Call for Papers: International Workshop "The Digitisation of European Public Administrations: What's the Political Dimension of Electronic Governance?", jointly organised by FHS Informationsberufe, Austria, and European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA), The Netherlands.
Outline: Against the threats of a "crisis of politics" and "the end of representation", Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), in particular eGovernment applications, are promoted as tools for a potential reinforcement of democratic governance and governability by a variety of social actors, among them prominently the political institutions at European supra-national level. At the same time, the rhetoric around eGovernment tends to convert political matters into economic operations (efficiency, citizens as consumers or prosumers,...). Thereby, possible contradictions between democratic claims and economic rationales remain largely unsolved. The workshop seeks to stimulate a critical debate based on empirical as well as theoretical studies challenging a pre-dominantly "neutral" managerial and technocratic view. Case studies on local, regional, national and supra-national European level are highly welcome.
Core questions of the workshop are: 1. interests, concepts and structural forces behind the promotion of e-government, accordance and conflicts of interests. 2. the discursive and structural re-shaping of Western democracies and of the practises of citizenship by electronic means (rationalisation, deliberation, exclusionary/inclusionary mechanisms,...)
Call for Papers: Presentations should be limited to 30 minutes. Deadline for abstracts is September 20th 2004 with workshop papers due by October 20th. Please, submit papers electronically to fritz.betz@fh-burgenland.at or monika.bargmann@fh-burgenland.at.