Abstract

In order to understand e-government, we need to grasp the processes whereby certain technological solutions are enacted in the practical work performed by public organizations. By combining recent thinking in research into technology with Scandinavian institutional theory, this study aims to show, by avoiding a predetermined division between technology and social actors, how we can understand changes in public management. A longitudinal qualitative study has been carried out in order to reveal the process whereby new ideas in public management are imitated and translated into a national context. The claim made is that the implementation of new public management ideas can be seen as changed local practice that leads to changes of assemblies. Therefore, new technology solutions are better understood, not as deterministic features that social entities can treat either well or badly, but as enacted into public management practices, where new and pre-existing entities are connected or disconnected. E-governance can thus be seen as part of new assemblies based on new and old ideas about how to act, where pre-existing and new practices melt and (re)arrange both new and old social and technological entities.