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This research investigates the presence of communitarian philosophy within contemporary Scottish public library strategy, exploring links between philosophy, politics and practice.

The paper follows a qualitative research approach, combining content analysis and discourse analysis methodologies for the analysis of a corpus of Scottish public library trust documentation according to a thematic framework of communitarian values.

The analysis revealed strong links between trust strategy and communitarian values but also highlighted contradictions within this form of communitarianism which belied a deeper neoliberal philosophical foundation. The research therefore identified a communitarian strategic service shift which introduced benefits of social inclusion, community autonomy and common good but also brought concerns of an inherently weakened communal foundation and the survival of a neoliberal status quo.

The analysis is focused on strategy in Scotland only and thus can only claim to be representative of that country. However, the growth in communitarian strategies in the public sector is informed from the analysis undertaken.

The paper provides a novel analysis of public library strategy and thus contributes to the understanding of public library practice in the modern era.

The impacts of communitarian philosophy in the public sphere are under-researched and how these changes impact the mission of libraries needs to be better understood.

This is the first analysis to consider public library strategy from a communitarian point of view. As such, it provides novel insights into a growing area of public service development.

The rise of cultural governance has made cultural democracy important in East Asia. South Korea and China have chosen to develop cultural democracy by means of developing community-based cultural houses. Cultural houses in Korea were first managed from the center but have now been decentralized, and those in China have been developed based on local financing and administration. Since central-local intergovernmental relations, as they relate to public culture, have gone untouched in East Asia, the purpose of this paper is to study how central-local intergovernmental relations have impacted the development of cultural democracy in this area, in order to better understand how public culture should be developed.

A comparative study of the cases of South Korea and China has been used. The materials and information collected for the study were gathered by a review and an analysis of extant literature, policy documents, data and other materials from the relevant departments of both countries. It was also based on semi-structured interviews conducted with the national cultural departments, regulatory institutions, and with officials and scholars.

This study shows that central-local intergovernmental relations can have an impact on the management of community-based cultural houses and the effectiveness of cultural democracy’s development. Only complete decentralization that directly invites democratization will provide positive local conditions for cultural democracy’s growth. In short, meaningful governmental responses to local demands and a strong civil society are critical for the advancement of cultural democracy.

This study seeks to provide insights into the relationship between central-local intergovernmental relations and cultural democracy. At the micro project level, cultural project management should be improved; at the medium local level, the public must be made part of any decentralization effort; and at the macro national level, the multiple impacts caused by decentralization need to be considered.

This study is unique in terms of both its research questions and its research area. Central-local intergovernmental relations, as they relate to public culture, have gone comparatively untouched, especially in the context of East Asia. It is in this context that studying how central-local intergovernmental relations impact the development of cultural democracy is worthwhile, in order to better understand how public culture has developed and will be developed in future. A comparative study of the cases of South Korea and China has been used to discover the impacts of different dimensions of central-local decentralization on cultural development.

New services design and development are difficult to plan, execute, measure and evaluate. Particularly, new services that are capital-intensive and involve a long gestation and development time are considered extremely risky. The purpose of this paper is to discuss a list of innovative practices in various managerial aspects in designing, planning and development of a large scale infrastructure intensive public transportation service. A contemporary new public transportation service development is discussed as evidence of proven and benchmarked criteria.

This is a technical paper, where theoretical foundations of best practices in new service development project are discussed and supported by practice-based evidences from a real-life urban transportation project. A case study approach is adopted with secondary data.

Worldwide during and after economic recession of 2008, several projects were stalled or abandoned. The inference through this work is that through efficient management practices, a large capital-intensive new service development project can be made successful even during a turbulent economy in a region marred by more challenges than elsewhere.

Several issues in large scale services development, such as urban transportation are domain specific. Some of the issues faced in urban transportation are common to several Gulf countries; therefore the policy guidelines, managerial practices and development strategies reported in this paper can be replicated in many of them. The commercial impact of the service project is a significant drive towards fuel conservation and to save huge amounts of productive time.

