Summary Over the last decades, governments all over the world have tried to take advantage of information and communication technology (ICT) to improve government operations and communication with citizens. Adoption of e‐government has increased in most countries, but at the same time, the rate of successful adoption and operation varies from country to country. This article outlines the evolution of ICT in the public sector over the past 25 years. It presents general trends by examining interactions and mutual shaping processes between ICT evolution and several inter‐related institutional changes including government operations, public services delivery, citizen participation, policy and decision making, and governance reform. The authors suggest that within a short time period, e‐governance has evolved rapidly from rudimentary uses of ICTs as simple tools to support highly structured administrative work to the integration of ICT throughout government operations. The growing use of Web 2.0, social media, and mobile and wireless ICT by citizens can also heavily impact the way public services are delivered and how citizen engagement processes are carried out. However, new management approaches, governance structures, and policy frameworks are still missing, posing a challenge for governments to operate effectively in the age of big data. Generally, developing countries are lagging behind in e‐government adoption compared with developed countries. Thus, for developing countries to successfully adopt ICT and try to leapfrog some of the obstacles encountered by early ICT adopters in developed countries, systematic analyses need to be conducted to understand the interactions among stakeholders and ICTs and co‐create the institutional environment to lead to a positive impact of ICT on public administration. Only when this relationship is clearly understood can innovative ICTs be seamlessly integrated into the governance structure. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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This study explored how citizens and governments used microblogging for communication during the water contamination incident in Shanghai, China. Based on analysis of both citizen and government microblogging posts, this study showed citizens can use microblogging to engage in the emergency response in four different ways, while governments mainly applied a push strategy for communication. Although public organizations showed a weak sign of using a pull strategy, the overall misalignment in the use of microblogging limited its benefits as an interactive platform where additional network collaboration can be developed. This study contributes to understanding how citizens actually use microblogging during an emergency and how governments adapt to the observed users’ behavior over time. Further research is needed to explore how governments can use pull or networked strategy to maximize the benefits of microblogging.

Despite recent studies on determinants of adoption and diffusion of e-procurement, the existing literature is still scant on how different variables affect eprocurement adoption, diffusion and upscaling by type of adopter. Using qualitative data from interviews, this paper aims at contributing to fill this gap by examining how outer and inner variables influence the adoption and upscaling of e-procurement in two European regions that can be considered as innovators (Valencia in Spain and Lombardy in Italy). Our findings show that 1) the role of inner factors is clearer than that of outer ones in adoption processes, 2) in particular, organizational (mainly slack resources in both cases) and individual determinants seem to be the most important inner factors, 3) change management strategies and activities have a key role in upscaling processes, and 4) the internal organizational context and the type of technological innovation may act as moderators/mediators of the effects.

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