Leveraging Trust as an Intermediary Construct for Enhancing Public Acceptance of Smart Government Model

The primary aim of this study was to formulate a trust model aimed at augmenting public acceptance of UAE's smart government services. The study identified a total of 31 factors categorized into seven distinct groups or constructs. The model comprises five independent constructs which are Word of Mouth, Knowledge and Experience, IT Quality, Privacy, and Security. Then, Trust as an intermediary construct while Acceptance as a dependent construct. Through a convenience sampling approach, data was collected from 400 respondents via a questionnaire survey. The data collected was utilized to create and refine the model using SmartPLS software. The model underwent thorough analysis, including assessments of convergent reliability and validity, discriminant validity, and hypothesis testing. The study results revealed the significance of all six hypotheses, indicating the noteworthy impact of the five independent constructs on the intermediary construct (Trust), which in turn significantly influences the dependent construct (Acceptance). In terms of its contribution to existing knowledge, this study significantly enriches the literature on citizen-centric models and smart government. Moreover, in practical terms, the findings provide valuable insights for policy makers and smart government officials to strategically optimize approaches, thereby facilitating the expedited and more effective adoption of smart government services.

Trust Model In Online Information Of Smart Government: A Conceptual Framework

Online information has gained significant importance in management and holds great value creation potential for public services. A pressing issue in this regard is how public organization can adapt their traditional structures and processes to the innovative field of online information to create public trust. This study aims to provide a new trust model of online information in smart government system to improve the public trust.The proposed conceptual model for evaluating publics’ acceptance to use online information constructs from Technology Acceptance Model. The proposed model will improve the service delivery of UAE government departments by enhancing the trust of public towards the online information usage

Proceedings of the Vision Zero Summit 2019 12–14 November 2019 Helsinki, Finland

The Vision Zero Summit was held on 12–14 November 2019 in Helsinki Finland, and organized by the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, with the support of our partners. Vision Zero is a strategy and a holistic mindset. It is continuous improvement of safety, health, and wellbeing at work, not just a numerical goal. This summit focused on discussing different aspects of Vision Zero, taking the Vision Zero thinking and actions to the next level, and sharing best practices and lessons learned. One theme of the Summit was worded as Rethinking Vision Zero, which is a reminder that there are many perspectives to Vision Zero. Vision Zero Summit was one of the side events of Finland’s Presidency of the Council of the EU. One of the Vision Zero Summit’s goal was to provide new ideas and perspectives, as well as strengthen participants professional networks. This Proceedings publication is a compilation of the papers presented on 12–14 November 2019 in the Vision Zero Summit 2019 in Helsinki

Eating a nuclear disaster: A vital institutional ethnography of everyday eating in the aftermath of Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster

This project explores the coordination of everyday eating in the aftermath of Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO’s) Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster. With the onset of the nuclear disaster in March 2011, imperceptible radionuclides re-emerged as objects of concern for many people living throughout the archipelago of Japan. Falling over homes, farmlands, forests, waterways and oceans, TEPCO’s radionuclides became unwelcomed actors within Japan’s agrifood assemblage, challenging the governance of food safety in Japan and around the world. To ensure the ‘safety’ of food circulating within its agrifood assemblage, the Japanese government initiated an effort to coordinate the activities of human actors in the turbulence of the radiological overflow. Beginning with the troubling experiences of konran (disorder) shared by forty-three people living and eating in Japan’s Kansai region in 2016, this thesis borrows sensibilities from the field of institutional ethnography to explore how everyday eating is hooked up within textually-mediated ruling relations that have emerged since the onset of TEPCO’s nuclear disaster. At the same time, sensibilities form material semiotics are used to attend to myriad other sociomaterial entanglements people find themselves entwined within in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster, particularly their entanglements with imperceptible radionuclides. I refer to this method of inquiry as a ‘vital institutional ethnography.’ With the goal of producing knowledge that will be of use to my participants in situating their own experiences of konran within greater ruling relations, I follow strings from their experiences into various institutional complexes to both explicate ruling relations and explore the monstrous and ghostly sociomaterial entanglements of humans and more-than-humans they relate with in their everyday lives. Beginning with an exploration of historical cases of industrial ruination and the current case of TEPCO’s nuclear disaster, I discover that ruling texts and discourses are enacted in ways to erase or obfuscate the material presence of industrial pollutants. Through explicating the various ruling relations my participants are embedded and participate within following TEPCO’s nuclear disaster, I argue that the Japanese government’s coordination effort attempts to establish a single, ‘correct’ way for humans to understand and relate with radionuclides possibly present in the food and water they ingest. This ‘single reality’ is born out of what I refer to as the ‘transnational nuclear assemblage’—an assemblage of commissions, governments, committees, scientific associations and many other organizations which produce ruling texts that are designed to manage and contain radiological overflows within a vast and ever-expanding textual complex. In exploring the ruling relations involved in the enactment of ‘safe food,’ I discover that while single-reality-wielding coordination efforts may be efficient for maintaining the pace of commerce and in paving the textual-path forward for military and industrial projects, tensions arise when they enter and interfere with the messy, multiple realities of my locally-situated participants

