Mid Sweden University

Purpose: This paper aims to explore whether the key drivers identified in digitalization policies are being prioritized by practitioners in health and social care and to what degree the goals of the policies are being enacted. Design/methodology/approach: The investigation comprised two stages. First, the key drivers of digitalization in the national policies were identified. Second, a survey was disseminated to practitioners within health and social care, asking them to indicate their stance on each key driver (using Likert scales). Findings: The findings of this paper are twofold. First, they demonstrate that practitioners more readily enact the key drivers centered around their everyday operations, such as improving services and care and increasing efficiency. Second, it shows that key drivers of a more rhetorical nature, such as “becoming the best,” do not yield benefits for practitioners. Practical implications: This paper shows that for policies to have an effect in practice and to contribute to change, they should be rooted in key drivers centered around practitioners’ everyday operations, promoting specificity over abstraction. Originality/value: While previous studies have involved policy analysis, few studies investigate the enactment of policies, how they are implemented and whether they contribute to changes in practice. 

The terminology associated with the use of information and communication technologies in the public sector has shifted over time, from information technology to digitalization. This change raises the question of whether corresponding shifts in government practices have accompanied it. To investigate this issue, we use topic modeling to analyze a corpus of IT- and digitalization strategies from Swedish local governments, produced over three decades. Our analysis reveals salient topics covered in these strategies and classifies them, displaying patterns of both continuity and change. Some of these patterns reflect dominant discourses about technological governance and the provision of digital services based on citizens’ needs, but there is also a notable absence of content related to democracy and participatory practices. Taken together, our study contributes empirically with an evolutionary perspective on digital government strategies and methodologically with the adoption of computational methods for this purpose.

This paper delves into the complex landscape of digital government (or e-Government) research, exploring the concept of public value. Drawing from extensive literature from public administration, particularly the works of Moore, Beck Jørgensen and Bozeman, and Rose et al., the study investigates the relationship between public value ideals, using structural equation modelling (SEM). Utilizing data from both citizens and public servants in a Swedish municipality, two models are constructed, reflecting the multifaceted nature of public values in practice. The findings highlight a disconnect between the perceived values of citizens and of public servants. While citizens prioritize efficiency and service as values to be created, public servants emphasize internal values of support for the public organization, referred to as an “institutional approach”. This study contributes to the ongoing debate on public value(s) in digital government by illustrating the importance of contextual viewpoints and question the role of service provision in relation to public values. It emphasizes the need to balance generative and institutional perspectives and advocates for further research to explore the shift from “serving” to “service” in the public sector ecosystem. Through these insights, this research is intended to inform more effective strategies for digital government and public sector management in contemporary societies. 

The importance of digitalization is increasingly recognised in academia, practice, and social life as a whole. In discussions of digitalization, the terms “transformative” or “transformation” are used to highlight the future ideal future as a result from intensified use of computers and digitalized technology. In the pursuit of this desired future, the notion of modern comes to mind, with Latour’s statement that how modern and non-modern are a demarcation of time: when something is modern, it is of a different time. Thus, in order to study digitalization with an emphasis on the larger, transformative scale and considering different interests, this thesis provides an exposé the phenomenon of digitalization’s wider ramifications using theories of modernity. Whilst modernity theories have been extensively used in sociology, they have rarely been applied in information systems or e-Government research. To operationalise modernity theories, first and second (reflexive) modernity are used. The thesis is based on three research papers on the Swedish public-sector context, focusing on digitalization and regional development (Paper I), municipal policies (Paper II), and local municipal employees’ translations of their digitalization policy (Paper III). In order to aid me in looking into digitalization I drew on previous research from fields such as philosophy of technology and science and technology studies, which have long studied technology in relation to society. The analysis revealed two distinct ideas. The first is that of digitalization as an efficient juggernaut, a large runaway engine going full throttle towards its desired destination: a digitalized society that utilises all of the benefits digitalization provides. Second, Latour’s notion, described in We Have Never Been Modern, of the public sector as stuck reproducing 19th century values of industrialisation, when closer inspection reveals that these 19th century values of efficiency, control, and rationality are not equipped to handle second modernity issues such as democracy and participation. The contribution of this thesis is twofold: i) a theoretical contribution, using modernity as a theoretical lens in order to understand digitalization and society; and ii) a methodological contribution, operationalising the discursive landscape of digitalization, using different levels of analysis to aggregate the findings to a higher abstraction level. Suggestions for future research include consideration of the problems regarding democracy and participation, which were the core of Scandinavian information systems research during the latter half of the 20th century. I advocate for revisiting these ideas and taking inspiration from both critical information systems and participatory design in Scandinavia.

Public-sector digitalization has gained traction over the years, and with it has come a flood of official documents (policies and grey literature) highlighting what the (digital) future is supposed to look like and proposing a range of digital solutions to inspire action. Such policies and strategic documents propose what will be important in future societies. In this paper, we employ the policy-analysis framework, ‘what’s the problem represented to be’ (WPR), first developed by Bacchi. We conducted a workshop with a Swedish municipality, inviting key actors to work with the idea of digitalization to re-read their digitalization policy in light of the WPR framework. The purpose of this paper is to investigate what surfaced when the policymakers and public servants used WPR to dissect their own digitalization policy. The results show that the key actors’ reflections centred around the value of the policy itself, and the WPR framework seemed to enhance their ability to reflect upon the usability of the policy and the work needed to implement and evaluate it. Furthermore, they pinpointed that the digitalization policy appeared rather naïve in terms of contextual factors (lack of recontextualisation on the municipal level) and hindrances (lack of resources to tackle existing hindrances). 

