E-Government Services Adoption Assessment From the Citizen Perspective in Jordan

Introduction

Electronic government, also called e-government, involves utilizing information technology (IT) to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, transparency, and accountability of governmental operations. This approach is regarded as one of the most noteworthy advancements in information and communication technology (ICT) in recent times (Rana et al., 2011). As per the UN e-government report, e-government pertains to the government's utilization of information and communication technologies to provide information and public services to the public (UN E-government Survey, 2014). E-government services provide a number of different benefits to citizens such as cost savings and increased revenue, economic growth, decreased duplication, improved transparency and accountability, improved cost-effective delivery of public services, a unified view of citizens for providing all government services and capability to promptly meet the expectations of citizens (Venkatesh et al., 2012).

To date, a number of studies (e.g., Janssen et al., 2018; Lallmahomed et al., 2021; Rana and Dwivedi, 2015; Rana et al., 2015, 2017) have been published to understand the adoption of e-government services for developed as well as developing countries. Most of these studies have used one or the other theories of technology adoption or diffusion such as theory of reasons action (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975), technology acceptance model (Davis, 1989), theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991), social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1985), diffusion of innovation theory (Rogers, 1983), unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (Venkatesh et al., 2003), extended UTAUT (Venkatesh et al., 2012) to implement them in the e-government context. The e-government research undertaken in the Jordanian context is no different where only the handful of studies (e.g., Abu-Shanab et al., 2010; Al Nagi and Hamdan, 2009; Al-Ryalat et al., 2012; Nofal et al., 2021) have been published. These studies largely endeavor to understand factors influencing the adoption of digital government services where the similar predominant theories were used to analyse the factors such as website usefulness, ease of use, subjective norms, facilitating conditions, perceived behavioral control, compatibility, trialability, hedonic motivation, attitude, self-efficacy, etc. So these studies provide only the initial understanding and repeated performance of some key constructs originating from the key theories of technology adoption and diffusion. We also argue that most of the studies on e-government adoption use well-known theoretical models could be constraining as the effectiveness of these theories is largely context specific. Moreover, these theories mostly explain the functional and social aspect of e-government adoption but miss out on the other pertinent and overlooked aspects of public services adoption such as emotional and relational drivers. By using the various constructs under each one of these categories, this research analyses the influence of constructs belonging to all these categories including functional (e.g. relative advantage), social (e.g. awareness), emotional (e.g. computer self-efficacy, resistance to change), and relational (e.g. trust) on to citizens’ intention to use them.