The Legacies of Vagrancy Law in Contemporary Homelessness Regulation: A Global Historical and Ethnographic Examination of Tokyo, Japan and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

This dissertation illustrates how contemporary policy responses to homelessness in Tokyo, Japan and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia have tapped into historically-entrenched policy ideas and institutions and been shaped by varied experiences with transnational policy networks from the time of each city\u27s mid-19th century integration into the world economy. Using archival and ethnographic methods, I trace links between past and present policies and practices related to homelessness management while underscoring the locally-distinct yet globally-connected nature of policy variations and impacts, including street-level experiences. I take a distinctly broad view of homelessness regulation to consider the criminal justice, welfare, and urban development policies that authorize street-level interventions by government and non-government actors. By focusing on Asian cities of varied developmental statuses, this research contributes to knowledge of—and reckoning with—the legacies of imperial and colonial politico-legal cultures in neoliberal governance beyond Euro-American contexts.This dissertation reveals the locally-situated ways in which homelessness has been (re)constructed across time and space as a problem of social and spatial disorder, ostensibly threatening spiritual and material modernity, defined differently across (post)colonial and (post)imperial contexts. This policy re/construction upholds what I identify as the legacy of vagrancy law: a delegitimization of homelessness across multiple policy fields, rendering it grounds for criminalization, eviction, public assistance disqualification, and political disenfranchisement. In highlighting street-level effects, the dissertation underscores how policy innovations across time, including welfarist approaches, incorporate terms constraining rights and socio-spatial mobility justified under legal frameworks classifying homelessness as an illegitimate and, hence, unprotected state of existence. I argue that truly democratic, humane solutions would require full legalization and public recognition of homelessness as not an aberration but an unexceptional variation in modern distributions of wealth and power

Aspired communities: The communities of long-term recovery after the 3.11 disaster in the town of Yamamoto

