In this article the authors address the question of how IT innovations affects public organizations concretely exploring the emerging attitudes of public government employees towards new forms of... Show More

In this article the authors address the question of how IT innovations affects public organizations concretely exploring the emerging attitudes of public government employees towards new forms of work with electronic tools. The authors bring our analysis and theoretical discussion beyond the widely applied technology acceptance models to examine the introduction of electronic tools too focused on technology functionality and short time analysis sights. Organizational and socioeconomic aspects together with the functionality of new concrete technological tools influence the innovation processes including work transformations. Based on the model of innovation proposed by Ebbers and Van Dijk (2007) the article focuses on the analysis of employees' resistance and support in innovation processes of the introduction of public government electronic tools. The authors apply the model to the case of the introduction of the Electronic Records System (ERS) (an electronic tool for the document management of unemployed persons) in a public organization in Germany. The analysis reveals that technology driven innovation ignoring work habits and transformations leads to employees` resistance to change. A conceptual redefinition of Ebbers and Van Dick's model based on the analysis results of the ERS including an extension of the resistance and support concepts as well as indicators is proposed.

The article aims to investigate how key e-Governance dimensions related to openness, such as transparency and accountability, which are a necessary condition for reaching a high maturity of... Show More

The article aims to investigate how key e-Governance dimensions related to openness, such as transparency and accountability, which are a necessary condition for reaching a high maturity of e-Government, may not be sufficient for open government. For this purpose, an interpretative framework to identify country attitudes towards Open Government is proposed and it is applied to two cases drawn from different legal, cultural and organisational backgrounds. Among the key findings of the article, the 'attitudes mapping' resulting from the application of the interpretative framework to the case studies points out the key role of different governance traditions in the path towards open government.

Research in government social media practices highlights expectations of co-creation and progression mirrored in maturity models, but research also documents low deployment degree and thereby points... Show More

Research in government social media practices highlights expectations of co-creation and progression mirrored in maturity models, but research also documents low deployment degree and thereby points to a discrepancy. The paper suggests that the authors instead of co-creation and progression draw on a dialectical approach and understand the development of government social media practices as a wrestling with contradictions. The case of emerging social media practices in a Danish municipality used to illustrate this framework suggests three main categories of contradictions in emerging social media practices: Contradictions between service administration and community feeling as forms of practice, contradictions in organizing between local engagement and central control, and contradictions in the digital infrastructure between proprietary municipal websites and public social media platforms. The paper discusses if a paradox lens will enhance our understanding of inherent contradictions or the dialectical notion of contradiction serve the purpose. The paper contributes to a dialectical theory of contradictions through an analysis of emerging government social media practices.

The increasing pervasiveness of Internet connected devices and services is altering the perception and practice of public spaces through the provisioning of location-specific digital information.... Show More

The increasing pervasiveness of Internet connected devices and services is altering the perception and practice of public spaces through the provisioning of location-specific digital information. Location-aware technologies allow people to access, annotate, address and attach information to locations, which transforms the space for other people who use the same services. Such locations acquire relevance and reshape social and spatial interactions through increased use on social media as people ‘check-in' to places, photograph or ‘like' them. Collectively the authors are marking-up the city around them. The popularization of location-aware technologies thus contributes to the changing meaning of locations in cities. In contrast to the technological focus in the emerging discourses on smart cities and big data, this paper offers an alternative view of the three lenses of Social, Local and Mobile technologies that describe and explain crowd-sourced socio-technical layers on the city landscape. The proposed integrated theoretical model describes the relevant information linkages between people and places in the online and offline worlds and introduces a new evaluation method for the evaluation of city places: affinity spectrum of social endorsements. The authors conclude with a discussion of the new opportunities for governments to better understand socially emergent ‘urban qualities' and how citizens construct and appreciate them in order better convert city places into public spaces.

Traditional competition between cities appears to transit to a “smart” competition and to this end smart city ownership, organization and evolution are questioned. In this paper, a worldwide smart... Show More

Traditional competition between cities appears to transit to a “smart” competition and to this end smart city ownership, organization and evolution are questioned. In this paper, a worldwide smart city classification is performed in order to address the preferred organization and the technological evolution of smart city. This classification's findings illustrate that State-Owned-Enterprise appears to be the preferred organization in most of the examined cases, while smart cities struggle in a niche international market arena.