مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد عوامل موثر در فساد در دریافت خدمات دولتی – امرالد ۲۰۱۷

For any society, corruption has been regarded as inimical (Foo, Wu and Chin, 2014). Ensuring transparency and accountability in government is important to combat corruption (Krishnan, Teo and Lim, 2013; Oye, 2013) given that corruption has been adversely impacting the growth of developing economies (Singh et al., 2010). Egovernment is one of the ways for facilitating the transition of a developing economy to a developed one (Ciborra, 2005). Therefore, governments have been adopting the information technology (IT) for providing better public services (Ndou, 2004) to ensure greater transparency and public accountability (Zhao and Xu, 2015). Furthermore, egovernment initiatives help in checking corruption, red tape, bureaucratic inefficiency and ineffectiveness, nepotism and cronyism (Cullen, 2009; Fourie, 2010; Garcia-Murillo, 2013; Hasan, 2004; Mistry and Jalal, 2012; Naz et al., 2006; Neupane et al., 2014; Pathak et al., 2009; Singh et al., 2010). In India, e-government initiatives have been initiated in many government departments in order to bring about transparency in public services and build trust of the citizens. In this line, our study seeks to assess the extent to which India’s latest e-government initiative- “Digital India”-has been successful in curbing corruption from the citizens’ perspective. For providing a theoretical base to our study, we use institutional theory which has been amply used in studies focused in the public sector (Currie, 2009). As an Information Systems’ (IS) popular theory to study innovation-adoption-implementation-assimilation dimensions (DeVaujany et al., 2014), this theory has been used in research to appreciate the extent of ICT adoption (Zorn, Flanagin, and Shoham, 2011), social transformation (Barrett, Sahay and Walsham, 2001; Krell, Matook and Rohde, 2016), reforming administration (Walsham and Sahay, 1999), etc. Institutional theory rests on the premise that institutions adopt different practices and mechanisms for gaining legitimacy and acceptability among different stakeholders; however, such practices and mechanisms may or may not attain the desired results (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Scott, 2003). The theory is based on a multi-level and multi-stakeholder analysis where different actors and factors influence the planning and implementation processes of an institutional innovation (Thelen, 1999). For our study, we posit that “Digital India” programme of the Indian government is an “institutional” measure to gain legitimacy and trust of the citizens. To simplify, since “Digital India” is an e-government innovation, we consider deploying institutional theory to assess the extent to which the innovation has been favorably perceived by the users in attaining its principle aim (i.e., checking corruption in public services).