Attaining Social Value from Electronic Government

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Michael Grimsley (Sheffield Hallam University, UK) and Anthony Mehan (Open University, UK)

Expectations of electronic government (e-government) go beyond mere customer satisfaction – they encompass a desire for much broader social outcomes, such as social inclusion, community development, well-being and sustainability. Equally, citizens attach value to the entitlements of others, for example, in respect of the quality of health care, threshold standards of education, and access to civil and criminal justice. Attainment of these socio-political and socio-economic goals through e-government depends both upon development of appropriate evaluative measures which meaningfully link service provision to strategic outcomes, and upon systems being designed to generate and sustain high levels of citizen engagement with electronically-mediated access to government and public services.

In this paper we define and elaborate a Social Value framework supporting evaluation and attainment of these broader socio-political and socio-economic goals. The key elements of the framework are the willingness of citizens to (positively) recommend an e-government service to others, based upon personal trust in the service provider, personal experience of the service, and experience of its strategic outcomes. The validity of the framework is explored through an empirical quantitative study of citizens’ experiences of a newly introduced e-government system to allocate public social housing, so-called choice-based letting (CBL). The results of this study include evidence of generic antecedents of trust and willingness to recommend, pointing the way to the general applicability of the framework for designers and managers of electronic government systems.
Keywords: government, social value, public value, recommendation, trust, evaluation.

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