Alice Robbin

The loss of personal privacy and its consequences for social research

This article chronicles more than 30 years of public opinion, politics, and law and policy on privacy and confidentiality that have had far-reaching consequences for access by the social research community to administrative and statistical records produced by government. A hostile political environment, public controversy over the decennial census long form, media coverage, and public fears about the vast accumulations of personal information by the private sector were catalysts for a recent proposal by the U.S. Bureau of the Census that would have significantly altered the contents of the 2000 census Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS). These events show clearly that science does not operate independently from the political sphere but may be transformed by a political world where powerful interests lead government agencies to assume responsibility for privacy protection that can result in reducing access to statistical data.

Rob Kling In Search of One Good Theory

Rob Klings legacy is a corpus of work that exemplifies the craft of inquiry and the social enterprise of science. This article examines his contribution to social informatics through an analysis of the multiple theories, methods, and sources of evidence he relied on to make his arguments about the social life of computing and the consequences of computerization. His citation identity demonstrates that he transcended disciplinary boundaries but grounded his analysis of the political and social order in interpretive theory and critique. Kling created a working vocabulary for theorizing about computerization and social life. His sustained inquiry and critique, a very public record of his work, enthusiasm, and charisma, contributed to the penetration of his ideas and the fostering of a world-wide community of interest for a domain of study called social informatics.

Administrative Policy as Symbol System Political Conflict and the Social Construction of Identity

Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity, formerly known as Statistical Policy Directive 15, is a classification system that governs the U.S. government’s collection and presentation of data on race and ethnicity. The directive underwent a public evaluation between 1993 and 1997 to determine whether the racial and ethnic group categories should be revised. This article links theories of the role of the state in the social order and the social construction of identity to explain how conflictual political processes modify administrative policy. Two narratives on the debates over the reclassification of “Native Hawaiians” and the addition of a “multiracial” category illustrate recent political conflicts over group identities established by state agencies. The author argues that the main explanation for administrative policy changes was the responsiveness of state agencies to political demands of significantly mobilized groups with claims to state re sources.

Seeking explanation in theory: reflections on the social practices of organizations that distribute public use microdata files for research purposes

Public concern about personal privacy has recently focused on issues of Internet data security and personal information as big business. The scientific discourse about information privacy focuses on the crosspressures of maintaining confidentiality and ensuring access in the context of the production of statistical data for public policy and social research and the associated technical solutions for releasing statistical data. This article reports some of the key findings from a small-scale survey of organizational practices to limit disclosure of confidential information prior to publishing public use microdata files, and illustrates how the rules for preserving confidentiality were applied in practice. Explanation for the apparent deficits and wide variations in the extent of knowledge about statistical disclosure limitation (SDL) methods is located in theories of organizational life and communities of practice. The article concludes with suggestions for improving communication between communities of practice to enhance the knowledge base of those responsible for producing public use microdata files.

E-Government Implementation in Developing Countries

This paper presents preliminary results of an ongoing study of e-government implementation in Lebanon. Following suggestions by various scholars that students of e-government employ theory to strengthen our knowledge about ICT for development, we apply a neoinstitutional theoretical lens to understand the role of international donor agencies that led Lebanese public authorities, since 2000, to invest in e-services despite the country’s serious economic difficulties and heavy debt. We situate implementation of an e-government infrastructure in the context of external pressures that Lebanese public administrators confronted. This analysis is based on the triangulation of evidence from semi-structured interviews with senior officials in government agencies who led the implementation effort, official government documents, and newspaper reports on the progress of this project. We find that the response by Lebanese public officials can be explained by the three isomorphic processes of coercion, mimesis, and transmission of norms. This case study suggests that implementing e-administration by developing countries is not necessarily motivated by a search for efficiency; under certain conditions adoption results from external institutional pressures. Nonetheless, this implementation needs to be understood as only a very small part of a larger story of the history and politics of Lebanon that contributed to what has been called the “still born” implementation of e-government in Lebanon.

governance.com: Democracy in the Information Age, edited by Elaine C. Kamarck and Joseph S. Nye, Jr. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2002. x + 192 pp.

A system and method for controlling an instrumentation system, wherein the present invention includes an improved instrument driver software architecture. The instrument driver software architecture of the present invention provides a number of features, including instrument interchangeability, i.e., the use of interchangeable virtual instruments or interchangeable instrument drivers, improved performance, an improved attribute model, improved range checking, and improved simulation features, among others.