ONLINE SERVICE PROVISION: ARE MUNICIPALITIES REALLY INNOVATIVE? THE CASE OF LARGER MUNICIPALITIES IN ITALY

The employment of information and communication technologies for the delivery of information and services has been considered a major objective of the modernization agenda of municipalities. This article contributes to the advances in the e‐government literature by assessing the current status of ICT adoption among larger Italian municipalities and investigating whether the municipalities at a more mature stage of e‐government adoption share any distinctive characteristics. The results show that some organizational factors, rather than environmental ones, show a positive association. However, the analysis also shows that most of the Italian municipalities involved have undertaken a non‐linear e‐government adoption process, which currently results in low diffusion of more mature stages of ICT adoption for the delivery of services to citizens and businesses.     

NETWORKING LITERATURE ABOUT DETERMINANTS OF NETWORK EFFECTIVENESS

Since the early 1990s, public networks have been implemented in many countries to solve ‘wicked’ public problems, addressing such issues as health, social care, local development and education. While considerable research has been carried out into public networks, both managers and scholars are left with some doubts about network effectiveness. In fact literature on this topic has been highly fragmented, comprising a plurality of definitions, multiple theories, multiple methods and multiple explanations. This paper aims to review and classify previous theoretical and evidence‐based studies on network effectiveness and its determinants. Our aim is to rearrange existing literature into a unitary framework in order to shed light on both hitherto unfilled gaps and established theoretical cornerstones.     

Inclusive Legal Positivism,Legal Interpretation,and Value‐Judgments

In this paper I put forward some arguments in defence of inclusive legal positivism. The general thesis that I defend is that inclusive positivism represents a more fruitful and interesting research program than that proposed by exclusive positivism. I introduce two arguments connected with legal interpretation in favour of my thesis. However, my opinion is that inclusive positivism does not sufficiently succeed in estranging itself from the more traditional legal positivist conceptions. This is the case, for instance, with regard to the value‐freedom principle, which is commonly accepted by inclusive positivist scholars. In contrast with this approach, I try to show, in the concluding section, how a constructivistic version of inclusive positivism could legitimately acknowledge the presence of value‐judgments in the cognitive activities of jurists and legal theorists.