Thailand and Indonesia are two developing countries still in the early stages of e-government implementation. An understanding of their citizens' perspectives can help the governments of these countries better plan their services and also provide useful information to governments of other developing countries. The current study uses a new survey instrument to assess the importance of e-government services and website success factors from the perspective of citizens. Using multigroup analysis to validate the instrument, it identifies that an important difference between the perceptions of citizens of the two countries is that in Thailand, the importance of financial transaction services is negatively related to the importance of citizen identification with the e-government site whereas in Indonesia this relationship is insignificant. Only two expected relationships were found to be equivalent across both datasets, i.e., the importance of financial transactions services is positively related to the importance of website efficiency and the importance of local information services is positively related to the importance of citizen identification with the site. The multigroup analysis showed that citizens in both countries interpreted the survey instrument similarly but had very different expectations for their egovernment services.

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Using a contingency theory framework, this study examines the relationship between a firm’s business-government relations (BGR) strategy, BGR structure, and BGR performance. Based on previous work, the study hypothesizes that BGR strategy determines, in part, the structure of the public affairs function, as well as the function’s effectiveness. Furthermore, the study contends that an appropriate fit between BGR strategy and BGR structure leads to improved BGR performance. Results indicate that there is a positive association between BGR strategies (buffering and bridging) and BGR performance. There is also a positive association between BGR strategy and BGR formalization (structure). However, the study finds no direct association between BGR structure and performance. Further analysis reveals that it is a fit between a firm’s BGR strategy and BGR structure that leads to improved BGR performance. The associations between strategy, structure, fit, and performance offer empirical support for the relevance of the contingency theory framework to BGR research.

Being in the public eye puts pressure on an organization's Public Affairs (PA) function. This study finds that firms more closely covered by the press tend to be more forceful in promoting their own position on social issues (social buffering). Press coverage is not associated with greater corporate efforts to comply with societal expectation (social bridging). Overall, press coverage is weakly associated with lowered perceived corporate public affairs performance. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.