Public Management and Administration - Owen E.hughes

changes have had an impact on the public management reforms; but rather than
them being a technological determinant that inevitably led to new public management,
it is rather the case that e-government merely reinforces the change
to new forms of managing which were already occurring.
E-government is in its infancy and much can go wrong, as discussed later. It
is already the case that some countries are much more advanced than others
and the gap between the technologically advanced and the others may grow
wider. However, even given the potential problems, it does appear that the time
of e-government, allied with the other public management reforms, has arrived.
Technology and the administration
E-government 183
Public organizations during the period of the traditional model were often technological
leaders, using the latest in equipment that was available. The
telegram and the telephone were very important for communication both within
and outside government services and government departments were assiduous
users of both. The nineteenth-century theory of bureaucracy depended on such
nineteenth-century inventions. As Fountain argues (1999, p. 142):
Organizational forms developed by state and industry … were rendered possible by technological
achievements that underlay the Industrial Revolution. The steam engine, telegraph,
telephone, and early adding machines all made possible bureaucracy as well as the
inter-organizational forms underlying business and government using vertical integration
and spatially dispersed headquarters and field organizations. Technological developments
did not determine these forms in an inevitable fashion, but they made them possible and,
in some cases, completely logical.
The traditional model of public administration grew and thrived with the technology
of the quill pen and later the typewriter for written communication. In
both of these technologies there is essentially one piece of paper or document
from which copies are made, laboriously if at all. A strictly hierarchical system
fits this kind of technology perfectly. That paper is passed up and down the
hierarchy gaining approvals or providing information and the organization is
designed to reflect this. The passage of single pieces of paper induced transaction
costs just by having to proceed from desk to desk via the centralized mail
system. This basic technology was also perfectly suited to the principles of
bureaucracy.
A central part of Weberian bureaucracy is the concept of ‘the office’, a place
where officials go to work, where the public goes for its interactions with the
agency and where records are kept. The office is also the central place for organizational
technology and for processing information. As Weber describes it
(Gerth and Mills, 1970, p. 197):
The management of the modern office is based upon written documents (‘the files’), which
are preserved in their original or draught form. There is, therefore, a staff of subaltern