Jane E. Fountain

Paradoxes of Public Sector Customer Service

The use of customer service ideas in government continues to be widespread, although the concept and its implications for public sector service production and delivery remain poorly developed. This paper presents a series of paradoxes related to customer service and its use in government. The central and most troubling paradox is that customer service techniques and tools applied to government may lead to increased political inequality even as some aspects of service are improved. The argument is structured by examination of the following: the predominant structural features of service management in theprivate sector, the assumption that customer satisfaction is a central objective of service firms, the understanding of customer service that informs current federal reform efforts, and the operational and political challenges of customer service as a public management objective.

Constructing the information society: women, information technology, and design

For the first time in history, women have the opportunity to play a major and visible role in a social transformation of potentially monumental proportions. The extensive reach and penetration of information technology into virtually every area of society creates enormous opportunities for women. But women’s lack of representation in IT design roles may prevent them from capitalizing on these opportunities. Most current discussion and analysis focuses on the increasing numbers of women as users of information technology with great emphasis on their use of the Internet and World Wide Web. Comparatively little attention has been given to the potential role women might play as designers in an information-based society. As the data in this paper clearly indicate, women are poorly represented in the sector that constitutes the growth engine of the U.S. economy and that bears primary responsibility for the scientific and technological development of an Information Society. The human capital requirements of the Information Society demonstrate the need for women to strengthen their participation as experts, owners and designers of information technologies. This paper argues that stronger representation by women in technical roles not only would help to redress a troubling human capital deficit, but is highly likely to modify and expand the range of technological applications, products, standards and practices to benefit all of society. On the importance of women as scientific and technical experts, see [1,2]. To develop this argument, the paper surveys across several policy areas to identify a central challenge that does not neatly fit into established policy categories. The first section of this paper distinguishes between the types of contributions that may be made by users of information technology versus its designers. The second section surveys current participation rates of women in IT-related fields within education and industry in order to gauge the near-term supply of women designers and experts. The third section argues, by analogy to the fields of medicine and psychology, that the degree of participation by women is likely to have a notable

Prospects for improving the regulatory process using e-rulemaking

U.S. citizens participate directly in rulemaking---a deliberate agenda-setting process designed to elicit, sort, and clarify fact and opinion from a wide variety of interested parties. The rulemaking process offers a directness and scope for public participation unavailable in other policy-making processes [1].

Comment: Disciplining public management research

Public management as an applied, problem-oriented field will always, and should always, wrestle with the exquisite tension between theory and practice. Researchers in public management should improve their ability to draw selectively and wisely, from a variety of disciplines, those analytic frameworks with explanatory power, sound empirical evidence, and practical value for managers. Laurence Lynn argues persuasively that public management can neither flourish as a research program nor fulfill its claim to educate analytically oriented managers without greater theoretical and methodological rigor. In support of Lynns basic argument, this comment extends his description of current economic models of organization and illuminates some of their weaknesses. By way of introducing alternative approaches, I briefly summarize two theoretical perspectives of potentially great utility to public management, the new institutionalism and network approaches to organizations. Both focus explicitly upon institutional arrangements and the interrelationship between managerial action and institutional relationships and structures. I then outline the argument that the normative conception of public management developed by Mark Moore contains the basic elements upon which to build a theory-based, methodologically sound research program, which can integrate concern with strategic managerial action and institutional arrangements and designs.

Local Government Stimulation of Broadband: Effectiveness, E-Government, and Economic Development

Access to broadband is widely recognized as a prerequisite for a communitys economic welfare and the delivery of local government services. In communities where the private sector is perceived as having failed to deliver adequate and affordable broadband services, municipal and county governments face pressures to stimulate broadband deployment. However, no systematic data documents the nature and status of municipal broadband initiatives, the comparative effectiveness of alternative policies for promoting broadband access, or their implications for local economic development, private provisioning of infrastructure, and the operation of municipal and county government. As a result, hundreds of communities are proceeding independently to develop their own strategy, without the benefit of the accumulated experience of those that have gone before, and with no assurance of success. The objectives of this project are to collect, analyze, and disseminate data about the nature and effectiveness of local government initiatives to stimulate broadband deployment, adoption and use, as well as the effects of such initiatives on local e-government and economic development.

Electronic Government and Electronic Civics

Electronic government and electronic civics embrace a wide range of topics. Electronic government and electronic civics include in their purview the development, use, and implications of new practices, processes, forms and interests in government and civic life occasioned by the Internet, World Wide Web and related information and communication technologies. They are concerned with individuals and the groups they form and sustain in order to bring coherence and stability to community life. At a slightly higher level of analysis, electronic government and electronic civics take account of the use and implications of the Internet for all forms of civic engagement from the development and articulation of individual and group values and interests in public affairs to the many relationships between and among communities, the polity, and the state. With respect to formal government systems, electronic government and electronic civics encompass the use and implications of information and communication technologies in all branches of government - the legislature, executive, and judiciary - as well as at all levels of government including local, state, federal, transnational, and global. The intersection of the Internet and governance spans the traditional fields and subfields of community politics and participation as well as those of political sociology, political science, and political economy.

Disjointed Innovation: The Political Economy of Digitally Mediated Institutional Reform

Current attention to social media and governance has focused on the enactment of networked communication and information use by and for governance with particular attention to the role of civil society. This paper argues that such a focus, while illuminating a possibly utopian perspective on political participation, often obscures even recent government reforms, existing institutional arrangements, and the myriad processes by which knowledge is translated to action in political settings. Drawing from and extending core perspectives within historical institutionalism, the paper examines three streams of theory and research: temporal models, coordination models, and the political effects of public policies where policies themselves may be conceptualized as institutions. Illustrations are drawn from American and European politics and used to ground as well as to probe models. The objective of the paper is a conceptualization that rebalances attention between agency and structure and that simultaneously considers the political past as well as the future.

Connecting to Congress

In this paper we summarize the progress of the Connecting to Congress (CTC) project.

The semantic web and networked governance: promise and challenges

The virtual state is a metaphor meant to draw attention to the structures and processes of the state that are becoming increasingly aligned with the structures and processes of the semantic web. Semantic Web researchers understand the potential for information sharing, enhanced search, improved collaboration, innovation, and other direct implications of contemporary informatics. Yet many of the broader democratic and governmental implications of increasingly networked governance remain elusive, even in the world of public policy and politics. Governments, not businesses, remain the major information processing entities in the world. But where do they stand as knowledge managers, bridge builders and creators? As they strive to become not simply information-based but also knowledge-creating organizations, public agencies and institutions face a set of striking challenges. These include threats to privacy, to intellectual property, to identity, and to traditional processes of review and accountability. From the perspective of the organization of government, what are some of the key challenges faced by governments as they seek to become networked? What best practices are emerging globally? And in the networked world that is rapidly emerging and becoming institutionalized, how can public, private and nonprofit sectors learn from one another?

A National Center for Digital Government program on networked governance: project highlights, dg.o 2006 NSF grant # 0131923

In this paper, we describe the ongoing research and activities of the National Center for Digital Government, now based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the Program on Networked Governance, the successor program to the NCDG, based at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.