Electronic government (e-government) was established as an effective mechanism for increasing government productivity and efficiency and a key enabler for citizen-centric services. E-government services are yet to be universally accepted as a medium for accessing online public services since its inception more than a decade ago. Both governments and academic researchers recognise the problem of low-level adoption of e-government services among citizens; a common problem in both developed and developing countries. E-government adoption, unlike most of IT adoption by employees in private-sector organisations, is voluntary and occurs often in turbulent social-political environments. Therefore, the problem needs to be addressed comprehensively from technological, social, political, and cultural perspectives. E-government adoption research currently lacks a comprehensive conceptual framework for explaining citizen adoption of e-government services. To fill this gap, this study investigates determinants and factors necessary to enhance citizen adoption of e-government services, by extending the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) using a set of social, political, and design constructs that are derived from different research literatures. The research adopted a multi-method approach (combining quantitative and qualitative methods) to explore practices and experiences of implementing and adopting e-government systems in Egypt. The results of this research, in terms of a new customised e-government adoption model and recommendations made for e-government will directly benefit the Egyptian government and developing Arab world countries that share similar circumstances in creating a more efficient e-government adoption strategy.

The UAE has a vision of delivering unified e-Government services across numerous departments of seven emirates. The primary goal is to bring all aspects of the government information services online for every citizens and business by completely replacing the existing paper-based bureaucracy. This creates significant risks and information security challenges which the UAE e-Government is seeking to address. This thesis makes a comprehensive review of the UAE e-Government’s information security posture. An analysis of the current strengths and weaknesses of the e-Government was carried out, SWOT analysis was employed and based on the results, a TOWS matrix was constructed facilitating the development of new e-Government strategies to mitigate external threats. To implement an Information Security Management System (ISMS) across the e-Government departments, a framework was developed based on a multi-layered approach that is used to structure the information security program. It considers three factors; technology, operations and people (employees), to increase the effectiveness of information security system. To implement the framework, several international standards were evaluated and subsequently the ISO 27001 standard was used as a benchmark for achieving a secure e-Government. A Gap Analysis was carried out to evaluate the current state of the security culture within the e-Government against the standard and a Risk Assessment was carried out to demonstrate the existing risks faced by e-Government services. A comprehensive series of penetration tests were commissioned on e-Government network infrastructure. Having made interventions to improve the security of physical information technologies and organisational operations, a comprehensive questionnaire was developed to obtain quantitative evaluation of the security culture within the organisation. Subsequently, a training programme was devised and developed for the employees to demonstrably improve the security culture as measured by this approach. Finally, the findings, in conjunction with a consultation with security heads within the UAE e-Government, are used to construct a single comprehensive information security policy that can be rolled out to all e-Government departments within the seven emirates.

As a theoretical contribution to the body of knowledge, e-working is conceptualised in and by this study to be both a way of being a worker and the way, or mechanism, for carrying out the work task. It is a conceptualisation which responds to the indeterminacy, dynamism and unfolding nature of e-working in the contemporary context. This study takes a local government focus, using a single case study. The chosen case is a local authority which perceives itself as an 'exemplar' with regard to operational practice despite, at the point of examination, having only recently acknowledged the need to make active use of e-working practices; practices which are common elsewhere. This study provides empirical, theoretical and methodological contributions. Theoretical contribution is primarily offered through a new and more effective conceptualisation of e-working. This conceptualisation, derived from an analysis of the existing literature, is used to investigate the experience of e-working change in a local authority context during a period of significant e-working change (Research Objective 1), resulting in the theorising of the implications of e-working change for managing and working in contemporary local authority organisations (Research Objective 2). Subsequent to this, reflections on use of the processual approach are also provided. In using the empirical data to build a rounded picture of the e-working change experience, and by endeavouring to use a 'pure' plurivocal approach, this study establishes what the participants perceive as causing their operational environment to be changed through the increasing use of e-working; their perception of the nature of e-working change; and what influences their experience of the e-working change process. Through the adoption of a processual approach to understanding organisational change allied to a plurivocal stance (reflection on endeavouring to apply a 'pure' plurivocal approach and explanation as to why researchers may be tending to use alternative or variant methodologies being presented as a methodological contribution) this study provides a better understanding of e-working change in organisations as a process: one that acknowledges its indeterminacy, dynamism and unfolding nature. The study identifies the key points of the e-working change experience relate to the work location; working agenda; living with the unknown; resourcing of change; culture and the issue of trust; and the communicative approach. Amongst the theorised findings is identification of the need to manage perceptions of vulnerability, especially in the light of cost saving intentions, as well as the need to question the applicability and influence of an historical approach. With communication reasoned to reflect honesty within the organisation, the requirement to clarify expectations and make effort to understand and respond to reluctant engagement, as well as responding to (e-)socialisation requirements, are identified.