Public transportation with a high quality of networked service improves the quality of life to a large extent. Unless certain measurable demands are not met, an affluent society is less likely to endorse public transportation. In addition, endorsement of public transportation is been promoted in several parts of the world as a drive towards a green, energy efficient, low-carbon emission and sustainable environment.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, new services planning and development is a key operations management topic, on which very little is written about. Particularly no other paper has presented a real-world large scale infrastructure intensive project development to this detail, and along with a theoretical background to benchmark performance and development practices.

The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of digital technology on promoting the equalization of basic regional public services based on measuring the level of digital technology and the equalization level of regional basic public services.

Based on the inter-provincial panel data from 2013 to 2021, this article utilizes the method of replacing digital technology to verify the robustness of the conclusion, evaluating the impact of digital technology on promoting the equalization of basic regional public services, while carrying out an extended analysis of government intervention, population density and regional heterogeneity.

According to our findings, digital technology has significantly promoted the equalization of basic public services in the region. According to the result of the heterogeneity test, digital technology has a better effect on promoting the equalization of public services in regions with moderate government intervention and relatively low population density. Moreover, the development of digital technology can significantly promote the equalization of public services in China’s eastern region.

This article elaborates on the impact of digital technology on the equalization of basic regional public services from three perspectives: reducing the cost of public services, increasing the degree of marketization of public services and realizing the sharing of public service resources. Thus, it enriches the empirical research literature on digital technology and the equalization of regional public services.

This study aims to investigate the basic public service level in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region under the impact of COVID-19.

This study constructed a basic public service-level evaluation system from the five dimensions of education, culture, health, social security and infrastructure and environment, and measures the basic public service level in 13 cities in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei using the entropy method. The spatial pattern and dynamic evolution of the public service level are analysed from the perspective of dynamic trends in time series and spatial distribution, along with the reasons for the evolution of spatial distribution.

(1) The basic public service level in the 13 cities is generally on the rise, but the trend is unstable. (2) The basic public service level in space shows a general trend of attenuation from northeast to southwest, with significant spatial imbalance and orientation. (3) The regional differences first increase and then decrease. (4) The inter-group mobility of different basic public service levels is low, and cities with lower initial levels find it difficult to achieve leapfrog development. Moreover, the health service level of the region is still at a low stage, which is not conducive to effectively preventing and controlling the epidemic.

From the perspective of this research, the spatial pattern and dynamic evolution of basic public service were adopted to analyse the coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. Furthermore, this study discusses how to improve the basic public service level to ensure sustainable operation in the region under the impact of COVID-19.

The purpose of this paper is to classify the best practices selected by the “Finnish Government Information Society Policy Programme” with a framework that includes four segments: technology, supply, demand, and spatial impact scale. These segments are elemental parts of service development processes, the best of which are classified into seven distinct categories: Telecommunications; Citizen Readiness; Education and Research; Working Life; Public Sector Electronic Services; Social and Health Care; and Electronic Commerce.

The empirical material includes the best practices as defined by the Finnish Government Information Society Policy Programme 2003‐2007. The best practices were analyzed through their project descriptions. The data were classified with textual content analysis into categories that were further analyzed numerically. The tools of statistical analysis included cross‐tabulations and chi‐square tests.

The results reveal differentiation among the best practices. The majority of service development concerns applications and software. However, physical infrastructure development was also present in the largest cities. Public sector organizations produced more than half of all of the best practices selected. Public‐private partnerships were also common, and the majority of service development was targeted to the national level.

The best practices analyzed illustrate the view of the Finnish Government Information Society Policy Programme. Consequently, the analysis highlights the values of the policy program. The data include only a small segment of on‐going development activity and represents a case study and therefore it is limited to the Finnish and Nordic context.

This paper uses a unique primary data set. The results obtained reflect the originality of the study and clearly provide sufficient grounds to consider electronic service development. The results are also transferable to public sector decision makers dealing with regional policies and development.

The purpose of this research is to investigate if, and in that case, how and what the e‐government field can learn from user participation concepts and theories in general information systems (IS) research. It aims to contribute with further understanding of the importance of citizen participation and involvement within the e‐government research body of knowledge and when developing public e‐services in practice.

