Public administration in digital society
My research interest is to understand what happens with public administration and governance in the digital society. I want to understand how the technological society in democracy evolves by studying the effects of digitalization in the public sector. I want to understand whether and how public administration transforms when public servants and citizens use complex technical information and tools to access, manage and implement public services. I am also interested in how 'technology' is conceptualized in political science research on digital society and how the concept is used to analyze the progress of reform in public administration.
Automated Decision Making in Social Services
My current research addresses institutional, organizational and professional tensions that accompany introduction of robotic process automation (RPA) in the Swedish income support services and administratio. Scandinavian welfare services are undergoing advanced digitalization in a context rife with diversified client needs and demands. Automation models are sought and implemented in Swedish public administration. In Income support services, the Trelleborg model (currently disseminated in 14 municipalities), made possible a shift of time and personnel resources to coaching the clients. In Kungsbacka municipality, 12 out of 16 social workers have resigned in protest, questioning that robots could make individual assessments of their clients’ needs, the shift to a labor market perspective from social care, the fear for losing the professional identity and the lack of dialog. These outcomes show that one single model of automation is no solution for all. The aim of this study is to uncover tensions and effects of RPA in social services upon organization of work, provision of services and interaction among professions. Three research questions are proposed: 1. How implementation of RPA transforms organization of work, provision of services and professions in Income support. 2. What policy and practice implications do the results show? 3. How can theory explain RPA processes in in Income support? The research is financed by FORTE programme for applied welfare studies.
Stakeholder Involvement and Citizen-centric Public e-Services: An international collaboration for knowledge exchange
Digitalization of public services entails various challenges of adoption and use by the stakeholders. How governments address these challenges affects citizen trust. Estonia, Sweden, Ukraine and Belarus governments shared the challenge on how to sustain trust and legitimacy when certain e-services are more used than others, or some regions are front runners, while others lag. Stakeholder involvement and citizen-centric public e-services are critical. We aim to cooperate with researchers, practitioners and stakeholders for sharing knowledge on citizen-centric digitalisation of public services for increased trust and legitimacy. We set up for 2 minipilots to map the problem in the different contexts, to engage stakeholders through minipilots, workshops and feedback discussions. These will result in setting up of a work structure and partnership for two new R&D project applications. The outcomes shall serve as an incremental, bottom-up process for reforming public services. The project is financed by Swedish institute.
