Three eGovernments Living Happily Ever After

Abstract

There exists a vast amount of different texts (policy documents, guidelines, action plans etc.) with the aim of stipulating the road forward for digitalisation of public sector, and an often used rationale for digitalisation is that the use of digitalised services will stimulate efficiency, reduce costs and at the same time enhance service quality. This is also often coupled with the idea that guarantee of success can be found participatory practices. This paper aims to disclose some of the underpinnings to the above logic by a closer analysis of ‘the who, the why and how' of involving participators in digitalization of public sector. This paper uses a combination of discourse analysis and a Bourdieuan inspired use of the concept of epistemic cultures as an analytical framework to disentangle the notion of a participatory eGovernment development. The empirical case is a text analysis of a national action plan for digitalisation and the results of the analysis unfold two interesting notions; 1) three conflicting notions of for whom, why and how this is done, and 2) the consequences of conflicting epistemic cultures for practitioners to solve in the everyday practice when customer-oriented market logics are naively linked with democratically oriented inclusive participatory decision processes; two not so easily combined ideologies.