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This paper aims to present the results of a project deployment on voluntary data exchange between a municipality and commercial entities built on the Commitment-Trust theory. The research also discovers whether data sharing can be a vital instrument to foster city socio-economic development.

Inspired by the engaged scholarship approach, this research explores the economic and operational results of data integration from two different information sources, the legislation impact and the effects on citizens as final beneficiaries. Over a period of 27 months, the authors observed changes the voluntary data sharing brings in traditional interaction between multiple ecosystems. The impact of positive and negative factors was validated via 12 exit interviews with key stakeholders.

Voluntary data sharing is driven by parties’ goodwill to improve public services for residents, the organisations gain tremendously much more benefits than they can do separately on their own. When the parties commit to voluntarily share data, this increases trust in each other and the responsibility of each data contributor. This research proposes that the Commitment-Trust theory is well-replicable for the government-to-business relationship.

This research contributes to the current body of knowledge of voluntary data exchange between different ecosystems, especially between a government and its environment. This paper presents a relevant project deployment from an emerging economy and its consequences for a city municipality, businesses and residents.

Whereas prior research has conceptualized and empirically investigated reinforcement and amplification mechanisms, this paper aims to propose a framework of power that captures the dynamic ways in which different forms of online political action are structured by disparate mechanisms.

The paper derives a theoretical model of power from Foucault and affiliated governmentality studies, which constructs power as the mechanisms and logics that structure the field of possible actions. This model is grounded in research literature on e-democracy and applied in a study of the mechanisms that structure e-democracy.

The paper identifies four mechanisms that balance disparate concerns of e-democracy. Monitoring (M) mechanisms apply logics of security and service to weigh anonymity and publicity against each other. The range of participants is determined by Inclusion/exclusion (I) mechanisms which operate through rules of engagement. Moderation (M) mechanisms balance concerns for heterogenic viewpoints and homogeneity according to a logic of uniformity. Logics of profit-making and shared understanding warrant the balance that Exposure (E) mechanisms strike between information abundance and centralized access. The four mechanisms are combined in the MIME framework.

The MIME framework includes mechanisms that are documented by the English-speaking research community, often with a substantial time lag. Others and potentially forceful mechanisms might not be reported in the research literature.

Practitioners are encouraged to be cognizant of the variety of mechanisms that condition e-democracy; their internal components and external relations of e-democratic practices when designing, building and conducting e-democratic initiatives.

Instead of focusing exclusively on the beneficiaries and the possible payoffs from e-democratic practices, the MIME framework developed in the paper focuses on the mechanisms which structure e-democracy.

The purpose of this paper is to enhance the knowledge about the use of online communication between patients and health-care professionals in public health care. The study explores digital divide gaps and the impacts of online communication on the overall costs of health care.

This study focuses on online health care in Denmark. The authors rely on population data from 3,500 e-visits (e-mail consultations) between patients and general practitioners (GPs) from 2009 to 2015. Additionally, they include survey data on the use of the internet to search for health-related information.

The analysis of the Danish data reveals a rapid uptake in the use of the internet to search for health-related information and a three-fold increase in e-visits from 2009 to 2015. The results show that the digital divide gaps exist also in the online health-care communication. Further, the study findings suggest that enforced supply of online communication between GPs and patients does not alleviate the costs. Rather, the number of visits to GPs has not been decreased significantly and health-care costs showing a marginal increase.

Further data should be collected and analyzed to explore the impacts of other institutional factors and population cohort on the digital divide and healthcare costs. Also, it is difficult to estimate whether the increased use of online health care in the long run lead to lowering overall health-care costs. While the internal validity of the study is high due to the use of population data, the external validity is lower as the study results are based on the data collected in Denmark only.

The study offers important input for practice. First, leaders in government might reconsider how they can control the health-care costs when opening online channels for communication between patients and doctors. Second, concerns about digital divide issues remains, but the study suggests that the uptake of e-visits does not widen the socio-economic, gender or age gaps. For health policy concern, this is encouraging news to lead to an increasing push of online communication.

The dynamics of online health-care communication may lead to mixed results and unexpected impacts on overall health-care costs.

The paper offers new insights in the impacts of mandatory supply of digital services. The Danish push-strategy has led to an enforced supply of e-visits and a rapid growing use of the online health care without widening digital divide but at the risk of potential increasing the overall costs.

The objective of this paper is to investigate how webmasters within government bodies explain quality of websites. Despite the central position for advancing the communication, bridging usability tests and design, there are surprisingly few studies on how webmasters perceive, experience and explain website quality or design issues.

The authors' unit of analysis is webmasters from Norwegian web‐award‐winning organizations. Eight webmasters from four types of websites were interviewed. The websites were purposefully sampled, using the strategy of maximal variation sampling to maximize difference between the four types of websites.

The findings reveal that issues concerning usability are found to be an important dimension of website quality. The authors' analysis of how webmasters explain website quality reveals substantial variance in explanation of website quality. Repeated keywords of website quality are mainly related to user‐friendliness, effective website usage, content‐related issues and accessibility (WAI‐principles).

