Public Administration in the Information Society

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.