Gil-Garcia, Dawes, Pardo lead issue focused on digital government and public management

The fifth and sixth entries in Volume 20 of the Public Management Review are really summed up in the abstract of the introductory article by the guest editors.

“We argue that their similarities and differences present opportunities for more dialogue between digital government and public management scholars that could produce synergies to enhance the production and dissemination of knowledge, yielding greater influence on practice,” wrote J. Ramon Gil-Garcia, Sharon S. Dawes and Theresa A. Pardo.

Gil-Garcia is the research director for the Center for Technology in Government at the University of Albany (CTG at UAlbany), while Dawes is the former director of the applied research center and Pardo is its current director.

Since CTG at UAlbany was founded in 1993 its members have explored emerging technologies and empowered governments to oversee those innovations, but this is the first time its members have served as editors of an issue of a journal specifically focusing on public management.

“Working on this journal was both a great challenge and a great honor,” said Gil-Garcia. “Our hope is that we will help cultivate new ideas and collaborations among people who may have never thought to work together.”

After a lengthy call for papers, double-blind peer review, and editorial process the May-June special issue is out now in print and available online.

“Here at CTG at UAlbany we are always looking for new ways to reach out, to engage, and this was a wonderful experience and opportunity to do that,” Pardo said. “We encourage anyone with comments, questions or interest in our work to reach out to us through our Twitter and Facebook pages or our website, ctg.ualbany.edu.”

Public Management Review has been published since 1999 and is ranked at an ‘A’ level in the ABDC Journal Quality List.

According to its website, the international journal aims to:

• explore the developing field of public management
• embrace research both about the strategic and operational management of public services and about social/public policy development and implementation
• encourage in particular work which either presents new empirical knowledge about public management and/or developed theory
• encourage questioning both of the legitimacy and hegemony of the ’new public management’ paradigm and its alternatives, and of the developing pluralism in public management which encompasses the governance of inter-sectorial relationships between government, non-profit and for-profit organizations in the provision of public services.