Bridging From e-Government Practice to e-Government Research

This chapter examines the state of the field of e-Government research to assess strategically how scholars may best target future research initiatives. While e-Government research is characterized by a great deal of interaction between practitioners and academic researchers, most research continues to either lack sufficient rigor to produce generalizable results or in search of rigor becomes too abstract to be directly useful to guide practice. Thus, despite the explosive growth in the field, there remain numerous opportunities to develop research projects that can both interest and aid practitioners and generate new theoretical and empirical knowledge. Through two reviews—one of the specialized e-Government literature and the other of general public administration and political science journals—this conceptual chapter identifies a number of research areas in which e-Government scholars and practitioners in the emerging economies may target their efforts.