Understanding e-Government project trajectories from an actor-network perspective

Richard Heeks and Carolyne Stanforth

European Journal of Information Systems, 2007, vol. 16, issue 2, 165-177

Abstract: A number of models have been offered to help explain the trajectories of e-Government projects: their frequent failures and their rarer successes. Most, though, lack a sense of the political interaction of stakeholders that is fundamental to understanding the public sector. This paper draws on actor-network theory to provide a perspective that is used to explain the trajectory of an e-Government case study. This perspective is found to provide a valuable insight into the local and global actor-networks that surround e-Government projects. The mobilisation, interaction and disintegration of these networks underpins the course of such projects, and can itself be understood in relation to network actor power: not through a static conception of ‘power over’ others but through the dynamic-enacted concept of ‘power to’. As well as providing a research tool for analysis of e-Government project trajectories, the local/global networks approach also offers insights into e-Government leadership as a process of network formation and maintenance; and into the tensions between network stabilisation and design stabilisation.

Date: 2007
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DOI: 10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000676

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