Congratulations to Anis Hamidati for passing her dissertation defense last Friday! We look forward to the revised document and signing her off as our latest CIS PhD graduate.
Title of Dissertation:
Top-Down Approach, Bottom-Up Solution: Overcoming Perceived Challenges of an Indonesian E-Government-Based Scholarship Program
Abstract:
The optimism surrounding e-government to improve government services has been widely documented and supported in public administration literature. This study looks at a long-standing government scholarship program in Indonesia, which shifted from traditional offline to solely online for its application process. This e-government initiative was imposed top-down to follow the larger government agenda in accelerating development through ICTs.
Despite the promise of e-government, many initiatives failed. At the same time, as demonstrated in this study, there have been some successes where users can conduct workarounds to achieve their goals rather than follow the previously designed pathways that did not work. These bottom-up solutions are sources of resilience that enabled the initiatives to work.
This study identifies and categorizes perceived challenges to the e-government program into four overarching themes: bureaucratic, cultural, financial, and technical challenges. Additionally, it delineates six themes of the workarounds employed in response to the challenges: street-level bureaucracy, social capital, financial capital, facilitation and support from institutions or policies, technical mastery, and public pressure. Furthermore, acquiring these workarounds is attributed to the three primary learning strategies: drawing upon past learning experiences, obtaining professional guidance, and working with peers.
Committee Members:
Dr. Rich Gazan, Chair
Dr. Elizabeth Davidson
Dr. Daniel Suthers
Dr. Jenifer Sunrise Winter
Dr. Baoyan Cheng, University Representative