E-Government: Contrasting Approaches and Alternative Insights

Steve Sawyer Penn State University, USA

Michael Tyworth Penn State University, USA

Abstract
We focus contrasting a social informatics approach with socio-political and techno-centric design approaches, using data from a study of e-government activity in criminal justice as the empirical basis. By social informatics we mean ‘the interdisciplinary study of the design(s), uses, and consequences of information technology that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural context’.” The empirical material comes from our ongoing studies of integrated criminal justice efforts in the United States. By integrated criminal justice we mean both the technological infrastructure and the institutional circuitry. Here we focus on San Diego, California’s Automated Regional Justice Information Sharing system (ARJIS, see www.arjis.org). In the comparison of approaches to engaging ARJIS we focus attention to differences in how human actions, the ICT, and their interactions are represented,. And, in doing this we highlight the alternative findings and interpretations that often arise from these different approaches to engaging e-government. We conclude our comparative analysis by returning to social informatics and engaging issues with improving the conceptual and methodological tool suites available, and with the importance of engaging the situated, social, and material elements of any ICT-based system.

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Reference:	Sawyer, S., Tyworth, M. (2006). "E-Government: Contrasting Approaches and Alternative Insights," Pennsylvania State University, USA . Sprouts: Working Papers on Information Systems, 6(21). http://sprouts.aisnet.org/6-21
Keywords:	E-Government, social informatics, case study, institutional theory
Item Type:	Article - Volume 6 Article 21 (2006)
Language:	English
Email:	Steve Sawyer (sawyer@ist.psu.edu) Michael Tyworth (mjt241@psu.edu)

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