| Review of: | Handbook of public information systems edited by G. David Garson |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Christine Bellamy |
| Reviewed in: | Public Administration |
| Date accepted online: | 02/11/2007 |
| Published in print: | Volume 85, Issue 2, Pages 541-568 |
Reviews
This is the second edition of a book that was first published in 1999. It aims to contribute to the career readiness of students of public administration by providing a set of up-to-date, original essays covering the issues that constitute 'ICT literacy for the public services' in the 'information age'.
The result is a big, comprehensive book of some thirty-five chapters. In line with the aim of helping practitioners, teachers and students keep up to date in an important, fast-changing field, some two-thirds of the material has been specially written for the second edition, including a completely new section on e-government. There are also sections on the history of IT in the public sector, the organizational dynamics of technical change and policy issues, such as the digital divide, information security and intellectual property rights. Other chapters deal with the interface between information systems and other public management functions - training, contracting, budgeting and management information - and there are also some case studies. The book is topped-off by a useful, but tantalizingly short, essay on the potential contribution to understanding public information systems of various theoretical perspectives, including empowerment theory, critical theory, socio-technical systems theory and global integration theory.
This handbook cannot be faulted for any failure of coverage, and there are many chapters here that could be of great use to teachers as part of a planned programme of set reading, particularly on vocational study programmes. For this reason alone, the book should sell well. Some chapters could also stand as major contributions to the research literature in their own right. Among these are the cross-country comparison by Todd La Porte and his colleagues of the effectiveness of the World Wide Web in promoting open government, as well as Northrop's fascinating chapter on 'The URBIS cities revisited', a contemporary study of the forty-two American cities that featured in the famous URBIS research programmes in the 1970s and 1980s. By any standards, the cross-country study by Shelly Arsneault and her colleagues would constitute an important contribution to the field, by offering a comparison of the factors determining high levels of technical diffusion in the 1990s with those that appear to predict which countries are likely to gain most in economic, political and social terms from the dissemination of the internet in the early part of twenty-first century.
As a 'handbook' of public information systems, this book does, however, have certain limitations, particularly for teachers and students outside the USA. The first is that, although the book has a section specifically dedicated to 'case studies', rather a lot of other chapters are, in fact, case studies too, albeit ones framed by a necessarily brief attempt at pulling out some issues of more general application. Many of the contributors have taken the opportunity to write up their latest empirical research and, in this field, this usually means a proliferation on the basis of no very obvious logic of single-country, single-industry cases. It is, therefore, quite difficult to gauge how representative the conclusions and lessons drawn in many chapters are for public services' IT across the piece. This makes the book especially problematic for non-American readers, because only four of the contributors are from outside the USA, and so almost of all the empirical evidence is drawn exclusively from the American government, often from a single American state and quite often from a single project. Thirdly, relatively few chapters pick up on the editor 's exposition of the social science of technology and innovation: indeed, a majority are written from an information systems or IT management perspective, and tend to treat such social phenomena as culture and institutions simply as irritating barriers to the full realization of the strategic benefits of IT.
Like many such handbooks, then, this one suffers from a certain incoherence of approach and unevenness of quality, and occupies a rather ill-defined place in the literature. With some very honourable exceptions, much of the work reported here is too particular for the book to do service as a good textbook, and anyway, it is far too big and expensive. However, the need to cover the field probably prevented it from becoming a showcase for the very best contemporary research in the field.