If you have found this article useful and you think it is important that researchers across the world have access, please consider donating , to ensure that this valuable collection remains Open Access. Prometheus is published by Pluto Journals, an Open Access publisher. This means that everyone has free and unlimited access to the full-text of all articles from our international collection of social science journals. This article examines the extent to which the implementation of Internet technology by Birmingham City Council BCC is facilitating new forms of engagement with the communities it serves.
However older, more traditional forms of hierarchical command and control persist. These are being sustained, in part, by adaptive uses of the same technologies that facilitate networking. Ultimately, this situation limits the extent to which new forms of community engagement have been achieved. As has been widely noted in the literature, 2 local government in the UK is currently experiencing a particularly rapid period of change, change which can be traced in the main to successive reform programmes mounted by central government.
Whilst such dynamism means few commentators speak with certainty about the future of local government, the notion that councils should become far more effective in engaging their communities is a key characteristic of this current period of reform. In drawing upon a case study of Internet use in Birmingham City Council BCC , this paper investigates the extent to which the implementation of Internet technology facilitates greater community engagement in local government.
BCC provides an interesting site for exploring these issues. In concentrating on organisational issues, this analysis seeks to add to a broader research literature on the importance of institutional structures and processes to an understanding of technological change.
Itself part of a broader array of research into the social shaping of technology SST , 8 this literature has a relatively long history. This approach has been usefully applied to governmental organisations in a number of analyses. Technology, in turn, may reshape organisations and institutions to better conform to its logic. New information technologies are enacted—made sense of, designed, and used when they are used —through the mediation of existing organisational and institutional arrangements with their own internal logics and tendencies.
