Public Administration in the Information Society: Essays on Risk and Trust

Risk and trust are interlocking issues, thrown into the social, political and managerial foreground as governments pursue their responses to the development of the information society. Transformations in the ways in which information is gathered, stored, transmitted and shared throughout government and the wider polity raise a variety of concerns across the spectrum of scholarship and public commentary. As the use of ICT becomes virtually ubiquitous, debates about risk and trust have taken on deeper and broader dimensions, in part reflected in the growing interest in risk management, and more recently in trust management, in public administration. Risk and trust must be acknowledged as central concepts in governments’ ambitions to address the information society, therefore. As our societies, polities and economies become increasingly ‘wired’ and information intensive, the collection, management and development of information resources come more and more to the centre of attempts to control and regulate for risk and trust in and by public administrations. Flows of information deriving from new ICT applications pervade public administration and the wider polity, as the chapters in this book show. Indeed we are reaching a point where practising public administrators see remedies for major arterial blockages in the governmental body increasingly to be found in new forms of digital networking, of which the Internet perhaps provides the greatest opportunities. As these potential remedies are identified and implemented so it becomes ever clearer that governmental risk management is at the heart of many of them. Moreover, and as a concomitant of its management of risk, government is also seeking to manage trust, in particular the trust levels of citizens and consumers, not only of its own services, but those of the commercial world. As governments better manage risk so, it is assumed, the trust of citizens in those governments will rise. Risks are omnipresent, both within the government machinery itself and externally to it. Government has a responsibility to deal with both. These risks can be macro in scale, such as the risk of losing public confidence in government, and micro, such as the risk of failure of a new government computer system. This macro/micro scale is a scarcely adequate bifurcation, however, for macro risks can have a myriad of micro consequences and vice versa. Moreover, management of these risks often can be reciprocally related to the management of trust, for to manage risk will contribute to increased trust and to manage trust implies the reduction of risk. Combining risk and trust management, opens up new management perspectives on emergent issues in the information society.