I have been waiting for the coming of the 6th chapter, Enacting Technology: an institutional perspective. After a long depiction of theoretical background, the author has sketched the analytical frame. What theory will be chosen? what new theory will be formulated? What is the relationship between the information technology, organizations, embeddedness, and institutions from an institutional perspective? I can not wait for more aminute. At first, the author summarize a few shadow theories that misinform decisionmaking and clarity of discussion of technology and structure, including technological determinism, rational-actor perspectives, incrementalism, systems analysis, and individual and group perspectives. Technology determinism always neglects the interplay between technology, embeddedness, and behavior and believes that technology acts autonomously upon individuals, social arrangement, and institutions. Rational-actors theories, including functionalism, natural selection and other frameworks, assume that organizations will choose the best technological offerings and learn to use IT in better and better ways while ignoring the role of institutions. Incrementalism is often invoked as a means of avoiding error in the policy process, but it doesnt prevent government actors from moving incrementally in the wrong direction because of path dependence. Criticism on systems perspective is a challenge. The author thinks that this perspective ignores these and other social structural processes while it says institutional lag. The author use the example of the high failure rate of business process engineering as a example to explain the need to attend to social and political structures, organizations, and networks. Because of the enormous scale of government organizations, the integration of new IT is exceedingly difficult. Research results from other individual-level perspective are sometimes weak because they are inconclusive and contradictory. Then contingency theories are analyzed, such as Barleys model which focuses on roles and role relationships but left the examination of organizational mechanisms, such as performance programs and operating procedures, and ignores the political or strategic behavior of actors in the context of new technologies. Technology enactment theory contributes partial answers to some of these unanswered questions. I said at the first edition of the article, enactment is an attractive concept. I have to say, I am obsessed by the theoretical framework of the book. I know something of those theories criticized by the author, but I didnt pay attention to their confines. The author does. On the basis of the theory review, the author puts forward, technology enactment will be an analytical framework. This is the core of the book. Technology enactment is the result of cognitive, cultural, structural, and political embeddedness. Enactment is similar to the definition of the situation, or the subjective representation of a problem that reflects an actors perception and boundedly rational reasoning rather than the situation itself. And then, an analytical frame is given. The analytical framework details the ways that individuals in institutions tend to enact new information systems to reproduce existing rules, routines, norms, and power relations if institutional rules are clear and no salient alternative uses are visible in the environment. The author explains, this conceptual framework illuminates the critical role played by sociostructural mechanisms in organizational and institutional arrangements as public managers struggle to make sense of, design, and use new IT. Individuals often enact existing performance routines and network relationships in the way they design and use web-based information and communication system. ..Knowledgeable actors try to pursue their interests in enacting technology. However, their interests are influenced by their organizational tasks, incentive structure, and ongoing social (network) relations. I have to write down, institutional arrangements mean cognitive, cultural, sociostructural, legal and formal arrangements. Selznick distinguished organizations from institutions, noting the propensity of some organizations to take on a particular character or competence over time. He defined the process of institutionalization as the emergence of orderly, stable, socially integrating patterns out of unstable, loosely organized, or narrowly technical activities...At the micro level, procedures, habits, and cognitive patterns are institutional instruments when they are widely shared and largely taken for granted.So, the behavior of bureaucratic decisionmakers is embedded in four ways, through cognition, culture, social structure, and formal government systems. During periods of stability, institutions are taken for granted. But when environmental shifts occur, institutions are less resistant to change. More recently, institutions and structure have been conceptualized as enablers of, as well as constraints on, behavior. In this sense, institutions can be defined simply as reproduced practices that are both flexible and remarkably stable. even the most enduring of habits, or the most unshakable of social norms, involves continual and detailed reflexive attention. Routinization is of elemental importance in social life; but all routines, all the time, are contingent and potentially fragile accomplishments. A routine may be said to be institutionalized only when departures from the patterns are counteracted in a regulated fashion, by repetitively activated, socially constructed, controls-----that is, by some set of rewards and sanctionsInstitutions are those social patterns that, when chronically reproduced, owe their survival to relatively self-activating social processes. Insights including selective attention