Networked Individuals and Institutions: A Cross-Sector Comparative Perspective on Patterns and Strategies in Government and Research

Abstract

Discussion of the role of the Internet in government and research tends to be “institution-centric” in that e-government and e-research initiatives are both anchored in top-down strategies to provide information resources to citizens or researchers by place-based institutions, including governments and universities. In both institutional arenas, the diffusion of these services has been limited to small albeit growing proportions of their target audiences. In contrast, individuals with access to the Internet have taken bottom-up initiatives to obtain information and services from the space of flows of the Internet in ways that reach beyond the boundaries of both governmental and research institutions, but in ways that could compete with but also enhance existing institutions, such as by making them more accountable to their respective constituencies. Institutional actors in government and research need to more explicitly recognize and strategically adapt to the practices and tools taken up by networked individuals, such as by creating e-infrastructures that—like the Internet—enable rather than constrain bottom-up innovation.

Keywords:

• e-government
• e-research
• Internet
• networked individuals
• e-social Science

An earlier version of this article was presented to the eResearch 08 Conference, session on Social Parallels between e-Research and e-Government, University of Oxford, 11 Sept 2008. The research on which this article is based was supported by the Oxford Internet Surveys (OxIS) at the OII and the ESRC's Oxford e-Social Science Project, University of Oxford (ESRC RES-149–25-1022).

Notes

∗p < .05,

∗∗ p < .01,

∗∗∗ p < .001; Model χ² (10) = 134.916, p < .001, R ² = 0.180 (Nagelkerke), correctly predicted = 66.8%, N = 929.

1. E-government is used to refer to the use of the Internet and related ICTs to support government operations and services.

2. E-research is used broadly in this article to refer to the use of advanced Internet and Grid technologies to support all phases of research within the sciences and humanities. In the United Kingdom, initiatives in these areas have been led by the National e-Science Centre (NeSC), the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS), and the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (ahessc).

3. In Britain, for example, the Office of the e-Envoy was established to promote the use of the Web by government departments. See http://archive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/e-envoy/ukonline-top/$file/ukstrategy.htm.

4. The notion of networked individuals corresponds to the term “networked individualism” used by Barry Wellman (2001) to break old dichotomies between the individual and place-based communities. I have developed and extended this concept in my work on the Fifth Estate (Dutton, 2007).

5. These included the NCeSS mailing lists, and a variety of listservs, such as that of the ESRC and the UK National Centre for Research Methods. Detailed descriptions of the survey methods and sample are provided by Dutton and Meyer (2008).

6. See http://www.nesc.ac.uk.

7. See http://www.ncess.ac.uk. Also, see Halfpenny et al. (2008) for a perspective on the development of e-social science.

8. See http://www.nsf.gov/dir/index.jsp?org=OCI.

9. See http://www.accessgrid.org.

10. These are meetings and events organized around the NCeSS hub and the Oxford e-social science node of one ESRC research initiative.