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ICT and Innovation in the Public Sector pp 9–48Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Building digital institutions: ICT and the rise of assemblages in government

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Part of the book series: Technology, Work and Globalization ((TWG))

Abstract

The encounter between Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and institutions generates phenomena that invite us to reframe our ways of looking at the organisational structures and at the overall institutional fabric of our society. Markets, corporate firms, public agencies and governments increasingly rely upon technology for collecting, producing, processing, and exchanging information (Benkler, 2006; Kallinikos, 2006). In many public domains, similarly to what has occurred in markets, it has become more and more difficult to do without technology in the production and delivery of services to the citizens. Public sector providers, from healthcare to education and justice, increasingly depend on large information infrastructures for their operations (Hanseth, 2000; Hanseth and Lundberg, 2001), and larger and larger components of the public sector are regulated by ICT standards and protocols. Although in the public sector we do not yet have the equivalent, for example, of the computer trading systems of the financial markets or the corporate Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems of industry, ICT produces specific structural changes and arrangements in the public domain. What an institution or administration can do depends more and more on the technical and architectural choices that are made at the level of the technology. Technology is gaining a new centrality in the configuration of political and economic space at the local and global level, becoming itself a political object (Barry, 2001).

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Authors
  1. Giovan Francesco Lanzara
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Research Institute on Judicial Systems, National Research Council (IRSIG-CNR), Bologna, Italy

    Francesco Contini (researcher) (researcher)

  2. University of Bologna, Italy

    Giovan Francesco Lanzara (professor of Organisation Theory and Political Science) (professor of Organisation Theory and Political Science)

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© 2009 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Lanzara, G.F. (2009). Building digital institutions: ICT and the rise of assemblages in government. In: Contini, F., Lanzara, G.F. (eds) ICT and Innovation in the Public Sector. Technology, Work and Globalization. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230227293_2

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