The analysis in the paper is made from a comparative, qualitative case study of two e‐government projects. Three analysis themes are induced from the literature review; practice of participation, incentives for participation, and organization of participation. These themes are guiding the comparative analysis of our data with a concurrent openness to interpretations from the field.

The main results in this paper are that the e‐government field can get inspiration and learn from methods and approaches in traditional IS projects concerning user participation, but in e‐government, methods are also needed to handle the challenges that arise when designing public e‐services for large, heterogeneous user groups. Citizen engagement cannot be seen as a separate challenge in e‐government, but rather as an integrated part of the process of organizing, managing, and performing e‐government projects. Analysis themes of participation generated from literature; practice, incentives and organization can be used in order to highlight, analyze, and discuss main issues regarding the challenges of citizen participation within e‐government. This is an important implication based on this paper that contributes both to theory on and practice of e‐government.

Lessons to learn from this paper concern that many e‐government projects have a public e‐service as one outcome and an internal e‐administration system as another outcome. A dominating internal, agency perspective in such projects might imply that citizens as the user group of the e‐service are only seen as passive receivers of the outcome – not as active participants in the development. By applying the analysis themes, proposed in this paper, citizens as active participants can be thoroughly discussed when initiating (or evaluating) an e‐government project.

The paper addresses challenges regarding citizen participation in e‐government development projects. User participation is well researched within the IS discipline, but the e‐government setting implies new challenges that are not explored enough.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse and understand the contemporary management of electronic identification (e-ID) development to: identify and formulate challenges and reflect upon the use of a combination of perspectives. To generate knowledge on this issue, we investigate e-ID development in Sweden from: an e-government systems development lifecycle perspective and a project challenge and critical success factor (CSF) perspective.

This is a qualitative case study covering an analysis of the three years in a larger project focusing e-ID in a public e-service setting. Empirical sources have been face-to-face interviews; official documents and different kind of forums for presentations and discussions in, for example, hearings arranged by authorities; meetings with the coordinating agency, and practitioners’ networks events.

This study concludes that there are significant challenges involved in managing e-ID development because of its contextual and integrated character. Challenges involve the organization and management of the program and can be traced back to e-government, general project management literature and theory on path dependency. Based on this study, we can question, e.g. governance models, centralization and a narrow focus on the technical artefact. Our study is also an illustration of a possible way to analyse e-ID within an e-government initiative.

The present study shows that an e-ID can be considered as a back office-enabler for launching e-services, but also highlights the need for management of the artefact as an integral part of e-service development because it is intertwined with the use of e-services from a user perspective. This aspect together with the insights related to challenges and success factors including path dependency provides implications for future practice of e-ID management and development in particular and information systems artefact development in general.

This paper addresses challenges related to the development of e-ID in a public e-service setting. Few studies have theoretically combined a lifecycle perspective on challenges and success factors related to e-ID development while also focusing different dimensions of path dependency as an example of a challenging area within a program frame. Studying e-ID as a contemporary phenomenon from a contextual perspective in line with sociomaterial thinking – with a focus on the interplay between technology and people –can also help us to understand and discuss artefact development in general.

With their focus on private companies, histories of personnel management and human resource management have neglected the much earlier development of these practices in public sector organisations. The purpose of this paper is to examine the origins and development of modern personnel management in the Australian colonial public services between 1856 and 1901 in order to set the record straight about when, why and how integrated and formal sets of personnel management practices were adopted in organisations to manage employees.

The research is based on close examination of public service legislation enacted between 1856 and 1901 in the Australian colonies, the reports of Royal Commissions and Inquiries on the public services and the evidence they gathered, and published histories on public service organisations.

This paper finds that a clear model of systematic personnel management evolved in Australia's colonial public services between 1856 and 1901. While the development and diffusion of personnel management techniques in the public sector varied considerably among the colonies in scope, nature, effectiveness and longevity, there were integrated, coherent sets of personnel policies and practices in place in several colonies several decades before their emergence in private firms.

In tracing the origins of personnel management in Australia to the colonial public services in the years following the granting of responsible government in 1856, this paper challenges the conventional understanding of personnel management as a twentieth century phenomenon of private companies.