ICT and Innovation in the Public Sector

The rise of the Internet offers the public sector a great deal of opportunity for change, and visible changes have taken place in recent years. This book offers fresh and original perspectives on the emerging institutional landscape of the Internet based public services. The contributing chapters investigate, empirically and theoretically, the multiple development paths that characterize the adoption of ICT in the public sector bureaucracy. Reporting on recent European development experiences in the area of justice, it throws light on how ICT shapes the institutions of the public sector, and, conversely, it shows how the normative rules and the institutional structures of the bureaucracy constrain and channel the design of the new technologies. The book is an important reading for anyone, specialist or non specialist, who has an interest in understanding the complexities of the design of e-government systems, in the problems associated with the rise of 'digital institutions' and in the evolution of modern bureaucracy in contemporary democracies.