Imbrications of institutional logics: the case of an e-government initiative in Greece

This paper examines critically whether e-government initiatives can be conceived of as representing a shift from a bureaucratic to a citizen-centric institutional logic. We draw upon a longitudinal study of a Greek e-government initiative that introduced one-stop shops for the delivery of government services. Based on institutional theory, we provide a framework that illustrates the domains of institutional change that accompany e-government projects and show how such institutional change can be understood as complex imbrications of contrasting institutional logics rather than one institutional logic displacing another. We argue that imbricated logics may have many unintended consequences which are not simply the outcome of either of the logics but are emergent from the imbrication