EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on public managers’ attitudes toward digital transformation

José Barrutia and Carmen Echebarria

Technology in Society, 2021, vol. 67, issue C

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has induced a process of digital acceleration and has likely changed the attitudes of local public managers toward information and communication technology (ICT). While this attitude change has been reasonably argued, it has not been systematically measured. This study narrows this gap by measuring the attitudes of public managers before and after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Overall, this study finds that the pandemic has led public managers to be more confident in the capacity of ICT to help cities achieve their economic, social, and environmental goals and respond to challenges. Both explicit and implicit measures confirmed attitude changes. The explicit measures also indicated that the change in public managers’ attitude toward ICT was similar to their change in attitude toward scientific progress and greater than their change in attitude toward other issues that have played a major role during the pandemic, namely, climate change, citizen participation, and privacy.

Keywords: COVID-19; Coronavirus; Attitude change; Public managers; Information and communication technology; Digital transformation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160791X21002517
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:teinso:v:67:y:2021:i:c:s0160791x21002517

DOI: 10.1016/j.techsoc.2021.101776

Access Statistics for this article

Technology in Society is currently edited by Charla Griffy-Brown

More articles in Technology in Society from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-04-09
Handle: RePEc:eee:teinso:v:67:y:2021:i:c:s0160791x21002517