Interpreting the 'Culture Variable' in the Study of Informatization in Public Administration. Selected papers from the 2007 conference of the European Group of Public Administration

‘Culture’ is an encompassing theme in social science, yet one with which researchers struggle. In 2007, the European Group of Public Administration [EGPA] conference was held in Madrid, with culture as its theme. As group directors of the permanent study group on ICT in Public Administration we invited researchers to submit papers that dealt with the various dimensions of the relationship between ICTs, public administration and culture. We found that, rather than leading contributors to address the theme directly, the theme of culture inspired most of the researchers to rethink their existing work and present it in a somewhat different way. From these different approaches we can learn much about ICTs and culture even though a thoroughgoing analysis of the concept of culture is absent. Conference themes are often ill-fated, therefore. They start promisingly in the imaginations of conference chairs who feel that it is a good thing to define a common thread for their conference. They believe, or at least hope, that this will lead to many relevant questions and research approaches built around that thread. They then send out a call for papers to scholars in the hope of receiving many high-quality contributions with a respectable degree of convergence on the chosen topic. They hope for a conference with focused discussion around their chosen theme that will result in an enhanced common understanding based on a strong conceptualization and wide ranging research. We also argued that it would be important to conceptualize ‘culture’ broadly. We indicated that culture in public administration can be analyzed at the level of the network society, at national level, in terms of politics and/or at an organizational level. Approaches to culture may conceptualize culture as a relevant aspect of organizational environments, as a subsystem of organizations alongside other systems such as structure and technology, and as an aspect of all processes of organizations. The most radical perspective states that organizations – and also public administration as a whole – is a cultural phenomenon. In practice two problems arise with conference themes and therefore also with the papers we invited about ‘culture’. First, many researchers are too autonomous and independent in their thinking to follow the lines set down by conference chairs. Secondly, the theme may be of no interest to many or even