The Impact of Smart City Initiatives on Human Rights

Abstract: A smart city is a phenomenon where municipalities engage with stakeholders to use ICT for increasing efficiency, sustainability, and quality of life for its citizens and city operations. However, smart city initiatives can at times challenge human rights. While particular human rights such as privacy have been subject to analysis in the digital government field, a complete view on human rights in smart cities has so far been missing in our discipline. It is mainly studies from other disciplines that voice comprehensive concerns about potentially negative impacts of smart cities on human rights. However, they often lack the technological background. This paper reports on a pilot st…

Channel Choice Complications

In spite of massive investment and increased adoption of digital services, citizens continue to use traditional channels to interact with public organizations. The channel choice (CC) field of research tries to understand citizens’ interactions with public authorities to make the interaction more efficient and increase citizen satisfaction. However, most studies have been conducted either as surveys of hypothetical services or in experimental settings, leading to a lack of empirical data from actual use contexts. Therefore, we present the results of a sequential mixed methods study which combines observations of citizen-caseworker interaction in a call center, contextual interviews with cal…

Exploring Public Sector’s Roles in Collaborative Consumption – A Research Agenda

Part 2: Digital Collaboration and Social Media; International audience; Motivated by the growing significance of sharing economy within our society, we here discuss which role the public sector may have within collaborative consumption (CC). CC refers to a business model grounded on peer-to-peer based sharing of goods and services through community-based online services. While public sector to a large extent has transformed from formalised bureaucratic structures into more hybrid organisations, focusing on the co-creation between public and private stakeholders, public sector’s role within the sharing economy is still in need for further investigation. We reflect on the need for studying ho…

The public sector's roles in the sharing economy and the implications for public values

Abstract Motivated by the growing significance of the sharing economy, we discuss the roles the public sector may play within the sharing economy and the corresponding implications for public values. The sharing economy represents a transformative agent for the public sector within the current landscape of digital transformation. While the public sector has so far acted mainly as a regulatory body in the sharing economy, we here discuss implications for other roles the public sector may take on, including the roles of customer, service provider, and platform provider. Framed within the context of the public value ideals (professional, efficiency, service, and engagement), we examine the opp…

Understanding Civic Engagement on Social Media Based on Users’ Motivation to Contribute

Social media offer various opportunities for civic engagement by, e.g., liking, sharing, or posting relevant content. Users’ motivation to contribute to relevant topics is quite divers and can stem from an intrinsic motivation to do good or external incentives such as being recognised and rewarded by other users. In our study, we adopt self-determination theory, which defines motivation as broad continuum ranging from intrinsic motivation to external regulation. We conducted a quantitative survey with 667 Facebook users to identify how the different kinds of motivation impact the users’ behaviour in terms of reading, liking, sharing, commenting, and posting topics relevant to civic engageme…

Developing an Analytical Framework for Analyzing and Comparing National E-Government Strategies

Part 1: E-Government Foundations; International audience; Across the world, e-government strategies are developed for the effective digitalization of the public sector. They offer governments a framework for dealing with challenges such as technical and legal interoperability and collaboration between public and private sector stakeholders, and for promoting a future vision for a digital public sector. Since e-government strategies are policy document and, thus, likely to convey biased perspectives, analyses of these strategies can yield insights into these biases and different perspectives on public sector digitalization. Until now, there has been no widely recognized framework for systema…

The Relationship Between Outbound and Inbound Communication in Government-to-Citizen Interaction

Multichannel Management in the Public Sector: A Literature Review

Structuring Governments’ Success Factors in Social Media

With the advent of social media, not only individuals and companies but also government institutions have started using these new ways of communication. Social media have raised hopes in serving as the Holy Grail to boosting the relationship between government and citizens. This has been attended by numerous recommendations from both practice and research regarding how governments should successfully leverage their social media activities. However, results show that success stories of governments using social media are still scarce. Therefore, it is crucial to critically evaluate success factors and to provide structured guidelines for governments’ behaviour on social media. In this paper, …