Search results

This paper explains the formation of government resistance to open data based on the cognition of stakeholders in Chinese context.

Adopting grounded theory, this study interviewed 22 stakeholders to collect data. Through continuous coding, this study identified the main categories and then constructed theoretical models.

This study identified and explained five main categories that relate to resistance: practice, perception, organizational culture, motivation and resistance strategies. Then, a framework was developed that conceptualizes the government' resistance to open data. Based on the division of the forms of motivation, there are three paths through which government departments resist open data, namely, avoiding disadvantages to the organization, being unwilling to increase the workload and being unwilling to take the initiative.

This paper reveals the internal logic of government departments' resistance to open data and provides a process explanation beyond causality. It also provides a reference for other countries in the same preliminary stage as China with respect to open data implementation.

Open data are characterized by a number of economic, environmental, technological, innovative, and social benefits. They are seen as a significant contributor to the city’s transformation into smart city. This is all the more so when the society is on the border of Society 5.0, that is, shift from the information society to a super smart society or society of imagination takes place. However, the question constantly asked by open data experts is, what are the key factors to be met and satisfied in order to achieve promised benefits? The current trend of openness suggests that the principle of openness should be followed not only by data but also research, education, software, standard, hardware, etc., it should become a philosophy to be followed at different levels, in different domains. This should ensure greater transparency, eliminating inequalities, promoting, and achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs). Therefore, many agendas (sustainable development strategies, action plans) now have openness as a prerequisite. This chapter deals with concepts of open (government) data and Society 5.0 pointing to their common objectives, providing some success stories of open data use in smart cities or transformation of cities toward smart cities, mapping them to the features of the Society 5.0. We believe that this trend develops a new form of society, which we refer to as “open data-driven society.” It forms a bridge from Society 4.0 to Society 5.0. This chapter attempts to identify the role of openness in promoting human-centric smart society, smart city, and smart living.

The importance of champion leaders including tech-savvy leaders to digital government has been highlighted in the literature. Meanwhile, what was in the authors’ interest to explore was the role of business-savvy leaders or non-governmental digital champions as units of analysis, those who mobilized people's interest in digitalization and bypassed governmental barriers through this popular mobilization. They could be considered policy entrepreneurs for understanding policy change in the digitalization of the health sector. This study sought to shed light on the barriers and drivers of digital health in Iran.

The researchers conducted interviews with actors of digital health businesses in Iran, including the Health Information Technology Center affiliated to the Ministry of Health and Medical Education (MOHME) administrative body and authorities, private companies active in digital health and health service providers. The purposive sampling method was applied, and 15 experts with relevant and valuable experiences as well as maximum variation to obtain representativeness and rich data were interviewed. Trustworthiness criteria were also used to assure the quality of the results. The data were analyzed based on directed content analysis using the MAXQDA10 software.

It was found out how popular diffusion was effective to overcome barriers to health digitalization. Access to the internet and diffusion of information technology helped the net-enabled businesses to connect directly to people and provide services to them. Diffusion of these services forced the public sector to adjust itself, and thus MOHME banned digital consultation services because of the so-called “insecure and unknown physicians”, following the increased popularity of digital services diffusion, but they were not able to resist popular diffusion of new technology. Hence, it was allowed to work. The main barriers to telemedicine spreading in Iran have been divided into five main categories including government incapacity for digital health governance, conflict of interest, professional obligations for information transparency, protection of patients' rights and data security and privacy.

As a game changer in digital health governance in Iran, popular diffusion will determine the future of digital health. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first ones to explore digital health governance in relation to the private digital health business in Iran with a public policy approach.

The purpose of this paper is to make intelligible the rationalities and mechanisms through which markets have been proffered as alternatives or complements to traditional welfare‐based provision and the effect of this development on the subjectivity of workers.

The research involved collection of archival data, personal encounters and in‐depth interviews with managers, staff and elected representatives at a local authority in New Zealand. Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality is mobilised to interpret these data.