In this paper we explore the evolution of the use of digital technology in the public sector. We do so by analyzing a corpus of IT- and digitalization strategies from Swedish local governments, produced from two time periods, using topic modeling. Our analysis reveals salient topics covered in these two sets of strategies and classifies them into three types: topics that persist across the two periods, topics that are unique to each period, and topics that evolved in content. We suggest that local government strategies became more general and optimistic in terms of the technologies’ new opportunities, specific in terms of management practices, and increasingly blurry in terms of organizational and material boundaries. We also provide evidence of digitalization strategies becoming more homogenous in their covered topics than their IT counterparts. By doing so, we contribute to research devoted to analyzing the discursive landscape of digital government by investigating the official content found in these strategies. Thus, we contribute to research devoted to studying policy in order to historically situate contemporary use of digital technologies and its evolution. We conclude the paper with important implications for practice.

Though ‘digitalization’ has become a buzzword and policy objective in public-sector development, the struggle tograsp and define it as a modern phenomenon continues. Furthermore, research has long shown that it is difficult to extractthe value with which digitalization is associated. Against this backdrop, the aim of this paper is to uncover the enactment bya specific set of actors of digitalization as production and reproduction practices. We interviewed a group of governmentallysanctioned regional digitalization coordinators to identify how digitalization was translated and implemented by the appointedprofessionals. We applied Orlikowski and Gash’s three levels of technology (nature, strategy, and use) and combined thesewith Feenberg’s matrix of four views on technology to produce an analytical framework. Our findings show that the making ofdigitalization can be described like ‘nailing jelly to a wall’, owing to the lack description of its capabilities and functionalities,coupled with a raison d’etre that is highly elusive beyond ‘change’, in very general terms. 

The intensified use of digital technologies in the public sector, which is commonly referred to as “digitalization,” is associated with the pursuit of a range of values. Values reflect notions of desirability, and they are expressed in strategic government documents. In this paper, we argue that the study of narratives in policies is important since they constitute starting points for the operationalization of strategic intent. The purpose of this paper is to gain an understanding of the narratives of the digitalization strategies that have been articulated by Swedish local government. We applied a theoretical framework that consists of four value ideals (professionalism, efficiency, service, and engagement), and we combined it with directed content analysis to analyze the strategies in question. Most of the statements in the strategies anticipate beneficial outcomes of digitalization and articulate few risks. The most common value proposal refers to the congruence between values of improved service and increased efficiency, while engagement values are less common. Moreover, the strategies draw on a repository of general and identical optimistic statements, which we refer to as the “parrot syndrome.” In addition, the methods that are used to evaluate values lack specificity. These findings contribute to the literature on the discursive landscape of digitalization by a comprehensive analysis of the value positions that are articulated in local government strategies. The paper concludes with three proposals for further research, namely to perform similar studies in other contexts, to study the enactment of e-Government strategies, and to investigate the aforementioned “parrot syndrome.”

As observed by e-Government scholars, the use of digital technology in the public sector has intensified during the last decade. With digital infrastructures becoming more complex, we argue that it is important to study the evaluation of their use. In this paper, we study the literature on the evaluation of e-Government. With a bibliometric analysis of keywords, combined with a narrative analysis of highly cited papers, we sought to characterize the literature on evaluation and identify themes and trends to propose directions for further research. Our findings reveal seven themes of e-Government evaluation research. Our analysis of highly cited papers disclosed that the literature is characterized by a service-dominant logic, with citizens’ adoption of government services and Web sites being assessed by statistical analysis of surveys. We note the shaky theoretical foundations of e-Government evaluation, a field that has been subject to a plethora of localized models. We conclude that evaluation efforts in e-Government research have been characterized by studies in which digital technology efforts have been judged on narrow grounds, such as ease of use. Based on these findings, we propose a research agenda that includes a shift from evaluation of services to a focus on “big questions”, such as emancipation and democracy. We propose that scholars should undertake more case studies of evaluative practices to form stronger theories with solid empirical foundations.

Digitalization is associated with structural changes in society, and a variety of policies on the topic have emerged on different levels of government (EU, national, regional, local) in recent years. Research suggests that government policies on digitalization are often overly optimistic about the transformational effects of technology. Hence, there is a need to scrutinise such policies. The purpose of this paper is to examine how objectives are expressed in digitalization policies in the welfare sector. To do so, an objectives-oriented approach is utilised to analyse four Swedish welfare policies. A directed content analysis was conducted using a theoretical framework based on five types of objectives from decision theory. The results reveal that common objectives in the policies studied were to change the status quo or use the people involved (citizens and healthcare staff) as a point of departure. At times, the policies combine goals of increased efficiency and better care, with a discourse that makes digitalization resemble a strategic goal (in itself). Moreover, few alternatives to digitalization presented in the material studied. Hence, although a range of actors is presumed to be part of changing the status quo, the results suggest that these actors have little choice due to a lack of alternatives to the prescribed path towards a digital welfare society. The results of this research have implications for both theory and practice. The absence of alternatives ought to be considered in future policy making. An interesting area for further research is to investigate how these policies are enacted in practice.