Abstract

Theoretical fragmentation in e-government studies hampers the further development of this field of study. This paper argues that a metatheory can reduce theoretical confusion. Ideas from the philosophy of the social sciences are used to develop a metatheory of e-government consisting of three dimensions: explaining/understanding, holism/individualism and change/maintenance. This metatheory is used to analyze a corpus of papers on e-government in both journals on public administration and information systems. The analysis of the 116 papers shows a bias towards explaining e-government, analyzing holistic systems and studying incremental rather than transformational change. We conclude that the value of the metatheory lies in facilitating debate about e-government between researchers with different perspectives, enabling researchers to be clear about their social science perspective, and developing educational programs that bring in various scientific perspectives.