The paper finds that the mandatory changes required by legislation are associated with efforts to constitute local authority workers as business‐like subjects through disciplinary mechanisms and technologies of the self. While markets have permeated this local authority, with some managers and staff claiming to work in a business‐like manner and transact with each other as customers, these discourses have not vanquished the traditional concern of working for one organisation to serve the community.

While the results of this study are not generalisable to other contexts, they show how the introduction of New Public Management in a specific context is associated with a contest between the traditional discourses of community and public service, and the more recent ones of enterprise and customer. The paper illuminates the pathologies associated with these new technologies and how their implementation is often divergent from the rationalities in the name of which they are promoted.

The paper will contribute to ongoing debate on how best to deliver public goods and services and especially, the limits and potential of markets.

The paper's mobilisation of Foucault's governmentality framework in the study of a local authority case study in a contemporary setting is relatively unusual.

Health-care knowledge is dispersed among different departments in a health care organization, which makes it difficult at times to provide quality care services to patients. Therefore, this study aims to identify the main challenges in adopting health information technology (HIT).

This study surveyed 148 stakeholders in 4 key categories [patients, health-care providers, United Arab Emirates (UAE) citizens and foresight experts] to identify the challenges they face in adopting health care technologies. Responses were analyzed using exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

EFA revealed four key latent factors predicting resistance to HIT adoption, namely, organizational strategy (ORGS); technical barriers; readiness for big data and the internet of things (IoT); and orientation (ORI). ORGS accounted for the greatest amount of variance. CFA indicated that readiness for big data and the IoT was only moderately correlated with HIT adoption, but the other three factors were strongly correlated. Specific items relating to cost, the effectiveness and usability of the technology and the organization were strongly correlated with HIT adoption. These results indicate that, in addition to financial considerations, effective HIT adoption requires ensuring that technologies will be easy to implement to ensure their long-term use.

The results indicate that readiness for big data and the IoT-related infrastructure poses a challenge to HIT adoption in the UAE context. Respondents believed that the infrastructure of big data can be helpful in more efficiently storing and sharing health-care information. On the technological side, respondents felt that they may experience a steep learning curve. Regarding ORI, stakeholders expected many more such initiatives from health-care providers to make it more knowledge-specific and proactive.

This study has implications for knowledge management in the health -care sector for information technologies. The HIT can help firms in creating a knowledge eco-system, which is not possible in a dispersed knowledge environment. The utilization of the knowledge base that emerged from the practices and data can help the health care sector to set new standards of information flow and other clinical services such as monitoring the self-health condition. The HIT can further influence the actions of the pharmaceutical and medical device industry.

This paper highlights the challenges in HIT adoption and the most prominent factors. The conceptual model was empirically tested after the collection of primary data from the UAE using stakeholder theory.

This case study presents a critical analysis of why and how corporate managers in China are reluctant to adopt sustainability reporting assurance (SRA) provided by externally independent third-party assurers, despite the fact that it is acknowledged as a value-adding activity globally.

A longitudinal fieldwork case study was conducted from 2014 to 2019 in a Chinese central state-owned enterprise (CSOE), a pioneer in sustainability reporting practice since the mid-2000s, to collect first-hand empirical data on managerial perceptions of the adoption of external SRA. Semi-structured interviews with 25 managers involved in sustainability (reporting) practice were conducted. The interview data were triangulated with an analysis of archival documents and board meeting minutes pertaining to the undertakings of sustainability practices in the case study organization.

Our empirical analysis suggests that while managers recognize the benefits of adopting external SRA in enhancing the legitimacy of sustainability accountability, they oppose SRA because of their deep-rooted allegiance to the dominant logic of sociopolitical stability in China. SRA is envisaged to risk the stability of the socialist ideology with which CSOEs are imbued. Therefore, any transformational approach to accepting a novel (foreign) practice must be molded to gain control and autonomy, thereby maintain the hegemony of stability logic. Instead of disregarding external verification, managers of our case SOE appear to harness sustainability reporting as a navigational space to engage in internally crafted alternative manners in order to resist the rationality of SRA.