This study includes webmasters from award‐winning websites. In upcoming research contributions, it would add to the richness of the study if webmasters from non‐award‐winning websites were included. Measurement of website quality and success is widely addressed within the research literature. This paper offers the opportunity to understand how practitioners (i.e. webmasters) facilitate for website quality, grounded in their perception and explanations of which quality aspects they found to be of importance.

The website quality aspects identified in this paper can be used as insights for how to develop and improve the quality of websites with the public sector.

The overall digital enabled transformation of government appears to be guided by a rather heterogeneous set of quality standards. While a variance of quality standards might stimulate innovation in websites, it can also lead to a substantial difference in digital services provided to citizens. Thus, the authors' research stimulates the awareness of diversity of quality parameters and could have as an implication that national and international standards beyond accessibility standards are more explicitly shared and debated.

The aim of this paper is to provide insights into website practitioners' (i.e. webmasters') perception and explanation of quality aspects in websites. Webmasters are important contributors to the quality of available websites, and it is of particular benefit to learn about their suggestions. Most studies tackle perception of website quality from a user's point of view, while the added knowledge in this paper is the webmaster's explanation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships between constructs of information system (IS) success in the public sector, as perceived by webmaster intermediaries, and investigate how user testing affects these relationships.

Online surveys were conducted, using questionnaires, with webmasters in Denmark and Norway who participated in the public sector web award contests organized by the government (n=1,237, n=541; response rate 44 per cent).

It was found that the frequency with which webmasters carry out user testing affects their perceptions of IS success, with those who conduct no user testing displaying the weakest associations among success variables. Findings also suggest that webmasters who do little or no user testing conveniently assume that citizen users are satisfied, while webmasters who are more knowledgeable of the user experience have a greater perception of levels of success.

The fact that the majority of webmasters do not perform any type of user testing triggers a reflection on the need for such important intermediaries to enhance their feedback channels. User involvement in assessing IS success cannot be overlooked, especially considering that user empowerment in the design, implementation, and evaluation of information systems matches a window of opportunity originating in the ongoing growth of web interactivity.

The paper is one of the few that investigates constructs of IS success in the public sector, and arguably the first one that focuses on the impacts of user testing on the relationships between constructs of IS success in a public setting.

The purpose of this paper is two-fold: first, it attempts to determine whether suppliers perceive distributive justice (equity) when their key customers implement sustainable sourcing initiatives based on assessment governance, composed of codes of conduct and auditing; second, it generates insights into specific costs, rewards, and investments and how these together result in perceived equity.

A qualitative research design was adopted for this study. A total of 30 executives from textile manufacturing suppliers in China, India, and Bangladesh were interviewed to determine their perceptions of distributive justice in relation to their key customers’ sustainable sourcing initiatives.

Most of the interviewees perceived that their customers’ assessment of governance initiatives was unfair. Four types of suppliers are identified based on their varying perceptions of the equity equation.

The findings introduce distributive justice as an important mediating variable between assessment-based governance and compliance. They also provide insights into the various types of perceived costs, rewards, and investments related to sustainable sourcing, and how they form varieties of the equity equation. The findings rely on a limited number of respondents and should, therefore, be researched further.

Assessment based on codes of conduct and auditing is the most prevalent sustainable sourcing governance approach, but suppliers may perceive this as an injustice leading to non-compliance. Buying companies are therefore advised to consider supplier perceptions of costs, rewards, and investments and adapt their sustainable sourcing initiatives accordingly.

Increased consideration of distributive justice in sustainable sourcing should increase the likelihood of supplier compliance, improving conditions for employees in global textile plants.

Extant research has studied the connection between assessment-based sustainability governance and compliance or overall performance. This paper contributes by suggesting that distributive justice might be a mediating variable helping to explain this connection.

The concept of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) integrates the environmental and social sustainability dimensions into the management of supply chains. However, the understanding of the management of social sustainability in the supply chain is relatively underdeveloped. This paper, therefore, seeks to explore the adoption, emerging approaches and the (un)intended outcomes of social sustainability in the supply chain as well as supply chain social sustainability in the Arab world.

This paper systematically reviews 396 peer-reviewed papers on social sustainability in the supply chain published between 1997 and 2020.

The review identifies and discusses three types of factors influencing the adoption of social sustainability in the supply chain: drivers, enablers and barriers. The review also identifies four main approaches to tackling social issues in the supply chain, namely an internal approach (e.g. internal adaptation), a hands-off approach (e.g. supplier switching), a hands-on approach (e.g. collaboration practices) and a relational approach (e.g. justice). The review also reveals that although addressing these issues can generate positive outcomes, it can also lead to unintended negative outcomes such as increased social violations and the perception of unfairness among suppliers.

This study complements the existing literature reviews on the social dimension of SSCM by not only providing an update of the current literature and shedding light on an emerging approaches (e.g. justice) to tackling social issues in supply chains but also by exposing the unintended negative consequences of tackling social issues, a subject that has largely been overlooked to date.