Together with my co-author Professor Stuart Bretschneider I wrote an article that was just published for early view in the Public Administration Review (PAR). In this article, we develop a model of social adoption in the public sector. Here is the abstract:
Social media applications are slowly diffusing across all levels of government. The organizational dynamics underlying adoption and use decisions follow a process similar to that for previous waves of new information and communication technologies. The authors suggest that the organizational diffusion of these types of new information and communication technologies, initially aimed at individual use and available through markets, including social media applications, follows a three-stage process. First, agencies experiment informally with social media outside of accepted technology use policies. Next, order evolves from the first chaotic stage as government organizations recognize the need to draft norms and regulations. Finally, organizational institutions evolve that clearly outline appropriate behavior, types of interactions, and new modes of communication that subsequently are formalized in social media strategies and policies. For each of the stages, the authors provide examples and a set of propositions to guide future research.
Mergel, I. and Bretschneider, S. I. (2013), A Three-Stage Adoption Process for Social Media Use in Government. Public Administration Review. doi: 10.1111/puar.12021
Albert Meijer, Frank Bannister and Marcel Thaens edited a special issue of “Information Polity” with the topic “ICT, Public Administration and Democracy in the Coming Decade”. They put together a tremendous group of international e-Government researchers and today the special issue was posted online. The articles included in the special issue include:
- ICT, Public Administration and Democracy in the Coming Decade, by Albert Meijer, Frank Bannister and Marcel Thaens
- Forward to the past: Lessons for the future of e-government from the story so far, by Frank Bannister and Regina Connolly
- The Information Polity: Towards a two speed future? by John A. Taylor
- E-Government is dead: Long live Public Administration 2.0 by Miriam Lips
- Surveillance as X-ray by C. William R. Webster
- Towards a smart State? Inter-agency collaboration, information integration, and beyond by J. Ramon Gil-Garcia
- The social media innovation challenge in the public sector by Ines Mergel
- A good man but a bad wizard. About the limits and future of transparency of democratic governments by Stephan Grimmelikhuijsen
- The Do It Yourself State by Albert J. Meijer
- Five trends that matter: Challenges to 21st century electronic government by Hans Jochen Scholl
- Why does e-government looks as it does? looking beyond the explanatory emptiness of the e-government concept by Victor Bekkers
- Big questions of e-government research by Mete Yıldız
My own article focuses on the innovation challenges government agencies are facing when they are implementing social media:
Abstract: The use of social media applications has been widely accepted in the U.S. government. Many of the social media strategies and day-to-day tactics have also been adopted around the world as part of local Open Government Initiatives and the worldwide Open Government Partnership. Nevertheless, the acceptance and broader adoption of sophisticated tactics that go beyond information and education paradigm such as true engagement or networking strategies are still in its infancy. Rapid diffusion is challenged by informal bottom-up experimentation that meets institutional and organizational challenges hindering innovative tactics. Going forward governments and bureaucratic organizations are also facing the challenge to show the impact of their social media interactions. Each of these challenges is discussed in this article and extraordinary examples, that are not widely adopted yet, are provided to show how government organizations can potentially overcome these challenges.
Mergel, I. (2012): The social media innovation challenge in the public sector, in: Information Polity, Vol. 17, No. 3-4, pp. 281–292, DOI 10.3233/IP-2012-000281
Feel free to email me (ines_mergel (at) yahoo dot com) in case you can’t access a digital copy through your library!
Today, President Obama published a new presidential memo building on the efforts of the Open Government Directive he encourages departments and agencies to save money by providing government records in digital format – instead of “paper and filing cabinets”.
From the White House blog:
The new effort calls for reports, by each agency head, describing their current plans for improving records management programs; outlining current obstacles to sound, cost-effective records management policies;and cataloging potential reforms and improvements. The agency reports will inform, and be followed, by a Records Management Directive, to be issued by the Director of OMB and the National Archivist. The Directive will focus on maintaining accountability to the American public through documenting agency actions; increasing efficiency (and thus reducing costs); and switching, where feasible, from paper-based records to electronic records. In addition, all statutes, regulations, and policies must be reviewed to improve government-wide practices in records management.
Full memorandum is available here and on Scribd via Fedscoop:
We just published the following article on the diffusion and adoption of web practices among Members of Congress’ offices in the International Public Management Journal.
How do decentralized systems deal with innovation? In particular, how do they aggregate the myriad experiences of their component parts, facilitate diffusion of information, and encourage investments in innovation? This is a classic problem in the study of human institutions. It is also one of the biggest challenges that exists in the governance of decentralized systems: How do institutions shape individual behavior around solving problems and sharing information in a fashion that is reasonably compatible with collective well-being? We use a particular decentralized institution (the U.S. House of Representatives), wrestling with a novel problem (how to utilize the Internet), to explore the implications of three archetypical principles for organizing collective problem solving: market, network, and hierarchy.
Lazer, David; Mergel, Ines; Ziniel, Curtis; Esterling, Kevin; Neblo, Michael (2011): The Multiple Institutional Logics of Innovation, in: International Public Management Journal, 14:3, pp. 311-340, doi: 10.1080/10967494.2011.618308.
Leave a comment in case you would like to read the electronic copy of the article!