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The worldwide movement toward digitisation in public service delivery presents a range of opportunities and risks. The potential benefits include improved efficiency, more consistent service delivery decisions and enhanced responsiveness to citizens' demand. The potential risks range from challenges in data use and privacy, to uneven service accessibility and the costly ICT investment required for digitisation. Researchers have begun to assess this important movement and its impacts. There remains a lack of in‐depth understanding of digitisation of public service delivery in developing countries. We aim to address that gap by examining a fully online welfare‐to‐work programme in a developing country, that is Indonesia's Pre‐employment Card Program. Using data collected from semi‐structured interviews with policymakers and service providers, we found evidence that digitalisation contributed to the programme's efficiency and effectiveness via, for example, automated registration processes and quick and revisable rollout. Its implementation however was not without challenges such as a digital divide among users and some technical problems. Indonesia's experiences with this fully digital programme suggest that a developing country, despite limited financial and administrative capacity, can embark on the digitalisation journey to improve their public service provision, even during the time of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities currently face new environmental demands and significant internal complexities that appear to challenge their traditional modes of work and organization--and thus their very identities. In this essay, Mark Considine argues that the prospect of such changes requires us to reflect carefully upon the theoretical and normative underpinnings of universities and to delineate the structures and processes through which they might seek to negotiate their identities. Considine re-theorizes the university as a higher education system composed by distinctions and networks acting through an important class of boundary objects. He moves beyond an environmental analysis, asserting that systems are best theorized as cultural practices based upon actors making and protecting important kinds of distinctions. Thus, the university system must be investigated as a knowledge-based binary for dividing knowledge from other things. This approach, in turn, produces an identity-centering (cultural) model of the system that assumes universities must perform two different acts of distinction to exist: first, they must distinguish themselves from other systems (such as the economy, organized religion, and the labor market), and, second, they must operate successfully in a chosen resource environment. Ultimately, Considine argues that while environmental problems (such as cuts in government grants) may generate periodic crises, threats within identities produce emergencies generating a radical kind of problematic for actor networks.