Transforming Government: People, Process, and Policy

Abstract

Transforming Government: People, Process, and Policy It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the second issue of the tenth volume of Transforming Government: People, Process, and Policy.Over the years, the constant update of the journal's scope to advocate theoretical as well as empirical research has led to an increase in the quality of submissions and citations.The papers in this issue of TGPPP provide a rich contextual background in the area of public policy and administration, understanding the significance of social media in the public sector, information exchange between networked actors in public administration, transforming government into more collaborative, innovative and open government, e-Rulemaking, government agencies or private sectors organisations converting huge volumes of crime data to useful information, e-Participation and open government reforms.This issue commences with a viewpoint by Adam Okulicz-kozaryn, entitled "Happiness Research for Public Policy and Administration".This viewpoint introduces happiness research for public policy and administration scholars and practitioners.The published literature indicates that happiness can be used as a "yardstick" to support public policy -this is not a new idea -it has already been proposed by Veenhoven (1988) and progresses this perspective.Happiness can be defined as people's evaluations of their lives, which includes "both cognitive judgments of one's life satisfaction in addition to affective evaluations of mood and emotions" (Steel et al., 2008).Happiness is not only a desirable outcome of interest but it also predicts other desirable outcomes of interest: life expectancy, morbidity, productivity, quits, absenteeism, unemployment duration and marriage duration (Clark, 2008).The author argues that this phenomenon has been constantly overlooked; however, that arguably the ultimate outcome of any public policy is happiness.Thus, the purpose is to focuses on what can be useful for the discipline, provides relevant examples and presents the most recent findings and directions for future research.The scientific study of happiness is taking now place for several decades in psychology and economics, other fields such as sociology and management are slowly joining, and recently studies specifically focusing on public policy are being published.Even OECD and UK government have recently joined the debate.Yet, these developments are happening without public policy and administration scholars.Following the above viewpoint, we have a research paper by Marius Johannessen, Øystein Sæbø and Leif Skiftenes Flak, entitled "Social Media as Public Sphere: A Stakeholder Perspective".In this paper, the authors argue that despite realising the significance of the social media phenomenon, it has proven difficult to get people actively participate in the decision-making processes.As citizens are increasingly getting digitised, governments are attempting to boost democratic interest through various e-Participation programmes (Macintosh et al., 2005).Among these many e-Participation programmes, several projects fail to attract large groups of citizens and change the way politicians work (Chadwick, 2008).The latter can be attributed to either due to low interest (Sæbø et al., 2009), lack of purpose and rules for conversation (Hurwitz, 2003) or a lack of citizen participation (Sotirios et al., 2011).In this context, social media is being increasingly used by the public sector -TG 10,2

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