06D1-00-Examine the Hurricane Katrina Case Study
BOOK REVIEWS G. David Garson Public Information Technology and E-Governance: Managing the Virtual State Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett, 2006 ISBN 0-7637-3468-3 The author’s goal was to ‘‘write a comprehensive textbook on policy and management issues that arise when considering information technology in the public sector’’ (p. xi).
The book succeeds in meeting this goal and goes beyond that. Indeed, this book would be at the top of my list of recommendations to both academic and practitioner audiences interested in becoming well-informed on a range of e-governance and e- government themes.
The book is divided into ve sections: Introduction; Politics and Policy; Management; Implementation; Public Information Technology, Organization Behavior, and Organization Theory. The Introduction provides a historical overview and introduces four competing ways of viewing information technology and change. The Politics and Policy segment covers enduring themes such as transparency, regulation and taxation, privacy, security, and some that are more contemporary such as e-democracy. The Management segment has chapters on e-government business model, contracting and procurement, planning, needs assessment and project management.
The Implementation segment provides an overview of implementation success factors and on strategies for evaluating public information systems. The nal segment of the book has a chapter that links organization theory and behavior with public information technology considerations.
The reason I like this book so much is that it looks at the promises and pitfalls of e-government with admirable equanimity. This level-headed approach comes through directly when the author talks about four theoretical frameworks on information technology and social change, and indirectly in the richly detailed rendering of historical Vol. 10 Issue 1 2008 151 – 157 Public Management Review ISSN 1471-9037 print/ISSN 1471-9045 online 2008 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14719030701783656 and contemporary developments on information technology. The rst two chapters of the book titled, ‘‘The Vision of E-Governance’’ and ‘‘A Brief History of Public-Sector Information Technology Policy’’ synthesize insights and evidence from a wide range of sources. There is much to recommend about these two chapters, especially Garson’s assessments of the relevance and value of prior scholarship. For example, he summarizes and extends Marshall McLuhan’s (pp. 8 – 9) insights thus: ‘‘Finally, he might predict that the public sector would eventually overinvest in e-government dazzled by its bene ts but overlooking its costs, until a reaction set in to reverse direction and restore some degree face-to-face interactions and street-level bureau- cracy.’’ The value of these two chapters for students of e-government lies in the range of literatures that Garson goes to and the skillful manner in which he connects them to the present day realities.
Another notable strength of the book is the careful treatment of the political landscape and its bearing on public sector information technology policy and management. The segment on politics and policy has six different chapters. In the chapter on access Garson (p. 113) notes that ‘‘. . . information inequalities exist on a massive scale, such that public managers in many instances must assume that the full realization of digital governance for their agencies must lie in the inde nite future. . . . public managers who ignore the digital divide in their pursuit of e-government may well wind up widening the divide, making matters worse.’’ This is a timely admonition and very much in line with policy and management problems that crop up due to access divides in other spheres of daily living (e.g., access to courts; access to the heath care system).
Although I have made no secret of my high regard for the book and its author, as a reviewer I am obligated to point out ways in which this very good book can be improved further. A couple of my comments are fairly straightforward. The book, as all good comprehensive textbooks should do, includes several case studies. Many of these are quite good. Nonetheless, the quality of case studies is uneven and some attention to it in a subsequent edition would be helpful. The target audience for the book seems to be American. However, there is enough in this book such that with some suitable modi cations it can be made more relevant to non-US audiences. While I liked the use of four theoretical ‘‘touchstones’’ (namely, systems theory, technological determinism, reinforcement theory, and socio-technical theory), there is room for making more in- depth use of these perspectives throughout the book. Finally, as a public management scholar who perhaps views how management should be presented differently than information management professionals and scholars, I am tempted to suggest that the last segment of the book linking organization theory and behavior with information technology and the very practical management segment need to be combined and reorganized. A combined and reorganized section would do well to pay attention to the burgeoning literature on e-government in the leading peer-reviewed public administration journals. That said, I want to close on a note that reiterates the value of this ne book for academics, practitioners, and anyone with even passing interest in 152 Public Management Review e-governance and I daresay governance. If it is not already on your bookshelf, it should be. Sanjay K. Pandey University of Kansas, USA Thomas A. Birkland Lessons of Disaster: Policy Change after Catastrophic Events Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2006 ISBN 978-1-58901-121-2 After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, we know that the public increasingly expects better public sector leadership before, during, and after catastrophic disasters and extreme events than it has seen in the past. High standards of responsiveness and ubiquitous media coverage compel political leaders and administrative heads to coordinate resources effectively. The massive numbers of public, nonpro t, and private organizations involved in catastrophic disasters require extensive ability to have horizontal, as well as vertical, communication and decision making. Catastrophic disasters are characterized by their unexpected or unusual size, disruptions to the communication and decision making capabilities of the emergency response system itself, and an initial breakdown in coordination and communication.
Therefore, high performance in managing catastrophic disasters requires an ability to assess and adapt capacity rapidly, restore or enhance disrupted or inadequate communications, utilize uncharacteristically exible decision making, and expand coordination and trust of emergency response agencies despite the hurly-burly of the response/recovery efforts. Learning from previous disaster experiences politically and practically is very important.
Lessons of Disasteris a follow-up to the author’s previous book,After Disaster(Birkland 1997), which examined the extent to which disasters as ‘‘focusing events’’ in uence policy agendas within relevant policy domains.Lessons of Disasteris built on the analytical framework developed in his previous work with more emphasis on whether or not sudden events, as focusing events, cause or encourage policy learning. According to the author sudden events include: accidents, natural disasters, and man-made disasters, such as terrorist attacks. The author uses the termfocusing eventswhich was widely used by students of public policy (Birkland 1997; Kingdon 1995). The author emphasizes the importance of interaction between the ‘event,’ the nature of the event, community actors interested in the issue, and the problems caused by disasters. The author explains understanding policy changes as learning from disasters in the policy process. The author points out that catastrophes and extreme events ‘‘are most likely to gain the greatest attention and therefore are the events most likely to trigger policy change (p. 4). Book Reviews 153
