Exploring The Efforts Of The Greek State To Implement ICT Programmes: An Alternative Interpretation

Drawing from literature on the national responses to the information society, the paper builds on existing research on government intervention in response to ICT, in particular with reference to the continuing, if not always successful, efforts of the Greek state to implement ICT innovations. Appropriating Foucault’s notions of rationalities of government, regimes of truth and knowledge, the paper critically investigates the discourses invested in the Programme at the point of origin, in the negotiating table between the European Commission and the Greek central government policy-makers. The paper goes on to argue that the problems encountered during implementation can be analytically understood as the external manifestation of the clash between the dominant discourses and visions about the role of technology in European integration inscribed in the Programme, and a range of alternative forms of thinking and acting by a wide range of local actors in various implementation sites. These alternative interpretations, which show themselves in a range of subversive practices, uphold the supremacy of national contextual differences, and indirectly, but very effectively, challenge the rationale by which the plans for ICT innovation at the national and supranational level were constituted.