The informatization of regional government: issues and prospects

The acceleration of social processes, while mediated by rapid development and the implementation of information technologies, radically changes familiar social reality, giving birth to more and more new phenomena where a hybridization of social connections meets with info-communication practices. Such centaur-phenomena pose new tasks for sociology – having to do with their study, comprehension and interpretation both in theory and in everyday life practices. Such a process as the electronization of government can be considered one of them, it having been actualized fairly recently as a result of widespread use of info-communication technologies in traditional management sociology practices. This article is dedicated to examining said phenomenon, within the context of studying Russia’s system of government through popular attitudes towards the manner in which our country’s vertical government power structure functions. This study was initiated by IS RAS’ “Sociology and Social Technologies Center” (under the guidance of A.V. Tikhonov), and it currently bears monitoring research project status. This project utilizes a wide array of online and offline methods for collecting and analyzing data. The author’s point of view is presented while considering the development of such a concept as “electronic management” (in the broad and narrow sense of the term), the definition of its role and place in resolving critical regional social issues and in the informational modernization of certain territories. Thoughts on the problematic and prospective outlines of the informatization and electronization of regional management are presented based on the validation of certain indexes. These indexes measure the current situation and the state of development when it comes to electronizing regional management systems, within an online assessment of how regional management systems function in 12 Russian regions. As a result, the prospective outlines for electronically modernizing Russian regional government have been explicated, which brings us to certain conclusions concerning the reproduction of info-social, infrastructural and communicative components, with them being a joint project between business and authorities, offered to the public as some sort of given reality so that the people can sort their everyday life while being removed from actual processes of regional management and socio-cultural modernization in particular.

informatization of regional government, electronic control, electronic government, sociocultural modernization, infosocial modernization of management.

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