Abstract
This article presents an explorative case study to understand the drivers and barriers that influence the adoption of smartphone-based city management apps as e-governance tools in U.S. cities. Using interviews with government officials and citizen focus groups in a southeastern city, we systematically examine the facilitators and barriers from the perspectives of the government and citizens. Our findings suggest that the city management app system was primarily adopted by the government to improve service efficiency through information integration and workflow automation on the backend. It is viewed by both the government and citizens as an innovative two-way communication tool that encourages citizens to report service problems and facilitates service improvement. However, the app’s potential of being an open dialogic and social space to engage citizens in a full range of co-production activities has not yet been sufficiently realized. Strategies for local governments and city management app developers to address e-governance challenges are discussed.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 563-585 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | Journal of Urban Affairs |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2019 Urban Affairs Association.
Funding
This work was partially supported by the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) Award #1640587 (PI: Arghandeh) and the Florida State University’s First Year Assistant Professor grant. Jinghui (Jove) Hou and Daniel L. Fay contributed to this work equally. The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a previous version of this article. The authors also thank Yun Chen for her research assistance.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| U.S. Department of Energy Chinese Academy of Sciences Guangzhou Municipal Science and Technology Project Oak Ridge National Laboratory Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment National Science Foundation National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center National Natural Science Foundation of China | 1640587 |
| U.S. Department of Energy Chinese Academy of Sciences Guangzhou Municipal Science and Technology Project Oak Ridge National Laboratory Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment National Science Foundation National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center National Natural Science Foundation of China | |
| Florida AandM University and Florida State University |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Geography, Planning and Development
- Sociology and Political Science
- Urban Studies
