Reshaping eGovernment through institutional agents

The eGovernment stage is being populated by a cast of intermediary actors from both the private and the not-for-profit sectors, as a result of the multichannel strategies with which many countries are seeking to give new impulse to their eGovernment plans. This paper claims that a fuller understanding of these players' role is crucial in developing socially-aware eGovernment policies and suggests the usefulness of adopting an institutional perspective to place the intermediaries in an adequate frame of reference. In particular, it suggests that it might be fruitful to slot the intermediaries into the "institutional agent" category. Some implications ensuing from this study are proposed and discussed.