The EGPA Study Group at 20: Reflections backwards, forwards, and sideways

Abstract

I was not a founder member of the Permanent Study Group on Informatization in Public Administration, as it was then called. I joined it a few years later, in the early 1990s, and attended regularly for most years until the early 2000s. The Group’s 20th anniversary is a good time to look back and to look forward. I would like to do both, and to give my impressions and views of the Group. I would also like to look sideways, concerning the current situation of studies of privacy within the broader field covered by the Group. As a political scientist interested in public policy, I joined the Group because of my research and teaching involvement in the study of public administration and of the development of information practices which were likely to have a great impact on the public sector. I had begun to do research in this broad area, and had started to publish articles. My particular, more specialist, interest was in matters to do with public access to information and official secrecy, and with the protection of privacy. In the UK, the former had been more prominent in public debate than the latter as ‘information issues’, although in terms of the implications of informatisation, the question of privacy was probably more obviously relevant and, as it has turned out, especially important. Both sets of issues spoke to the changing relationship between citizens and the state, and therefore transcended the research questions of technical and managerial change that, quite properly, animated an interest in informatisation and that formed the basis of the cutting-edge research being done by the Group and its individual members. The development of electronic government, in which I had acquired what has become a lasting interest, was a central research focus for the Group and its members, and gave a great impetus to the Group’s emphasis on empirical and comparative research. So participation in the Group was, for me, one of the most important steps I could take in my own learning. It also proved to be a testing-ground for my own contributions, but this was sometimes frustrating as well, given the particular focus of the research in which I was involved, and in which the Group had little interest. The Group also served as a central node in a network of research relationships that ran across countries and levels of academic positions, so that it was easy to establish contacts outside the confines of the Group’s annual meetings. These networks connected to other kinds of formal relationship and institutional activity within Europe, and these have been of especial value to scholarship, as well as to my interests outside the privacy field. Overall, I believe that I have taken more from the Group than I have contributed, so I have accumulated a large debt. In this brief piece of retrospection, and in keeping with good privacy protection, I will not mention any creditors’ names, although there have been particular individuals whom I have regarded as my mentors in this general field of research. Some have been