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This thesis examines and assesses the transformation and implementation of the Dubai Government’s operation, governance and delivery of public services through its use of ICT. The research design includes a critical examination of the evolution of ICT and its role in changing public services and government operations worldwide as an early move towards E-Government. Three recognised theories are used to examine the E-Government transformation and its effects of on governments, namely: the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the Diffusion of Innovation Theory (DOI) and the Lens of Max Weber’s Theory of Bureaucracy. Generally, the study seeks to determine what were the important factors for Dubai to achieve its strategic plan. Six questions were addressed by the research, stating the scope of work undertaken. First, to measure the status of eGovernment initiatives in terms of usefulness and ease of use. Second, to assess the extent of eGovernment application in terms of Government-to-Customer, Government-to-Business, Government-to-Government, and Government-to-Employees. Third, to determine the level of acceptance of eGovernment initiatives. Fourth, to explore the factors/challenges in a successful eTransformation of Dubai. Fifth, to assess the impacts/opportunities of eGovernment initiatives in the development of Dubai. Sixth, to formulate the model to achieve a successful implementation of eGovernment. A purposive sampling method was used for selecting citizens/customers, business employees and government employees, totalling 1500 equally distributed respondents. The researcher has prepared, administered and empirically tested three questionnaires, and also prepared and administered structured interviews with some officials of eGovernment. Data obtained are presented and analysed. Also, the study examines the catalytic role of eGovernment in the development of society, commerce and government, and shows fundamental changes from traditional systems or from bureaucratic paradigms to eGovernment paradigms. Comparisons are made with eGovernment applications in other countries as per rankings made by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). The researcher has selected top ranked states to examine best practices in e-Government. Most importantly, this research presents a unique and original contribution to knowledge of the subject treated in its programme for achieving successful eGovernment through the proposed rocket ship model Al Bakr eGovernment Model of implementation, adoption, conclusions and findings of the study.

There has been much written about leadership; so much in fact that it tends to cloud rather than illuminate the issue. But little of that work has been about how leadership is understood by professionals in their workplace and the impact that has on their day-to-day activities. This research covers the period from early 2002 until the end of 2004, and includes fieldwork in the Department of Education and Skills (as it was known until June 2007). The research was conducted in a traditional hermeneutic style from a critical perspective, and the evidence is taken from interviews with twelve senior civil servants. There were three aspects of leadership that came to the fore in the research. First, leadership in the civil service cannot be satisfactorily described by existing models in the academic literature. For these civil servants, leadership is made up of four elements, vision, motivation, monitoring progress and reaching planned outcomes, which itself could lead back to renewed vision. Thus there was a cycle from conception to results. This thesis proposes a new model of leadership that describes this cycle, called the Leadership Circle. Second, training in leadership is problematic (some trainees think it very valuable; others see little or no worth in it) and discussion on it throws up some unexpected related issues such as isolation in the workplace and lack of confidence amongst leaders. The way training in leadership is set in the wider context of support for leaders needs to be re-considered by HR departments; there is a wide range of benefits that can accrue if leadership training is seen as part of a suite of continuing support. Finally, civil servants' scope to act as leaders is constrained by the parallel role filled by Government Ministers. Theoretically there is a clear division of responsibility and authority between the two groups but there are overlaps in the day-to-day situation. And the roles of each group have changed significantly over the last 30 years without any overt acknowledgement of that change or consideration of the consequences. Is either group well placed to deliver their evolved roles? It is suggested that this situation is serious enough to merit further work.

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to a better understanding of users’ experience of e-government services in developing countries through a study of a specific e-government service, the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) portal. This thesis therefore encompasses both the users’ experience of e-government services and effect of the digital divide in the use of e-government services. The NIS portal was chosen as the context for this study because it is the most well-developed e-government service in Nigeria. Those seeking to travel in and out of the country have no option but to use it regardless of whether they are currently living in Nigeria. Given the importance of profiling a significant number of users to support the investigation of relationships between variables, and the geographic scatter of the respondents, snowball sampling was used for the questionnaire survey used to collect the data. The questionnaire design and subsequent analysis was informed by previous research and theory in the fields of customer satisfaction, service quality, technology adoption and the digital divide. 351 completed questionnaires were collected and analysed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and Analysis of a Moment Structures (AMOS) Software. All respondents identified themselves as having used the NIS portal, with 50% reporting their main place of residence as Nigeria, and the remainder being resident in other countries. The analysis of descriptive statistics and the responses to the open questions and statements used in the questionnaire suggested that the respondents had a low level of satisfaction with the NIS website, with much of their concern stemming from issues pertaining to security, support and trustworthiness. There were also concerns documented regarding the safety of personal and financial data. They also mentioned significant issues with the ease of use of the website and its quality. Nonetheless, users valued the quality of the content and information available through the portal and were positive about its convenience and potential to deliver benefits. In terms of usage barriers, the most significant is Nigeria’s intermittent electricity supply, closely followed by the high cost of internet access, both of which pose a particular challenge, given the high rate of unemployment in Nigeria. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to generate an e-government user experience scale confirming the importance of dimensionsidentified by other researchers, as well as identifying new factors. These were: security and support, content and information, ease of use, benefits, barriers, convenience, trust and website quality. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) was used to investigate the relationships between these factors. Content and information were found to have a significant effect on ease of use and convenience. Website quality was found to have a significant effect on ease of use, security and support. The website’s ease of use was found to have a significant effect on barriers and convenience to have a significant effect on perceived benefits. Meanwhile, security and support was found to have a significant effect on trustworthiness. Barriers and benefits as well as trustworthiness were all found to have a significant effect on user satisfaction. Demographic statistics supported hypotheses testing on the digital divide in the use of e-government services. Demographic (age, education, gender and income), social-economic (employment) and geographic (location: rural and urban, developing and developed countries) factors affected the e-government users’ internet experience, their access to computing facilities and their e-government experience thus confirming that a digital divide exists amongst NIS portal users. This research makes a number of contributions. Firstly, it is one of a very few significant studies to explore user experience of an e-government portal in a major developing country. As a result, it has brought to light important concerns regarding users’ security, privacy and trustworthiness as they relate to their personal information. Secondly, it compares users both inside and outside the country, thereby offering unique insights on the digital divide. Finally, it proposes an e-government user-experience model that identifies the relationships between the various factors that contribute to user satisfaction. Suggestions are offered for practitioners, e-government policymakers and researchers.

