Walter Castelnovo
of customer orientation( O’ Flynn 2007; Bonina & Cordella 2009). This approach led to focus the evaluation of an e‐Government initiative almost exclusively on“ user / customer satisfaction” with the risk of weakening other fundamental citizenship values such as fairness, equity, transparency, accountability, social justice and democratic participation. As remarked by Brewer( 2007, p. 553), the conceptualization of citizen as customer:
highlights the narrowly defined relationship that public service consumers have with government, based as it is on their personal satisfaction with the services they receive. They are driven by individual self‐interest and give little attention to other considerations such as the community interest.
However, it should be observed that government actions usually impact directly neither on particular citizens nor on citizens in a broad sense; rather, government actions are usually intended to impact directly on stakeholder groups and on their interests. Indeed, as customers are key stakeholders for firms, citizens as users / customers of public services are among the key stakeholders for government organizations. Yet, the customer role is just one of the stakeholder roles that should be taken into account when considering the impacts of government actions. Harrison, Pardo, Cresswell, and Cook( 2011, p. 2) argue that“ each government action needs to be treated as potentially presenting value to multiple and diverse stakeholders from both inside and outside the organization.” It follows that“ to be most useful, the analysis of public value must center on particular stakeholder groups and their interests, not the citizen in a broad sense.”
Government activities involve a wide range of stakeholders and the application of stakeholder analysis to government can lead to the identification of a quite long list of possible stakeholders. Of course, this is also true for e‐Government initiatives that are characterized by many stakeholders( see, for instance,( Rowley 2011) for a quite comprehensive list of the stakeholders considered in the e‐Government literature) with multiple value dimensions( Chircu 2008). Although stakeholders should be conceived of as roles rather than directly as individuals and groups, it is important to stress that those roles are invariably played by individuals, i. e. by citizens. From this point of view, the way in which government initiatives impact on citizens playing a stakeholder role could be represented as in Figure 2:
Figure 2: Government initiatives and citizens as stakeholders
Conceiving stakeholders as roles played by citizens determines two relevant consequences. On the one hand it explains why the list of the stakeholders involved in government activities can be so long. Actually, even when they are targeted toward a specific segment of the population, government initiatives impact, at least indirectly, on all the citizens( if only because government activities use public resources); this makes the emergence of conflicts of interests among different stakeholders very likely. On the other hand, it highlights the possibility for an individual to play several different stakeholder roles, either concurrently or in sequence.
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