It goes without saying that the Internet and the Web have the potential to change how organizations work in the most fundamental ways. Technologies, organizations, and administrative practices have always co-evolved. The railroad and the telegraph underpinned the modern business firm, and mainframe computers and satellite communications enabled the rise of the truly global multinational corporation. A modern military would be unthinkable without globe-girdling, space-based sur-are nonetheless vital to the structure, ftincveillance and command and control svs-rion, and goals of government, and ultitems, themselves the offspring of earlier undersea cable systems that tied field commanders and diplomats to headquarters back home.Technology and organizations co-evolve in public bureau-mately to the character and quality of civic life. Interest in the effect of the Internet to revitalize democracy leads many observers to focus on the role of the new technologies on participation and interest group formation and repcracies as well, and although they often lag resentation. While such efforts are impordevelopments in the private sector, they tant, the role of the Internet and the Web

The foundations for governance in an information age are developing through the World Wide Web as it becomes the principal electronic public gateway into government organizations. Governmental openness is now important to a variety of strategies for governmental reform. The Web (a) makes government more efficient; (b) facilitates the functioning of new network-like arrangements between public organizations, the private sector, and citizens; and (c) empowers citizens to play a stronger role in interacting with government. We describe the concept of organizational openness and summarize a methodology to measure it on a worldwide basis. Data from 1997 through 2000 are presented, showing rapid diffusion of the Web and variation in levels of openness, even across countries with similar levels of economic and political development. Bureaucracies adopt Web technologies as a function not of traditional diffusion processes, but of emergent institutional isomorphism. Short-term prospects for responsive government improve, but so do unrealistic expectations affecting government legitimacy.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract