Albert Meijer

• Utrecht University

We introduce a psychometrically validated scale to measure Digital Transformation Leadership in public organizations. As governments adopt new digital technologies to improve processes and services, understanding how managers effectively lead these transformations is essential. Although research on digital transformation and public sector leadershi...

Within the context of three-dimensional simulations of urban space and their variables within, digital twin technologies (DTs) are touted as making urban governance and planning effective, calculable, evidence-based while reducing costs and complexity. We conducted 3 years of in-depth fieldwork on the application of DTs for urban governance in the...

Purpose Collaborative data innovation (CDI) is the process through which multi-actor collaborations collect and share data for responses to public issues. The aim of this conceptual and empirical paper is to provide a theoretical and empirical understanding of this relatively new phenomenon. Building upon theories of collaborative innovation and da...

A dialogue for the assurance of good digital governance. Development of the instrument ‘From Principles to Actions’ with scenario-based design thinking When governments use digital technologies, public values can come under pressure. This article presents an instrument for governments to identify actions aimed at safeguarding public values concerni...

Current research on data in policy has primarily focused on street-level bureaucrats, neglecting the changes in the work of policy advisors. This research fills this gap by presenting an explorative theoretical understanding of the integration of data, local knowledge and professional expertise in the work of policy advisors. The theoretical perspe...

The influence of austerity measures and neoliberal ideologies has sparked discussions about the relevance and value of academic institutions, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Universities are redirecting academic focus towards greater societal engagement. This book argues that academia has much to gain by moving beyond its instit...

There is increasing debate about the role that public policy research can play in identifying solutions to complex policy challenges. Most studies focus on describing and explaining how governance systems operate. However, some scholars argue that because current institutions are often not up to the task, researchers need to rethink this ‘bystander...

A rich academic understanding of the relation between e-governance and sustainable development is crucial for studying the current ‘twin transition’, i.e. the connection between the digital and sustainability transition. An analysis of current literature highlights that there is a strong emphasis on the question how e-governance can be an instrumen...

Algorithms are rapidly transforming government bureaucracies. The implications of this transformation for the work of public service employees are not yet well understood. So far, the literature has mostly neglected the use of algorithms by these “screen-level bureaucrats”, and this constitutes a major gap in our knowledge about how algorithms affe...

Introduction Governments around the world are struggling to find innovative solutions for complex problems. Key issues are sustainability, the quality of living in cities, and inequalities and tensions between groups of citizens. To address these challenges, new forms of governance are needed which serve to make and implement collectively binding d...

The transition literature argues that governments have an essential role in facilitating societal transitions. The current paper aims to provide a theoretical and empirical understanding of this government role by analyzing the work of entrepreneurial civil servants. These civil servants try to execute transition tasks but are often resisted by the...

Smart city projects rely upon dynamic and complex multi-stakeholder collaboration. This collaboration can be challenging. In this study, we use an instrumental lens and argue that tools can help public professionals in dealing with smart governance challenges. Building upon smart governance and collaborative governance models, we conceptualize smar...

Governments across the world are experimenting with smart city technologies but recent studies suggest that not all citizens support this development. However, a comprehensive understanding of citizen discontent with the smart city is missing. This study systematically reviews academic research addressing citizen discontent with the smart city. Bas...

Over de uitlegbaarheid van algoritmen voor politiemedewerkers en burgers Esther Nieuwenhuizen, Carlos Soares en Albert Meijer Voor de ondersteuning van steeds meer processen maakt de politie gebruik van algoritmen. Dit gebruik van algoritmen is niet alleen een technisch proces: het leidt tot zowel een interne als een externe transformatie. De inter...

From the publisher: "New information and communication technologies have drastically changed public management. Public managers are increasingly dependent on information gathered form complex systems and they need to be able to put in place sound IT and communication structures. This accessible text, aimed specifically at those studying and workin...

In terms of the inclusivity of democracy, both the opportunities and risks of using digital media have been highlighted in the literature. Empirical research into the use of digital media and the inclusivity of citizen participation, however, is limited. More specifically, we have a limited understand of the relation between the ‘richness’ of digit...

Transparency and the efficiency of multi-actor decision-making processes : an empirical analysis of 244 decisions in the European Union Studies into decision-making suggest the existence of a tension between transparent and efficient decision-making. It is assumed that an increase in transparency leads to a decline in the efficiency of decision-mak...

This study focuses on an important yet often neglected topic in public personnel competency studies: competencies required for digital government. It addresses the question: Which competencies do civil servants need for data-driven decision-making (DDDM) in local governments? Empirical data are obtained through a combination of 12 expert interviews...

This Element argues that to understand why transparency “works” in one context, but fails in another, we have to take into account how institutional (macro), organizational (meso) contexts interact with individual behavior (micro). A review of research from each of these perspectives shows that the big promises thought to accompany greater transpar...

The transition literature attributes various transition tasks to government to support socio-technical transitions toward overcoming societal challenges. It is, however, difficult for civil servants to execute these transition tasks, because they partly conflict with Public Administration (PA) traditions that provide legitimacy to their work. This...

Algorithmic decision-making in government has emerged rapidly in recent years, leading to a surge in attention for this topic by scholars from various fields, including public administration. Recent studies provide crucial yet fragmented insights on how the use of algorithms to support or fully automate decisions is transforming government. This ar...

A growing body of literature discusses the impact of machine-learning algorithms on regulatory processes. This paper contributes to the predomi- nantly legal and technological literature by using a sociological-institutional perspective to identify nine organisational challenges for using algorithms in regulatory practice. Firstly, this paper ident...

Recently, we have seen a rising interest in the study of complex systems in public administration. This paper demonstrates how specific design interventions, also referred to as ‘probes’, can be used to investigate complex systems. The value of this strategy is demonstrated by probing three open data ecosystems in the Netherlands. The probes produc...

Social media institutionalization in public administrations has been conceptualized as the final stage of the adoption process. However, an understanding of organizational models for social media institutionalization in public administration is lacking. This exploratory study of Dutch local governments contributes to the literature by identifying h...

The literature on transitions recommends that both the government and the civil service should engage with profound societal problems requiring a fundamental socio-technical system change. We analyzed a corpus of 100 publications to cluster the transition tasks that the transitions literature attributes to government. These tasks are set off agains...

The literature on transitions recommends that both the government and the civil service should engage with profound societal problems requiring a fundamental socio-technical system change. We analyzed a corpus of 100 publications to cluster the transition tasks that the transitions literature attributes to government. These tasks are set off agains...

The current scientific debate on algorithms in the public sector is dominated by a focus on technology rather than organizational patterns. This paper extends our understanding of these patterns by studying the algorithmization of bureaucratic organizations, which is the process in which an organization rearranges its working routines around the us...

This article provides a theoretical understanding of the potential contribution of digital platforms to the co-creation of public value. On the basis of insights from different academic disciplines, a layered model is developed for the relations between technology, governance, users and societal outcomes. The theoretical model proposes that these l...

This chapter develops a theoretical perspective on the path dependency of smart cities. Our perspective will highlight both the physical and social dimensions of path dependency and also reflect on their interrelations. We will present a case study of the city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands to show the value of this perspective on the smart city....

Dossier In this feature authors discuss recent research findings that are of interest to readers of Beleid en Maatschappij.

Public organisations increasingly rely on machine learning algorithms in performing many of their core activities. It is therefore important to consider how algorithms are transforming the public sector. This article aims to clarify this by assessing algorithms from a public value perspective. Based on a discussion of the literature, it is demonstr...

This article focuses on understanding the dynamics of citizen participation in smart city initiatives. The literature identifies citizens as key actors in smart cities, however, our understanding of their roles and influence is underdeveloped. Using modes of urban governance to provide contextual depth, alongside the literature on citizen participa...

Motivated by the classic work of Max Weber, this study develops an ideal type to study the transformation of government bureaucracy in the ‘age of algorithms’. We present the new ideal type – the algocracy – and position this vis-à-vis three other ideal types (machine bureaucracy, professional bureaucracy, infocracy). We show that while the infocra...

Responsible algorithmization: do value sensitivity and transparency lead to more trust in algorithmic decision-making? Algorithms are starting to play an increasingly prominent role in government organizations. The argument is that algorithms can make more objective and efficient decisions than humans. At the same time, recent scandals have highlig...

This ground-breaking collection of essays examines the scope and consequences of digital vigilantism – a phenomenon emerging on a global scale, which sees digital audiences using social platforms to shape social and political life. Longstanding forms of moral scrutiny and justice seeking are disseminated through our contemporary media landscape, an...

Governments around the world are utilizing data and information systems to manage the COVID-19-crisis. To obtain an overview of all these efforts, this global report presents the expert reports of 21 countries regarding the relation between the COVID-19-crisis and the information polity. A comparative analysis of these reports highlights that gover...

The growing expectations to public services and the pervasiveness of wicked problems in times characterized by growing fiscal constraints call for the enhancement of public innovation, and new research suggests that multi-actor collaboration in networks and partnerships is superior to hierarchical and market-based strategies when it comes to spurri...

Studies into decision-making suggest the existence of a tension between transparent and efficient decision-making. It is assumed that an increase in transparency leads to a decline in the efficiency of decision-making processes; however, this assumption has not been tested empirically. This study provides a starting point for investigating the comp...

The positive features of innovation are well known but the dark side of public innovation has received less attention. To fill this gap, this article develops a theoretical understanding of the dark side of public innovation. We explore a diversity of perverse effects on the basis of a literature review and an expert consultation. We indicate that...

Open Data work : understanding Open Data usage from a practice lens During recent years, the amount of data released on platforms by public administrations around the world have exploded. Open government data platforms are aimed at enhancing transparency and participation. Even though the promises of these platforms are high, their full potential h...

Public organizations often face numerous barriers when it comes to adopting and using social media to communicate and engage with the broader public. This research aims to better understand how barriers to social media adoption can be tackled by zooming in on one specific type of organization: the police. Our research answers the following question...

Social and sustainable initiatives generally start small and need to scale to create substantial impact. Our systematic review of 133 articles develops a better understanding of this scaling process. From the literature, we conceptualize impact as the result of two different pathways: ‘scaling out’ (extending geographical space or volume) and ‘scal...

Our exploration of three bodies of literature – public management, accounting and urban governance – shows that three views on these new technological practices of ‘urban auditing’ are present in the literature: a technocratic, a critical and an emergent view. We use these three views to introduce the six papers in this special issue. We conclude...

There is increasing debate about the role that public policy research can play in identifying solutions to complex policy challenges. Most studies focus on describing and explaining how governance systems operate. However, some scholars argue that because current institutions are often not up to the task, researchers need to rethink this 'bystander...

This article contributes to the growing body of literature within public management on open government data by taking a political perspective. We argue that open government data are a strategic resource of organizations and therefore organizations are not likely to share it. We develop an analytical framework for studying the politics of open gover...

Introduction to the special issue ‘Local and regional governance in the digital society’ The technological dynamic has a major impact on all kinds of markets, but what does this dynamic mean for local and regional government? This special issue presents five articles about local and regional governance in the information society. The editors of thi...

Principles for good local governance in the digital society. A step towards a normative framework This article presents a normative framework for good local governance in the digital society. We build on the five principles of Frank Hendriks (laid down in an article in Urban Affairs Review in 2014): participation, effectiveness, learning ability, p...

This paper presents a systematic review of the literature on smart governance, defined as technology-enabled collaboration between citizens and local governments to advance sustainable development. The lack of empirical evidence on the positive outcomes of smart cities/smart governance motivated us to conduct this study. Our findings show that empi...

Living labs have become a promising methodology for public administration research to design and study public innovations. Surprisingly, public administration research has paid scant attention to living labs to date. An obvious obstacle to the application of a living lab approach in public administration is unclarities about the value, validity and...

This paper develops a theoretical understanding of the management of value conflicts in public innovation. Drawing from the literatures on public values and on public innovation, various strategic approaches to managing conflict are discussed, conceptualized, and applied to two cases. The paper identifies three basic approaches for dealing with val...

This theoretical viewpoint paper presents a new perspective on urban governance in an information age. Smart city governance is not only about technology but also about re-organizing collaboration between a variety of actors. The introduction of new tools for open collaboration in the public domain is rapidly changing the way collaborative action i...

Social media is being used by a large part of local administrations. As a highly disruptive adopted innovation, it is important to understand the process of institutionalization through empirical variables. This paper studies the Dutch case to analyze to what extent social media technologies have being institutionalized within major city councils i...

Public administration research in a knowledge society: An argument for transdisciplinary and plural science This article presents the research program into governance in a knowledge society of professor Albert Meijer and colleagues at Utrecht University. The knowledge society is a society in which (1) citizens are higher educated that ever before a...

Open government data are claimed to contribute to transparency, citizen participation, collaboration, economic and public service development. From an innovation perspective, we explore the current gap between the promise and practice of open government data. Based on Strategic Niche Management (SNM), we identify different phases in the open data i...

This literature review illuminates the conceptualization of predictive policing, and also its potential and realized benefits and drawbacks. The review shows a discrepancy between the considerable attention for potential benefits and drawbacks of predictive policing in the literature, and the empirical evidence that is available. The empirical evid...

The complex and technological nature of the introduction of these issues calls for new approaches to citizen engagement and we propose that design may play a role. Design provides highly concrete research tools that can help to define and better understand the root causes of problems (Mulgan 2014). In addition, designers offer various means to stim...

Citizen-generated open data is the data that individuals consciously generate and that are openly available for use in the public domain. The promise of citizen-generated data is that it generates a basis for public governance. We conducted an explorative comparative case study research of 25 cases in different countries to enhance our understandin...

HASHTAG POLICE: How police officers deal with value conflicts caused by social media Social media changes society and causes new dilemmas in local government. Little is known about the nature of these conflicts and the way government organizations deal with them. Therefore the authors of this article have carried out empirical research into the man...

Big data promises to transform public decision-making for the better by making it more responsive to actual needs and policy effects. However, much recent work on big data in public decision-making assumes a rational view of decision-making, which has been much criticized in the public administration debate. In this paper, we apply this view, and a...

Transparency and responsiveness are core values of democratic governments, yet do Freedom of Information Laws - one of the legal basis for such values - actually help to increase these values? This paper reports a replication of a field experiment testing for the responsiveness of public authorities by Worthy et al (2016) in the United Kingdom. We...

Governments around the world are pressed to develop innovative solutions for the wicked problems they are facing. To develop these solutions, the public innovation capacity—defined as the capacity to develop and realize new ideas for societal problems—is of crucial importance. This article builds a model of the public innovation capacity on the bas...

In the study of public administration, e-government has been the focus of significant studies, and this number has been growing in recent years. This introduction to the virtual special issue of JPART on e-government highlights key contributions of selected JPART articles to the knowledge about information and technologies in government. In that se...

This panel discussion will present the views of editors of digital government journals regarding the process, outcome, and impact of journal publication. Fundamental questions about topics, types of research methods, what makes a journal article good, interesting to readers, related to practitioners and capable of impacting government policy are ad...

Human-driven changes on this planet have been giving rise to global warming, social instability, civil wars, and acts of terrorism. The existing system of global governance is not equipped to effectively address these enormous challenges. It is slow where one must move quickly, favors bureaucracy and politics over authentic deliberations and effect...

This is an appendix to the article "United People: designing a new model of global governance", available here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324983643_United_People_Designing_a_New_Model_of_Global_Governance This appendix provides background information on the principles informing the UP model, creating councils within this model, get...

During recent years, the amount of data released on platforms by public administrations around the world have exploded. Open government data platforms are aimed at enhancing transparency and participation. Even though the promises of these platforms are high, their full potential has not yet been reached. Scholars have identified technical and qual...

The use of social media produces new value conflicts in public governance. The police force is a public organization directly confronted with these changes. However, there is no systematic understanding of these conflicts in daily police practice or of the coping strategies used. This article presents an explorative understanding of the value confl...

Smart cities are presented as both inevitable and benign futures: the technological development is unstoppable and will bring us wealthier, safer and more sustainable cities. Putting technology to use, however, is never entirely a matter of engineering but of strategic, political and value-laden choices. This article combines the literature on tech...

The rapid deployment of technology in urban settings drastically changes the way urban safety is being governed. This article investigates smart governance of urban safety empirically through an in-depth case study of a project to improve the safety of a street in the Dutch city of Eindhoven. This collaboration between the city government, technolo...

Developments in open data have prompted a range of proposals and innovations in the domain of governance and public administration. Within the democratic tradition, transparency is seen as a fundamental element of democratic governance. While the use of open government data has the potential to enhance transparency and trust in government, realisin...

In this paper we present innovative solutions to the problem of transparency in Public Administrations (PAs) by opening up public data and services so that citizens participation is facilitated and encouraged with a Social Platform and a personalized user-friendly Transparency-Enhancing Toolset.

Governments around the world make their data available through platforms but, disappointingly, the use of this data is lagging behind. This problem has been recognized in the literature and to facilitate use of open datasets, scholars have focused on identifying general user requirements for open data platform design. This approach however fails to...

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the literature on the types, effects, conditions and user of Open Government Data (OGD). The review analyses 101 academic studies about OGD which discuss at least one of the four factors of OGD utilization: the different types of utilization, the effects of utilization, the key conditions, and the dif...

Open data platforms are hoped to foster democratic processes, yet recent empirical research shows that so far they have failed to do so. We argue that current open data platforms do not take into account the complexity of democratic processes which results in overly simplistic approaches to open data platform design. Democratic processes are multif...

The attention for Smart governance, a key aspect of Smart cities, is growing, but our conceptual understanding of it is still limited. This article fills this gap in our understanding by exploring the concept of Smart governance both theoretically and empirically and developing a research model of Smart governance. On the basis of a systematic revi...

There are three issues that are crucial to advancing our academic understanding of smart cities: (1) contextual conditions, (2) governance models, and (3) the assessment of public value. A brief review of recent literature and the analysis of the included papers provide support for the assumption that cities cannot simply copy good practices but mu...

Participant or data source? Citizens as extension of urban innovative capacity In the private sector, user innovation is used to develop innovations that better fit the needs of customers. In the public sector, interest for citizen innovation is also on the rise and new information and communication technologies seem to offer a great potential for...