The Economic Moralities of E-Government: Recoding Public and Private Boundaries
Taking the implementation of the Electronic Records System (ERS) (an electronic tool for document management) in a public organization in Germany as empirical example, we analyze how the private and public actors differently involved in the introduction of the E-Government tool justify on the basis of their differing "moralities" the necessity of transformation in the public organization, their expectations about the use of the new digital tool and about the future economic and social change needs involved in digital innovation. We focus on the following questions: What are the features of transformation in the context of innovating with a digital tool (ERS) in a public organization? What professional boundaries do emerge between public and private actors in the transformation process? Basing on the answer to these empirical questions we argue that both public and private actors' expectations in the transformation of public administrations are increasingly interrelated moving from public/private boundaries and separated economic moralities towards more hybrid forms of organizing and justifying services provision supported by E-Government tools.
The paper is organized in six sections. First, we introduce our theoretical ideas about boundaries between public and private information systems and professional jurisdictional quarrels in the context of E-Government. Second we present our research questions as well as the operationalization of our theoretical ideas. In a third section we explain our methodology including the description of our case study. In the fourth section we answer our research questions basing on our empirical results. We finally conclude with a discussion section proposing an analytical framework for the analysis of professional boundaries transformations and economic moralities due to digitalization in public sector contexts.