The empirical analysis presents a nuanced explanation as to why internal managers have hitherto been reluctant to embrace the embedding of independent assurance into the sustainability reporting process. Our prolonged fieldwork provides ample context-specific, intra-organizational evidence regarding the absence of SRA in Chinese CSOEs, which warrants more attention given their considerable presence in the global economy. In addition, the empirical analysis contributes to our understanding of the managerial capture of sustainability issues in a specific context of state capitalism and how organizations and individuals in an authoritarian regime interpret and respond to novel discourses derived from distinct institutional settings.

This multiple case study investigates the impact of technology on organizational change in public libraries. Over the past 12–15 years, public access computers (PACs) have been introduced into public libraries. Once these PACs were connected to the Internet, they attracted patrons who had not previously used public library services. The main themes around which this study was organized relate to the implementation of technology with facilities and services, city government, and people. The main research questions were following: (1) How has public library culture changed since the introduction of computers for patron use? (2) What adjustments were necessary to deal with the influx of computers and other technology in public libraries? (3) Have PACs changed the way the libraries are organized and how they are staffed? The findings of the study included how technology influenced changes in staffing in the public libraries. Each of the libraries has undergone a culture shift due to the introduction of technology. One of the shifts is the change of the reference desk from general reference to the addition of a help desk with reference responsibilities. Another concern of the directors was constantly funding the upgrades necessary for software and hardware that technology requires. As not all of the directors have supportive city government, this can be problematic. Finally, the facilities where the public libraries were housed had undergone changes either through renovations or through new buildings to accommodate technology and the infrastructure needed to support it.

The purpose of this research is to consider empirical perspectives relative to e‐government agenda, highlighting the critical need for understanding mutual relationships between the information systems (IS) function providers (supplier of IS services) and IS function users (service departments) in UK local authorities.

The empirical research was guided by an extensive literature search and consisted of ten randomly‐selected case studies from the sampling frame of UK local authorities. Semi‐structured interviews were carried out with ten head of IS, ten IS project managers and with ten designated e‐government managers. Interview findings were triangulated with data collected from document analysis carried out at each site. Documents included Society of Information Technology Management reports, government reports such as UK Online, ODPM, DETR, Cabinet Office reports and various other financial reports. The overall structure for each interview was provided by a standard case study protocol derived from the “active agents” framework.

Provides information about local authorities, highlighting the changing relationship between users and providers of information services in delivering e‐government. Introduces the “active agents” framework as a tool to operationalise structuration theory.

A useful research for policy makers and researchers that are interested in the changing patterns of public service delivery and provider‐user relations in IS.

The paper offers “active agents” framework, based on structuration theory, as a powerful tool for interpreting changing relations between users and providers of the IS function in local authorities.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the workings of the internal specifier/provider arrangement, a new organizational form that is not required by government mandate but has become common place in the Australian public sector.

The case study empirics take place in a large local government water authority. Data were collected from face‐to‐face interviews with 26 managers using a semi‐structured interview schedule and from internal and public documents relating to the case.

The following five “so what” lessons are identified: private sector co‐ordination and management mechanisms such as transfer pricing can be relied upon to help reduce the ambiguity surrounding the specifier/provider model; the providers are likely to be more anxious about the introduction of the model because poorly perceived performance may result in outsourcing; to improve the ability of the organization for co‐ordinating activities the model requires clearly defined specifier and provider roles and tasks; the service level agreement is an important communication device for clarifying roles and expectations; and increasing the number of sub‐divisions complicates the ability of the organization to access suitable human resources and to communicate effectively with their employees and minimize employee stress.

The findings of this paper are likely to be useful for other organizations faced with similar pressures as to deal with those pressures require new and innovative ways of working.

This paper contributes to our understanding of the new organizational forms emerging in the public sector and the issues surrounding their implementation. The main contribution of this paper is a discussion of the lessons that were learned from the employees in the case organization in their attempt to change the organization from its traditional bureaucratic operational procedures to cost center structures using the internal specifier/provider model.