The first time I met the Chinese translation version of this book "Building the Virtual State: Information Technology and Institutional Change" was one year ago at the "Feng Ru Song" Bookstore, which is a famous academic bookstore at the south gate of Peking University. But I knew of it earlier in many research papers, where this book is remarked as a "seminal work" in the field of the institutional research on digital government. Although I got a Chinese translation, which is a nice version published by China Renmin University press, I do hope to read the original English version. When I came to UMass, I have the opportunity to read it carefully. It is really a wonderful work. Besides the attractiveness of its academic rhetoric, I am also entranced with its deeply thoughts and innovative foresights.

Some creative ideas are as following:

1. The rhetoric of "post-bureaucracy" notsithstanding, this administrative machinery, and the career public servants within it, continues to be an essential intermediary between elected officials and society. It transforms the often vague and ambiguous decisions and judgments of the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary into operational and organizational rules and programs. Its attributes and vitality are more than ever of crucial concern to government and, ultimately, to citizens. In an industrialized society and economy, the state is central to contemporary political life.

2.One of the central tasks of public administration and management  is the design and maintenance of effective organization as well as coordination, function, and process flows in more or less systematic channels through which move information, activity, production and decision-making. .....Coordination is achieved through hierarchy, formalization, and socialization. 

3.on the one hand, improved communication and shared information could vastly increase the importance of mutual adjustment. On the other hand, if rigid rules were programmed into information systems, mutual adjustment would lose force as a source of coordination.

4. Lindblom:"The behavior of each participant (including each citizen) in the governmental process is greatly controlled by conventions [rules] about ends and means that have the effect of prescribing behavior conditionally or absolutely.

5.Socialization, as a form of standardization, provides stability and uncertainty reduction, forms of rationalization that are essential in bureaucracy. ....For our purposes, it is clear that the socialization of individuals means that new information technologies and their use in government will be perceived through standard lenses that will in many cases bias innovation in unanticipated ways to conform to existing structural and political arrangements.

（to be continued)

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