and search; limitations of perception; the centrality of scripts, schemas, routines, and performance programs; and the variety of unanticipated consequences of rule-based behavior explain departures from rationality and ironically, departures from institutional constraints as well. The important insights of the Carnegie school that stem from viewing organizations as interdependent and partially consistent production systems complement negotiated order theorys view of the fluidity of structure and the processual nature of scripted behaviors. Formal norms operate explicitly through rules and are reinforced through the monitoring and enforcement efforts of, for example, individual organizations and the state. Informal norms, the rules adopted and adhered to by a group, may be explicit but are often implicit. They are enforced through social mechanisms, including approval, acceptance, disapproval, avoidance, and shunning. Organizational, network, and institutional arrangements----and the embeddedness of behavior in them----play key roles in technology enactment. Enacted technology is the perception, design, and use of objective technologies. The institutions influence and are influenced by enacted IT and predominant organizational forms. Institutions enter the technology enactment framework in the form of cognitive, cultural, sociostructural, and formal embeddedness. The outcomes of technology enactment are therefore multiply, unpredictable, and indeterminate. Outcomes result from technological, rational, social, and political logics. Virtual state is a result of the concrete application of the technology enactment framework. The virtual state denotes a government in which information and communication flow increasingly over the web rather than through bureaucratic and other formal channels. The restructuring of agency services and information in portals sometimes makes it difficult for citizens to know which agency they are dealing with. The organizational and institutional perspective is an interesting challenge for me. The methodology and structure also make me interested. The author teaches me a method to put forward a new concept or theory. Thats valuable. The left parts are practice. The author said, My first objective is to illustrate technology enactment at work. At a more ambitious level, the cases presented in this and the following three chapters are meant to test whether the framework is supported. Enacted technology is a product of design, negotiation, politics, understanding, social construction, entrepreneurship, and leadership. The Internet is used often to reinforce old institutional structures rather than to pen communications. Channel development occurs selectively and is controlled by public managers. ( The end)
Fountain cites a large number of researches from economics, enterprise management, and new public management in the fourth chapter, because the network istoo new to government research field for the author to findusable research results. Although networkorganizations emerged many years ago, such as those successful international firms, it is paid much attention in recent 10 years as a new organization form of enterprises. Fountain wants to examine the implications of the increasing use of networks for the structure of the state and the policy making process. It is an interesting and valuable challenge. In contrast, networks within hierarchies, or intrao-rganizational networks, subsume relations between and among actors under governance structure that handles conflict resolution and channels behavior. At first, the author leads the reader to understand network as a organization form neither market nor bureaucracy. Yes, it is between them. The social structure of bureaucracy----that is, flows and networks of informal communication, influence, and advice-----is as important to the policymaking process as the formal structure. ...Ronald Burt has demonstrated empirically that power, in the form of social capital, accrues to individuals who straddle and broker among disparate professional networks. Individuals in these positions possess access to especially useful information unavailable to those working within one network and can play a brokering role among structurally distinct network constellations. This is only a primary analysis on the benefits inherent in networks. Then the author discusses the central elements of the inter-organizational network. Then what are they? Coordination because of the trust among the members of a network, but not consequently, lower transaction costs, better resource sharing, increased learning among network partners, and great level of innovation. Rather than leaving the flow of benefits to chance of goodwill, reciprocity ensures that benefits from coordination flow to each organization. Organizations form networks to pool resources and share administrative costs. They use collective action to stabilize resource flows, cycles, and other uncertainties by standardizing procedures. ...The successful formation of cooperative networks requires that actors value the long-run network relationshp highly enough to divert resources and attention to network formation and to forgo immediate individual gains. so too high trust will results in a low cooperation. For the government, it is more difficult to develop inter-agency networks because oftheslow flow of information,stiff systems and other factors. If the virtual state is a network state that uses the Internet as a technological and information infrastructure, policymakers cannot exercise control over its development without understanding both the characteristics of networks and their developmental process. Central to their development and maintenance is social capital. Social capital is a popular concept in social science and management field in recent