I argue in this thesis that we can understand the various ways in which community is ontologized as a tangible, affective and compelling social reality through the analytical lens of the future orientation of collective aspiring. The social and material lives of the residents in the disaster-stricken Tohoku region of northeast Japan were drastically altered after the Great East Japan Earthquake and the tsunami on March 11 in 2011. Based on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork in 2014–2015 in the town of Yamamoto, I seek to understand in this PhD thesis how the local communities were recovering during the still-ongoing reconstruction then. The main objective of this thesis is to offer analytical tools to explore how people come to interpret, experience and feel their social existence as community. I understand community in this research as embodied, materially grounded yet symbolical and discursive by drawing from the practice theory approach. The definition of community has long been debated, romanticized and nostalgized. Instead of as a particular grouping or identity, I analyze community as a process of mutually constitutive enacting and envisioning in social practices. I explore this process in light of the teleological character of human activity that is based on a constant reinterpretation of the past and a striving towards the future in the present. I argue that the various forms of sociality that are interpreted, experienced and felt as community can be understood through the future orientation of a collective aspiring of desired futures as shared objectives. As such, community is not a result but the process of collective aspiring in itself that I have divided into action-oriented pursuing and affectively charged yearning. The ethnographic analysis of collective aspiring illustrates how multiple, ambiguous, overlapping and even conflicting experiences and interpretations of community emerged in post-disaster Yamamoto. My findings elaborate the community concept by highlighting the role of temporality and the future particularly in social life. This suggests that disaster recovery can be perceived as the process of restoring the capability to envision and to enact the future in and of a place, both individually and collectively. I also highlight the sense of agency in social practices, the felt, embodied and social security and the role of spatiality in collective aspiring.Ehdotan tässä tutkimuksessa tulevaisuusorientoitunutta kollektiivista tavoittelua käsitteelliseksi linssiksi, jonka läpi tarkastelemalla voidaan ymmärtää yhteisön ontologisoimista reaaliseksi, tunteisiin vetoavaksi ja jopa pakottavaksi sosiaaliseksi todellisuudeksi. Koillis-Japanin Tohokun alueen asukkaiden sosiaalinen ja materiaalinen todellisuus muuttui 11.3.2011 Suuren Itä-Japanin maanjäristyksen ja tsunamin seurauksena. Tämä väitöskirjatutkimus perustuu kahdeksan kuukauden etnografiseen kenttätyöhön Yamamoton kaupungissa 2014–2015, ja pyrin siinä ymmärtämään paikallisten yhteisöjen toipumista pitkäaikaisen jälleenrakennuksen keskellä. Tavoitteenani on tarjota analyyttisiä työkaluja lisäämään ymmärrystä siitä, miten ihmiset tulkitsevat, kokevat ja tuntevat sosiaaliset suhteensa yhteisönä. Ymmärrän yhteisön fyysisesti ilmentyvänä ja materiaalisena, mutta myös symbolisena ja diskursiivisena soveltaen käytänneteoriaa. Yhteisön käsite on ollut pitkään kiistelty, romantisoitu ja nostalgisoitu. Tietyn ryhmän tai identiteetin määritelmän sijaan analysoin yhteisöä toisiaan molemminpuolisesti luovien toimimisen ja visioimisen prosessina. Tarkastelen tätä prosessia ihmistoiminnan teleologisen luonteen valossa jatkuvana menneisyyden tulkintana ja tulevaisuuteen suuntautumisena nykyhetkessä. Väitän että sosiaalisten suhteiden monien muotojen tulkitsemista, kokemista ja tuntemista yhteisönä voidaan ymmärtää haluttujen tulevaisuuksien kollektiivisen tavoittelun tulevaisuusorientoitumisen kautta. Yhteisö ei ole siis tulos, vaan kollektiivinen tavoittelu itsessään, jonka olen jakanut toimintaorientoituneeseen pyrkimiseen ja tunnelatautuneeseen kaipaamiseen. Etnografinen analyysi kuvaa, miten monia päällekkäisiä ja jopa ristiriitaisia yhteisöjä muotoutui katastrofin jälkeisessä Yamamotossa. Löydökseni tarkentaa yhteisön käsitettä korostamalla ajallisuuden ja erityisesti tulevaisuuden merkitystä sosiaalisessa elämässä. Täten katastrofista toipuminen voidaan nähdä prosessina, jossa yksilöllinen ja kollektiivinen kyky visioida ja toteuttaa paikkasidonnaista tulevaisuutta pyritään palauttamaan. Korostan myös toimijuuden tunnetta sosiaalisissa käytänteissä, turvallisuutta tunnettuna, koettuna ja sosiaalisena sekä spatiaalisuuden roolia kollektiivisessa tavoittelussa

