Search results

Many countries today, especially in Europe, provide publicly funded public services in quasi-markets. As these markets commercialize, agencies of various types are providing technologies that support citizens’ choice of services. Citizens’ use of technologies for service provision is studied as e-government under labels of channel management, e-service uptake or adoption. In contrast, by using actor–network theory (ANT), the purpose of this paper is to focus on the marketing devices that are used to enroll citizens to choose technologies in a context with large penetration of quasi-market arrangements.

Based on a Swedish case study, this paper uses qualitative data from 11 occurrences of technologies to support citizens’ choice (“market devices”) in education, healthcare and public pension in an analysis of the means taken (“marketing devices”) to increase their use. The study formulates a tentative typology of these devices.

The marketing devices are intended to attract citizens’ attention to the possibility of choice (e.g. catalogs, postcards and commercials), invite interaction (e.g. various social media platforms), improve the technological support in line with user needs (e.g. user participation in development), increase visibility of technological support (e.g. search optimization) or directly connect citizens to technological support (e.g. via links).

The paper contributes to e-government research through a typology of means taken to increase citizens’ technology use based on selected concepts from ANT, and to a discussion of technologies and humans.

The relationship between the state and the individual is, more than ever before, being mediated by public portals. The requirement specifications for public portals can be said to define the level of expectation among influential actors concerning the roles of the individual in this relationship at a certain point in time. At the same time, they are part of an emergent‐development process. The purpose of this paper is to test this perspective in the empirical context of healthcare.

This research proposes a framework for analysing the requirement specifications for public portals, making various roles possible, such as being a patient, a citizen, a consumer, and a customer. The framework is tested in a case study of a Swedish national healthcare portal.

It can be concluded that prominent actors in this particular context of design defined the requirement specification so that the patient and citizen roles were well supported, whereas the roles of the consumer and customer were supported in a less well‐developed manner. The case study also indicated the importance of reusing already existing functionality to attain quick and tangible results. Consequently, the individual is both enhanced and limited by the “travel of ideas” in the form of the reuse of existing functionality.

This paper puts forward the view that the requirement specifications for public portals are part of the emergent formation of an e‐governance relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of accreditation documents (ADs) in the competition based on provider quality in a quasi-market for primary healthcare.

The paper uses a mixed-method research methodology to analyse two primary healthcare ADs in two Swedish regions. In total, 19 interviews were conducted with actors involved in the creation and use of such documents.

This paper points to the crucial role of ADs in the identification of quality differences that influence the competition in primary healthcare. This finding contrasts with the commonly held laissez-faire idea that competition causes providers to develop their own service concepts and where the invisible hand creates quality differences. The paper adds to the discussion with its detailed description of how ADs create competition among primary healthcare providers through selection processes, quality differentiation, and ranking.

The paper does not explore quality differences in the medical treatment of patients in primary healthcare centres.

The paper provides insights for politicians on how to use ADs to control competition and regulate choice.

The paper takes an innovative approach to the examination of how ADs increase the competition in primary healthcare choice.

One prominent translation of patient‐centred care is public sector consumerism by which patients may influence the services provided by acting like consumers. The focus of this study is the extent to which technological devices in national public healthcare portals in the UK and three Nordic countries transform patients so that they can act as healthcare consumers.

The paper applies a comparative case study methodology.

As national healthcare portals, Norway's technological devices, to some extent, and the devices in the UK and Denmark, to a greater extent, equip patients to act as consumers. At present, Sweden's technological devices are much more limited. In Denmark and the UK, these devices that use quality indicators are in the forefront in the development of national healthcare portals.

A theoretical framework is applied that emphasizes the role of technological devices in the construction of calculating consumers as described by Michel Callon. This perspective, which promotes patient‐centred care, enhances the understanding of fundamental design issues related to the role of technology as the individual forms his/her relationship with healthcare systems.