years. Social capital is among the chief benefits of cooperation and a product of well-functioning networks....Social capital, like other forms of capital, accumulates when used productively....The central elements of social capital are trust, norms, and networks. Closely related to accretion is the self-reinforcing cyclical nature of social relations. Networks, technology and innovation have a inherent relationship. Their impact on bureaucracy are at last portrayed. Networks in government rely on budget-making and oversight process for funding and rigidly to allow network formation to develop in response to opportunities and problems. The internet as catalyst to network formation simply makes the mismatch of speed between the institutional structures of government and the linkage afforded by the Internet more problematic. In a network, agencies increasingly require more rapid access to knowledge and stronger innovative capacity. When the knowledge base that supports an industry is hard to comprehend, still emerging, and distributed across several organizations, then collaboration among firms, universities, and national laboratories will reflect a strong and fundamental interest in access to knowledge rather than simply strategic calculation, resource sharing, or transaction cost reduction. But the government is different from market organizations. This ability to preserve competition while encouraging cooperation to develop cross-cutting agency and policy capacity is one of the chief challenges underlying the move to G2G web-based initiatives in the government. The central difference between sectors lies in the incentives and rewards for network formation. I do think that the incentives and rewards are the biggest difference between the private sector and the public sector, so it is really difficult to migrate the modes simply from market to government. This also shows the corner in public management research. The researchers in public field hope to get feasible experience from enterprises, for example, NPM as one of the test, but the failure is not impossible. Then theauthortries to find the relationship betweensocial capital and informational capital. This is really anotherinteresting subtopic. They aredifferent. Social capital provides decisionmakers with information benefits beyond access to shared information on the web. So they can not substitute for each other. Those specific, accurate, important, and implicative information comes from social capital instead of informational capital. Social capital encompasses not only shared access to information but also many positive properties of interdependence, including shared values, goals, and objectives; shared expertise and knowledge; shared work and decisionmaking; sharedrisk, accountability, and trust and shared rewards. Social capital increases the ability to build and use informational capital. Yes, I agreeon this point. What will the author think about the relationship between the Internet and social capital? That should be the target of this chapter. However, the investment from federal government have not yet catalyzed extensive cross-agency networks in government. As we learn our way to a virtual state, the more difficult investments i n information infrastructure for both the state and the economy will not be hardware but software and institution-building. Institution building, yes, it is the most difficult thing in the world. If the social capital has some limitations, what is it? When conditions are less than optimal-for example, when trust among network members is either too great or too small, or when social ties restrict sound decisionmaking---some types of productive capacity are diminished. Power will exist in networks. Power in networks is often conditioned on 'organization size, control over the rules governing exchange of material resources and information, the ability to choose a do without strategy, the effectiveness of coercive strategies, and the concentration of inputs. The conclusion is, perhaps you have guessed out, Information technology does not, and cannot by itself, create social capital or cooperation, in the absence of a base of trust; but if easier communication and coordination lead to enhanced trust, then the Internet contributes. The internet does not, however, substitute for the development of social relations. A government that forces network formation but eschews collaboration may increase, rather than decrease, the costs of coordination. In such a scenario, poor institutional design, not technology, would be the culprit. Institutional design! Building the Virtual Sate: Information Technology and institutional Change . Washington, D.C. :Brookings Institution Press, 2001
Building the Virtual State comprises two parts: theory and practice. In theory part, there are 6 parts in total: Introduction, Leveraging cyberspace to reinvent government, networked computing Bureaucracy, Inter-organizational networks, and Enacting technology:an institutional perspective. The first three partsof the book delineate the exciting emergenceof information technology and the huge changes in state and organizations brought about by it. The Internet is thought as an enabler of virtuality. Information technology will be used to reinvent government. Virtual agencies, or federal interagnecy websites, would enable service integration not possible outside cyberspace, the author brings forward based on an analysis of the case of virtual federal government. What I am interested in most is the institutional perspective of the following three chapters. The institutional analysis of information technology in government makes me curious. In economics, institution and technology are thought as two main impetus of society. However, how do the institution and technology interplay in a bureaucratic