Legitimation of E-government initiatives: A study of India’s identity project

Abstract

Legitimation is an important aspect of e-government initiatives due to the complex and diverse issues related to policy and technology implementation which create huge demands for resources. Legitimation is one of the core concepts of Institutional theory. Though institutional theory is gaining importance in IS and e-government research, there are very few studies on the strategies and process of legitimation in e-government implementations. In this paper we use institutional theory and examine the institutionalization of India’s Unique Identification (UID) project. Given the novelty and uniqueness of the UID initiative, we find that the predominant strategy used is that of conformance and proactive manipulation of the environment. The main contribution of the paper is in identifying that different strategies are used for supply side and demand side stakeholders of e-government projects.