This thesis is an examination of how digital automation of administrative work unfolds in practice. It sets out to understand how administrative work changes as it is digitally automated and how such changes have wider consequences beyond the performance of specific work tasks. A case study design is used, focusing on digital automation through Robotic Process Automation (RPA) at a Swedish municipality, and the methods to produce data include interviews, observations, and document analysis. The thesis contributes to the body of literature that understands work as practices performed by diverse configurations of social and material elements, a body of literature that spans the fields of organization studies and information systems research. It comprises five papers:Paper I builds a foundation for the thesis by examining the automation process and conceptualizing it as configuring work. This is a dynamic process of mutual reconfiguration of work practice, digital technology, and organizational arrangements through which a new agentive configuration of work is approached. Paper II explores the ways in which a new dichotomy of human and digital coworkers emerges and the role of social responsibility and context for work as a new division of labor emerges. Paper III takes a broader look at the effects of digital technology on the organizing of work and proposes the conceptualization of hyper-taylorization as a way of understanding how the rationale of digital automation technology comes to enhance Taylorism in terms of making work digitally legible, predictable, and controllable. Paper IV shifts the focus again to the ethics of digital automation, utilizing an example from the case study to explore ethical and managerial implications when digitally automating. Paper V is a conceptual paper that aims to conceptualize the thesis's core theoretical contribution, which is to understand digital automation of administrative work as not just a change in how work is performed but a change regarding how knowledge about work is created and the conditions of knowledge creation. Within this framework, “work” is understood as performing an epistemic machineryrelated to the materiality of the configuration that performs work. Thus, The paper concludes that digital automation, at least in technological history, implies an epistemological shift of administrative work towards a more strictly rationalistic way of understanding the world at the expense of a pluralistic set of ways of creating knowledge and understanding the world.The thesis concludes by discussing the implications of this shift and how the political terrain of administrative work comes to be abandoned as it is digitally automated.
The digitalisation of public services involves not only the transformation of the relationship between public service providers and clients, but also the transformation of public administration work. While most studies of digitalisation of the public sector have focused on the practical outcomes for the quality of public services and the quality of public administration work, none have unpacked , or theorised, how these changes actually come about in practice. This paper fills this gap by drawing on a study of the in-house adaptation of a digital automation tool (an RPA) by a Swedish local authority. In the article, we pay attention to what we, inspired by Donna Haraway and Lucy Suchman, call ‘configuring work’, i.e. the weaving together of the affordances of the technology, materials, discourses, roles and power structures. The contribution of the paper is two-fold. First, the paper demonstrates empirically how the digitalisation of a public service took place through an emergent, relational process that involved both the social and the material. Second, by adopting the the idea of ‘configuring work’ and paying attention to the effects of this, we show that the digitalisation process was successively shaped by the particular vested interests, ethics, discourses and the algorithmic materialities that comprised it. This helps us discuss the reason for why, in extant literature, digitalisation threatens the professional autonomy of the public administrators as well as why it may reduce service quality. Finally, we suggest how some of these issues may be addressed in future research.
This chapter makes the case for a processual approach to understanding ethical change leadership in order to develop a more fine-grained understanding of how leadership matters. It starts with a vignette taken from current empirical studies on digitalization, leadership, and organizing. This vignette is utilthere isized as an illustration of the theoretical argument made. The argument is presented in three steps. First, the vignette is reread and some critical questions as posed. Second, it delves deeper into the perspective that leadership may be understood as a process, and what this means for understanding leadership for change. Third, a processual conceptualization of ethics that is not centered on individuals, but focused on what is produced, re-produced, and not-produced in the doing of leadership for organizational change, is presented. This leads to the introduction of the concept of care, and propose the idea of care-ful co-directing change.
Export Date: 26 April 2023; Book Chapter
Workplace technologies today not only support work but also perform it. Whereas the general debate often focuses on quantitative effect in terms of possible jobs lost, what is still largely missing is how workplace technologies impact the quality of employee’s work-life, in particular for office and administrative work. By mobilizing the literature conceptualizing work as accomplished in digital/human configurations, in this article we aim at unpacking how introducing digital automation technologies may lead to repositioning the human worker at work. We study the very start of introducing an RPA in a Swedish municipality with an ethnographic sensibility. Building on close readings of three episodes, we discuss how such the human/digital emergent configuration produced a re-distribution of categories of tasks and responsibilities and, consequently, a dichotomous distinction between human and digital co-workers. This means also a changing fabric of relationships supporting work, which could be characterized in terms of asymmetrical co-workership.
Version submitted to publication and in review, submitted for being part of compelation thesis
This paper aims to develop a conceptual understanding of the epistemic effects on work of digital automation. It does so by developing a performative understanding of an epistemic machinery, a material-discursive configuration which enacts epistemic and ontological boundaries in work. It goes on to conceptualize how the materiality of digital automation, mainly in the form of algorithmic representation, comes to prefigure certain epistemological and ontological boundaries. It then discusses the second order effects of this reconfigured epistemic machinery that is displacement of professional values and the political implications of that. It contributes to organizational theory by providing a conceptualization of how digital technology can change knowledge in work. It also contributes to discussions about the political implications of digital automation and use of algorithmic technologies in organizations.