organization like government? What will happen to the structure, rules and governance of government while the information technology is used deeply? The third chapterbegins with the discussion ofthe bureaucracy from Max Weber.Fountain concludes characteristics of modern bureaucracy fromWeber's view points. Weber's rational-legal ideal type was meant to indicate how bureaucracy could replace personalistic, patrimonial, patriarchal governance in society and economy. The modern American state is a bureaucratic state. She helps the reader to understand that fundamental concepts of governance follow logically from Weber's conceptualization, including jurisdiction, hierarchy, merit, documentation, and professional training in administration. If bureaucracy is outmoded or deficient, which of these elements has changed? In the third chapter, Fountain goes on toabstract the central elements of bureaucratic structure as : (1)coordination, which includes mutual adjustment, supervision, standardization, and the standardization of people. As for the last point, the author explains that standards may be socialized into people, just as they are into work processes and equipment , through selection methods, traininng and education, appraisal, and incentive systems that reward standard behavior and punish deviations. (2) Bureaucratic functions. Every elementis circumscribed to the impact that information technology will bring on it. at a minimum, this tell us that design and use of the Internet would be a source of negotiation and political contest, the results of which have implications for authority, power, and resource distribution. (3) Bureaucratic flows. Flows of authority, work, control, and staff information circulate in all directions throughout the organization. Indubitably, the author think that bureaucracy is central to modern government today. The last part of the third chapter is Weber Redux. Has jurisdictional disappeared? By no means, although some jurisdictional boundaries have changed character. A comparison between classic elements of bureaucracy with the structural elements and that in the wake of technological changes. A notable result has been the detachment from individuals holding a particular role. To the extent that information is power, this fundamental structural shift has important implications for authority and power in government. In sum, the author thinks that the use of the Internet in bureaucracy is likely to lead to greater rationalization, standardization, and use of rule-based systems. The rules may not be visible because most of them will be hidden in software and hardware. But they will remain and may increase in power. Technology might be enacted to facilitate collaboration, shared information, and enhanced communication. Equally plausible, it may be designed and used coercively to promote conformance and control. At the end of the third chapter, the author said: But bureaucracy, in either rendering, has not diminished in importance. That is her view.
The first time I met the Chinese translationversion of this book Building the Virtual State: Information Technology and Institutional Change was one year ago at the Feng Ru Song Bookstore, which is a famous academic bookstore at the south gate of Peking University. But I knew ofit earlier in many research papers, where this book is remarked as a seminal work in the field of the institutional researchon digital government. Although I got a Chinese translation, which is a niceversion published by China Renmin University press, I do hope to read the original English version.When I came to UMass, I have the opportunity to read it carefully. It is really a wonderful work. Besides the attractiveness of its academic rhetoric, I amalso entranced with its deeply thoughts and innovative foresights. Some creative ideas are as following: 1. The rhetoric of post-bureaucracy notsithstanding, this administrative machinery, and the career public servants within it, continues to be an essential intermediary between elected officials and society. It transforms the often vague and ambiguous decisions and judgments of the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary into operational and organizational rules and programs. Its attributes and vitality are more than ever of crucial concern to government and, ultimately, to citizens. In an industrialized society and economy, the state is central to contemporary political life. 2.One of the central tasks of public administration and management is the design and maintenance of effective organization as well as coordination, function, and process flows in more or less systematic channels through which move information, activity, production and decision-making......Coordination is achieved through hierarchy, formalization, and socialization. 3.on the one hand, improved communication and shared information could vastly increase the importance of mutual adjustment. On the other hand, if rigid rules were programmed into information systems, mutual adjustment would lose force as a source of coordination. 4. Lindblom:The behavior of each participant (including each citizen) in the governmental process is greatly controlled by conventions about ends and means that have the effect of prescribing behavior conditionally or absolutely. 5.Socialization, as a form of standardization, provides stability and uncertainty reduction, forms ofrationalization that are essential in bureaucracy.....For our purposes, it is clear that the socialization of individuals means that new information technologies and their use in government will be perceived through standard lenses that will in many cases bias innovation in unanticipated ways to conform to existing structural and political arrangements. （to be continued)
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