The Adoption of Public Agency Websites and Online Services: On Efficiency, Power, and Legitimacy

This paper examines the organizational motivations underlying the rapid adoption of E-government websites and E-government services. Three strands of organizational theory – 1) contingency theory, 2) resource dependence theory, and 3) institutionalization theory – offer dramatically different accounts of the organizational dynamics that lead municipal governments to create and develop a web presence. The first emphasizes the need to attain technical efficiency within a complex environment, the second emphasizes the importance of internal power relationships, and the third emphasizes an organization’s need to develop legitimacy vis-à-vis peer organizations. We develop hypotheses based on each of these accounts and test them by analyzing the pattern of website adoption among municipal governments using event history analysis. From contingency perspective, we find that the greater the economic complexity in the external environment of the organization, the greater the likelihood of website adoption. Next, from a resource dependence perspective, our results indicate that having a focal department or an actor within a municipal government is positively related to the earlier adoption of websites. Lastly, we report evidence of institutional isomorphic pressure by comparing the early adopters and late adopters. We conclude by discussing how understanding the motivations behind website adoption help illuminate the likely impacts of E-government applications on governance more generally.