The 60% PhD Seminar of Amela Muratspahić , PhD Candidate in Media and Communication Studies on 'Shifting Agencies: Technological Practices at the Swedish Public Employment Service.'

Welcome to the next higher seminar organised by the Media and Communication Studies department!

In this higher seminar, our doctoral student, Amela Muratspahić, will present on her PhD research project titled 'Shifting Agencies: Technological Practices at the Swedish Public Employment Service.'

Ambitions towards increased implementation and use of datafication and automation in welfare services have democratic implications, leading to shifts in the relationship to the citizen, increased control through datafication which often negatively impacts the most precarious groups in society, as well as shifts in the practices of civil servants (Dencik & Kaun, 2020; Eubanks, 2018). This dissertation is specifically about the technological practices of civil servants, or street-level bureaucrats who need to negotiate between the often-conflicting values of executing governmental decisions with professional discretion (Lipsky, 1980/2010; Dubois, 1999/2010).

Sweden is often framed both as an early adopter of new technologies and an example of a social democratic welfare state (Esping-Andersen, 1990), although there have been shifts in line with closer ties to the private sector (Ahlbäck Öberg & Widmalm, 2016; Karlsson, 2019). (Un)employment is important to welfare state politics and it is also tied to political and normative ideas about work and the jobseeker. In Sweden, the Public Employment Service (SPES) is a public institution that has undergone large political, economic and organisational changes in the recent decade. Many of these changes are related to technology, including the implementation of a statistical decision-support system in the labour market assessment process.

The purpose of the study is to understand the negotiations with technology by different actors in the Swedish Public Employment Service at a time of increased datafication and automation of a precarious process, namely unemployment. The research questions are as follows:

- How do caseworkers, developers and managers negotiate the sociotechnical features of the digital and automated systems used by the Swedish Public Employment Service?

- How are orders of worth invoked in negotiations on technology at the Swedish Public Employment Service by caseworkers, developers and managers?

- How are digital and automated systems at the Swedish Public Employment Service mediating interactions between different actors with varying resources and what are the democratic implications of this?

The study is qualitative in nature. It employs semi-structured interviews with caseworkers, managers and IT workers and observations at SPES offices. The theoretical framework draws on Pragmatic Sociology of Critique (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991/2006; 1999) to analyse which worlds and worths are most prominent in technological negotiations of different actors at the Swedish Public Employment Service. Subsequently, the concept of friction is employed to understand what happens when different actors critique the technological systems and practices at the SPES, as well as how actors and practices repair the order. The pragmatic sociology of critique is aided by (media) practice theory (Couldry, 2004) and purposefully decentres any one technology to instead examine how technologies are invoked in relation to institutional and social practices (Dencik, 2019).

It is possible read the PhD manuscript in advance as well as to join the higher seminar on campus and online via Zoom. Contact us for the Zoom details if you'd like to join online, and if you'd like to read the manuscript in full.