Discipline or Interdisciplinary Study Domain? Challenges and Promises in Electronic Government Research

Digital or Electronic Government Research (EGR) finds itself at a crossroads. While the body of electronic-Government-related knowledge is rapidly growing, questions have been raised about whether EGR qualifies as a legitimate discipline, and what the accepted methods and procedures of inquiry should be. This chapter proposes that EGR will be fortunate not to develop into a traditional discipline and not to restrict itself to a narrow set of procedures. Rather, EGR should keep drawing upon multiple disciplines spanning the whole spectrum of hard-pure, hard-applied, soft-pure, and soft-applied sciences. In so doing, EGR might best thrive as a multi-, inter-, or transdiscipline with the prospect of becoming an academic role model for integrative knowing capable of coping with the complexity of problems and phenomena without unduly simplifying them.