Does public administration have artefacts?

Abstract

Public administration reform has always been at the heart of scholarly attention (e.g. [15,23–25]). And yet it is remarkable to observe that the transformational potential of the ICT revolution for government has largely escaped scholarly interest so far (see for instance Meijer, this Volume; Dunleavy et al. [9]). Interestingly, a similar lack of interest can be observed for practitioners: although governments are developing policy strategies to achieve ICT-enabled ‘transformational government’, the fundamental concepts, structures, frameworks, processes and relationships in public administration are not presented as a strong part of the reform debate. At the 20th anniversary of the European Group of Public Administration’s permanent Study Group on ICT in Public Administration we may ask ourselves what might explain this ‘blank spot’ in public administration scholarship and practice. Why is it that fundamental changes in the structure and functioning of public administration are central scholarly activities in theoretical and empirical public administration, but are not viewed in any relationship to ICTs? Why is it for instance that societal reform as a result of using ICTs is widely acknowledged, for example through new social networking activities among peers, new information retrieval methods offered by powerful search engines such as Google, and new forms of service provision introduced by successful dot.com companies like Amazon.com; but little is heard from mainstream public administration scholars of the transformational potential of ICTs within and for government? To what extent might explanations and solutions for this lack of interest be found in the unique character of government and public administration perhaps? Thus far, explanations have mainly been offered that emphasise differences between ICT-focused public administration scholarship and orthodox public administration scholarship; or, more generally, between the technologically determined and the socially determined social sciences [28]. The fundamental problem however may be that scholars working at the crossroads of ICTs and public administration have failed to make a difference thus far, both towards their colleagues in public administration and compared to their colleagues in the more technically focussed disciplines; reasons for this failure will be further explored in the next two sections. Public administration scholars have failed to demonstrate the importance of looking beyond the technical object, the ‘Artefact’, in exploring ICTs in public administration; the importance of taking into account the specific political, institutional and social contexts for explaining changes (and no changes!)