Title: E-government: from actors to interrelations

Authors: Georgia-Barbara Foteinou, Georgios Pavlidis

Addresses: Department of Business Administration, University Campus, University of Patras, Rion, Patras 26500, Greece. ' Department of Business Administration, University Campus, University of Patras, Rion, Patras 26500, Greece

Abstract: E-government, as an interdisciplinary area of research, exhibits some special difficulties related to its sociotechnical character. This paper adopts a systems approach of e-government, to offer a unified framework of analysis. This approach offers a deeper understanding of e-government as an interactive, open multi-level, sociotechnical system, which is embedded to a hyper-system and entails many other subsystems that result to a high degree of complexity. At first, e-government is defined as a system whose constituent parts are entities and relationships. Then, some system characteristics are specified and its social and technological aspects are taken into account.

Keywords: systems approaches; e-government actors; electronic government; sociotechnical systems; set theory; entity-relationship models; interrelations; interactive systems; multi-level systems; hyper-systems; subsystems; complexity; entities; relationships; social aspects; technological aspects; electronic governance; e-governance.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEG.2010.036904

International Journal of Electronic Governance, 2010 Vol.3 No.3, pp.319 - 331

Published online: 15 Nov 2010 *

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