Information Polity Research Articles

Editorial: Information Polity 2024, Vol.29, No.3 – Visualising research to reach a larger audience

Editorial: Information Polity 2024, Vol.29, No.3 – Visualising research to reach a larger audience

Information Polity publishes more than strong empirical studies: It is a rich platform for learning and debate

Information Polity publishes more than strong empirical studies: It is a rich platform for learning and debate

Erratum to papers published in Information Polity – Volume 27, issue 2

Erratum to papers published in Information Polity – Volume 27, issue 2

The COVID-19-crisis and the information polity: An overview of responses and discussions in twenty-one countries from six continents

Governments around the world are utilizing data and information systems to manage the COVID-19-crisis. To obtain an overview of all these efforts, this global report presents the expert reports of 21 countries regarding the relation between the COVID-19-crisis and the information polity. A comparative analysis of these reports highlights that governments focus on strengthening six functions: management of information for crisis management, publishing public information for citizens, providing digital services to citizens, monitoring citizens in public space, facilitating information exchange between citizens and developing innovative responses to COVID-19. The comparative overview of information responses to the COVID-19-crisis shows that these responses cannot only be studied from a rational perspective on government information strategies but need to be studied as political and symbolic interventions.

Revisiting the Open Government Phenomenon. A Meta-Analysis of the International Literature

According to the contributions of several authors, the Open Government (OG) concept is maturing and moving toward its consolidation as a new field of multidisciplinary knowledge with its own dynamics. However, little is known about how it is developing that path, if it is really generating its own characteristics and what is its scope in terms of the creation of an academic community. This article makes a systematic review or meta-evaluation of the literature on OG for 5 years (2011 to 2015) of the three magazines most recognized for their production and quality of content in the theme: Government Information Quarterly, Information Polity and eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government. This article analyzes a total universe composed of 189 articles, classified into different categories that try to answer three research questions: How is the OG analyzed? (Study Design, Research Techniques, Methodological Approach) Where is the OG analyzed? (University Departments, Host Country of the Universities and Institutions, Level of Government, Analyzed Country/Areas) What are the most analyzed topics and the most prominent concepts in the study of OG? (Main Topic, Keywords). Article data reveal the key features of OG analysis: still little quantitative and explicative-correlational studies, very focused on the countries of the Anglo-American area, and with very diverse interests ranging from open data, e-government to social media to co-production. In addition, with the latter, it can be confirmed to what extent a scientific community has been created around the OG as well as establishing some conclusions on the development of OG in the coming years.

Security and the Transnational Information Polity

Security and the Transnational Information Polity

Information Polity: International recognition and more excellent papers

Information Polity: International recognition and more excellent papers

The Information Polity: Towards a two speed future?

The overarching argument here is that only a `whole polity' perspective, an `information polity' perspective, can be satisfactory as both a starting and finishing point for the predictive endeavour being set out in this special edition. The organising image is one of seeing two trajectories at work in the polity, trajectories that hitherto have too often been treated as separate but which are ineluctably intertwined. The first of these trajectories is that of information intensifying government/governance and the second, the trajectory associated with communications intensifying democratic character of the polity as both formally initiated in experimentation and innovation and in the informal, spontaneous democratic impulses that have emerged from the era of social networking, or 'web 2.0'. Drawn together these trajectories make up the wider polity, an information-and communications-intensive polity. Separating them for analytical purposes allows examination of the different paces of change in each of these trajectories, enabling speculative conclusions to be drawn, perhaps more accurately than otherwise, about what to expect in this century's third decade.

Diversity in an Information Polity

Diversity in an Information Polity

Information Politics in Health Information Exchange Networks

There have been recent mandates for the implementation of Electronic Health Records to improve the quality of healthcare. The sharing of Electronic Health Record information between health providers is called Health Information Exchange (HIE). In the quest to implement Health Information Exchange, technological factors have been emphasized, ignoring important cultural factors. Health Information Exchange requires the collaboration and harmonization of efforts between many stakeholders who often have conflicting views about how information should be shared. Industry-specific cultural factors such as legal, social, and political issues are critical to understand in the context of complex network environments such as Health Information Exchange. This study draws upon multiple theoretical perspectives to develop a conceptual theory to explain information politics in complex network environments. Davenport, Eccles, and Prusak’s (1992) information politics theory is applied and extended through this longitudinal case study of the HIE Privacy and Security State Network. Through examination of a three-year project (Health Information Security and Privacy Collaboration), it was found that stages of information polity evolved. The contributions of this study include the application and extension of information politics theory from the organizational level to the complex network level. Implications for practice and research are provided.

The citizen in the information polity: Exposing the limits of the e-government paradigm

The rise of 'e-government', both as a recognized field of practice and an identifiable and legitimate field of study, has occurred extraordinarily rapidly throughout the world. The term 'e-government' has come to capture and de-limit in toto what might be termed the agenda for government in the age of the Internet. This article questions the value of the orthodox interpretation, the paradigm, that has so rapidly emerged around e-government, in particular the casual assumption that e-government is ipso facto 'citizen-centric'. In so-doing this article reveals a concern that different questions must be asked in order to understand 'e-government' and its implications fully and fundamentally. If we are to ask these different questions rather than those to which we are drawn under the orthodox e-government frame of reference then this field will become more theoretically informed, particularly in ways that aid our understanding of 'citizenship' in the 'e-ubiquitous' State.

Quality and variety in the pages of Information Polity

Quality and variety in the pages of Information Polity

Rediscovering the Grand Narratives of the Information Polity: Reflections on the achievement and potential of the EGPA Study Group on ICT in Public Administration

My main theme in this short essay is that scholars of what I have called the information polity [3,13, 14] should lift up their sights and engage with the ‘macro themes’ of the day, as they have done in the past. It is interesting to me to see how our collective sights have lowered during the past 10 years, or so. We have in that period become more and more concerned with meso and micro themes relating to forms of public management, and systems development and application. We have been somewhat less engaged by the larger issues that governments and their citizens have been concerned about. Where are the papers on citizenship in the information polity; on privacy and control and on their bedfellow, surveillance; on information-intensive government at both general and policy-specific levels; on the challenges for Governments of the evolution of the world-wide web, specifically issues of Internet governance and the so-styled Web 2.0? How should we evaluate the macro threats and benefits with which information age Government confronts us? What ideas, concepts and theories can we rediscover, reinvent or develop that will enable us to speak to these major challenges? This main theme of mine engages with that of Wim van de Donk who has spoken today about reviving some critical spirit into our subject field. Above all, we need to lift ourselves out of the e-government agendas set by Governments themselves and by global Consultancy firms and rediscover our academic tradition of thoughtful and critical theorising, supported by empirical research.

Personal identity management in the information polity: The case of the UK national identity card

In the Information Society an individual may take on an identity for each electronic service with which he or she engages. As a consequence, an individual may accumulate a vast array of personal identifiers for such 'services' and is also likely to accrue a range of physical representations of such multiple identification: credit card, debit card, driving licence, passport, library card, parking permit etc. Hence, multiple identity management is a significant issue for individuals and organisations. In this paper we unpack this issue in terms of a semiotic framework consisting of three interrelated processes - authentication, identification and enrolment. These processes serve to locate the three elements of the person, identifiers and identity that help define the socio-technical network which comprises the issue of personal identity in the Information Age. We test the explanatory utility of this framework against a contemporary and prominent case from the UK - an attempt by the government to introduce a national identity card. Such an identity token offers numerous potential benefits for individuals and organisations but raises major challenges to data protection, data privacy and public trust in the information governance of the UK.

Personal identity management in the information polity: The case of the UK national identity card

In the Information Society an individual may take on an identity for each electronic service with which he or she engages. As a consequence, an individual may accumulate a vast array of personal id...

Voluntary organisations as e-democratic actors: political identity, legitimacy and accountability and the need for new research

English Voluntary sector organisations (VSOs) are actors of growing significance within the ‘information polity’. One testament to their significance is the UK government's recent proposal for the development of an electronic mixed economy that will see VSOs act as ‘intermediaries’ in the delivery of e-government services, including e-democratic services. As VSOs independently harness information and communication technologies (ICTs) in ways that are enabling them to strengthen their ‘voices’ within both the national and international political system, so interrelated questions about their political identity, democratic legitimacy and accountability become profoundly important within the intermediaries context.

Coping with the dilemma of common pool information resourcing: Integrating information domains in the Dutch Police

In a previous article in Information Polity [1] we looked into the question of whether integration of its information domains is leading to centralization in the Dutch police system. In this article we attempt to find out how such integration came about in the first place. Trying to establish an overall information management in or between organizations can be viewed as an attempt to create a common pool resource (CPR). Is hierarchy really the only way to establish such a CPR as, for instance, Davenport appears to assume? The experience of the Dutch police seems to point in a different direction. As it happens the 25 regional police forces, and the national police services have formed a 'Board of Direction' (Regieraad) in which the Ministry of Justice and the Home Office also partake. These parties are to decide on the shaping and operating of the police's information systems on the basis of equality. All evidence seems to point to the fact that this has been accomplished without making use of hierarchy. If we want to account for the Dutch police's success in establishing an overall information management without making use of hierarchy, there are three explanations that stand out in the available literature. These are Kollock's application of Ostrom's design principles of communities successful in creating CPRs to electronic environments, Monge, Fulk and Flanagin's stress on the advantages that fall to those who found a CPR, and Scharpf's concept of `negotiation in the shadow of hierarchy'. In this article we try to establish which one of the three holds good in the case of the Dutch police.

Constructing new ways of living together: Government relationships with the voluntary sector in the information polity

In this paper we examine how the transformational potential of information and communication technologies and Labour's partnership with the voluntary sector are being brought together in ways that could bring voluntary organisations more intimately within the centre-ground of the democratic polity. Drawing upon the concept of the 'information polity' we map the new patterns of influence that are emerging around the ownership and control of information as this re-positioning occurs.

Fulfilling its Promise – Information Polity as an International Journal

Fulfilling its Promise – Information Polity as an International Journal

Drawing Voluntary Organisations into the Information Polity: Information Resources and Macro Politics

This article examines the ways that voluntary organisations are re-positioning as democratic actors as they are drawn into new (electronic) relationships with government. Drawing upon our own empirical research we examine the new information resources and requirements that are emerging around these organisations as this re-positioning is played out. We look, too, at the emergent information relationships and capabilities that are enabled as voluntary organisations begin to harness information and communication technologies (ICTs) in pursuit of democratic objectives. Employing the concept of the ‘information polity’ we map out a framework for the sustained empirical enquiry that will allow new patterns of influence to be mapped and understood.