Electronic government (e-Government) is attracting the interest of governments around the globe due to its great importance in facilitating, and providing services to citizens. Although most countries invest massive budgets to provide latest technologies, they face many obstacles, including the notable absence of the assessment, and evaluation of e-Government services from the citizen’s point of view. The objective of this research is to identify an e-Government evaluation model based on previous research and studies, and to evaluate each model by verifying its attributes, factors, and how they relate to each other. This research concentrates on evaluating online services provided to citizens by governments. It will develop a citizen centred model to evaluate e-Government services, and will help government organizations to find the strengths, and weakness of their online services. One of the main aspects of developing an evaluation model is to consider the citizens. The citizen is one of the most important reasons for governments putting their services online (e-Services). Therefore, finding ways of evaluating e-Services is crucial for governments in order to achieve better results from their perspectives as well as citizen satisfaction. The iMGov Model is based around the concepts of three phases in terms of Placing an Order, Processing an Order, and Delivering an Order. The new model will be compared with existing evaluation models. In conclusion, this research will produce an adequate e-Government evaluation model to measure e-Government services provided to citizens.

Governments’ policies and actions often precipitate public blame firestorms and mediated scandals targeted at individual or collective policy makers. In the face of losing credibility and resources, officeholders are tempted to apply strategies of blame avoidance which permeate administrative structures, operations, and language use. Linguistic aspects of blame avoidance are yet to be studied by discourse analysts in great detail. It is necessary to develop a more sophisticated, context-sensitive understanding of how blame avoidance affects public communication practices of governments, because certain defensive ways of communicating may curb democratic deliberation in society. In this thesis, I propose a systematic approach to identifying and interpreting defensive discursive strategies adopted by government communicators in the circumstances of blame risk. I do this by engaging with a set of recent empirical data (samples of text, talk, and images produced by the British government at critical moments in the aftermath of the financial crisis of the late 2000s; field data from the backstage of British government communication), and integrating political science literature on the politics of blame avoidance with the linguistically rooted discourse-historical approach to the study of social problems. I show how reactive and anticipative blame avoidance in government communication involves the use of particular strategies of arguing, framing, denying, representing social actors and actions, legitimating, and discursive manipulation. I argue that officeholders’ discursive practices of blame avoidance should be interpreted in relation to various conceptualisations of ‘government communication’, understood within the frames of a discursively constructed ‘blame game’, and analysed as multimodal defensive performances. This is a multidisciplinary exploratory study that I hope will open up new avenues for future research into government blame games, and, more broadly, into blame phenomena in political and organisational life.

Since the advent of Internet and communication technologies, E-government has become a Subject of considerable importance to the developed and developing countries, providing these countries with many potential opportunities to improve the quality of public services, provide cost-effective service delivery, and promote a better relationship between citizens and governments than that associated with traditional modes of public services delivery. However, the few existing studies in the field of IS related to the adoption and diffusion of online public services in the context of developing countries reveal that citizens remain sceptical about accepting internet-based technologies. This raises the question among researchers, scholars, and practitioners involved in the development and implementation of ICT, of how governments can increase citizen adoption and level of usage of the new electronic delivery channel in respect of public services in developing countries. The primary objectives of this study are twofold. Firstly, it aims to identify the critical success factors in respect of E-government adoption and implementation in Libya, from the citizen perspective, and secondly, it aims to determine the inter-relationships among these factors in the Libyan context. In doing this it assesses the usefulness of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as a basis for the development of a conceptual framework enabling rational, informed decisions underlying and predicting citizen satisfaction with E- government services in Libya. To achieve its aims, the study undertakes five main tasks, these being: (1) a review of the literature, (2) a preliminary field investigation to ensure the appropriateness of the research approach chosen for the study, (3) a pilot study to assess the reliability and validity of the research model, (4) the development of hypotheses and scales, and (5) the development and validation of a research model via a questionnaire survey. Triangulation of the data is achieved by using qualitative interviews as well as a quantitative survey. The data from the study is then compared and contrasted with the literature from which the theoretical framework for the contextualisation and interpretation of findings was developed.