E-government value priorities of Danish local authority managers

The management of eGovernment is a central topic in the improvement of public administration, where the underlying values of eGovernment practitioners are an important (but often taken for granted) motivation for strategy and implementation of eGovernment projects. This chapter offers a value analysis of central trends in the public administration literature: New Public Management, the post-Weberian Bureaucracy and the New Public Service. Using the assumption that eGovernment is driven largely by public administrations and therefore shares public management values, we develop a value model for eGovernment. Administrative Efficiency focuses on value for money logics highlighted by New Public Management thinking. Service Improvement, derived from the tradition of public service, emphasises the value of providing better services to citizens. Citizen Engagement, with its roots in liberal democratic arguments, promotes democracy, deliberation and dialogue. A set of Foundational Values grounded in the deeply-rooted bureaucratic tradition is also identified. A preliminary study of local authority managers’ values shows a heavy bias towards administrative efficiency and an absence of concern for citizen engagement; the implications of these results are briefly discussed.

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