Radioactive Governance: The Politics of Expertise after Fukushima

This dissertation focuses on Japanese public and state responses to the release of radioactive contamination after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. I argue that the Fukushima nuclear disaster has led to the emergence of new forms of expertise in governing radioactive risks. These include techniques of governance that attempt to normalize peoples relationships with nuclear matter as an everyday concern. They also include decentralized strategies that empower victims of the disaster by providing access to technoscientifc practices of radiation monitoring and delegating radiation protection from the state to the citizens. My findings uncover a major shift in how societies have formerly organized responses to radioactive risks. In the aftermath of nuclear accidents, scholars have criticized central authoritarian decisions, in which state management of radioactive hazards was associated with politics of secrecy, victimhood, or public knowledge deficit. At stake in Fukushima is an increased normalization of citizens relationship with residual radioactivity, which is transformed into an everyday concern, rather than being represented as something exceptional. This is not only done by state experts, but equally via the increased activity of citizen scientists that collectively monitor residual radioactivity. My research is a significant departure from traditional sociocultural works that predominantly focus on micro-scale studies, such as how prior sociocultural factors influence a group understanding of radioactive risks. By highlighting major shifts in the structure of expertise and the regulation of life amidst toxic exposure, my research highlights how the management of contamination risks is evolving in an era where the impacts of modernization represent permanent marks on the planet

Getting the Measure of It: Radiation Knowledge Construction in Japan since 2011

Since the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdown in March 2011, in which environments, foods and bodies were contaminated with radioactive isotopes, many devices have made knowledge about radiation. This thesis overlays concepts such as assemblages, qualculations, comparisons, and syncretism to provide a multidimensional, layered way of thinking about scientific knowledge making in contamination emergencies. Based on ethnographic data from Japan gathered between 2018 and 2022, including two periods of fieldwork in Japan in 2018 and 2019, I demonstrate multiple heterogeneous socio-material entities come together to construct radiation knowledge in different places, times and for different purposes. I contend that human and nonhuman actors are active in the process of radiation knowledge creation, performing different roles and functions in the assemblage. I argue these actors influence what else is in assemblages, where and when they operate, and what happens when they come into contact with alternative assemblages operating in the same spaces and times. However, not all actors have equal agency in this. I highlight tensions between knowledge- making communities – the questions they seek to answer, the resources they have access to, and the extent to which they seek to align their practices with others. I also assert that nonhuman actors, such as emergency plans, legislation, standards, thresholds and guidance documents simultaneously stabilise and constrain knowledge making opportunities. Stabilisation and constraint occur across multiple dimensions – spatially (where knowledge is made), temporally (when it is made) and practically (how it is made). As well as contributing to social science debates about the sociality and materiality of collective knowledge making practices in general, my findings are directly relevant to professionals charged with planning for and responding to contamination events. It suggests a new way of thinking about knowledge making in emergencies which acknowledges the multiplicity of knowledge making assemblages, their opportunities and limits in different places and times, and how they operate alongside other knowledges and practices

Demographic Change in Japan and the EU

This volume contains selected papers of the 2008 annual conference of the German Association for Social Science Research on Japan (Vereinigung für sozialwissenschaftliche Japanforschung e.V. – VSJF). The academic meeting has addressed the issue of demographic change in Japan in comparison to the social developments of ageing in Germany and other member states of the European Union. The conference was organized by the Institute for Modern Japanese Studies at Heinrich-Heine-University of Duesseldorf and took place at the Mutter Haus in Kaiserswerth (an ancient part of Duesseldorf). Speakers from Germany, England, Japan and the Netherlands presented their papers in four sessions on the topics “Demographic Trends and Social Analysis”, “Family and Welfare Policies”, “Ageing Society and the Organization of Households” and “Demographic Change and the Economy”. Central to all transnational and national studies on demographic change is the question of how societies can be reconstructed and be made adaptive to these changes in order to survive as solidarity communities. The authors of this volume attend to this question by discussing on recent trends of social and economic restructuring and giving insight into new research developments such as in the area of households and housing, family care work, medical insurance, robot technology or the employment sector