Abstract
AbstractIn recent years, local authorities in the UK have begun to adopt a variety of “smart” technological changes to enhance service delivery. These changes are having profound impacts on the structure of public administration. Focusing on the particular case of artificial intelligence, specifically autonomous agents and predictive analytics, a combination of desk research, a survey questionnaire, and interviews were used to better understand the extent and nature of these changes in local government. Findings suggest that local authorities are beginning to adopt smart technologies and that these technologies are having an unanticipated impact on how public administrators and computational algorithms become imbricated in the delivery of public services. This imbrication is described as algorithmic bureaucracy, and it provides a framework within which to explore how these technologies transform both the socio‐technical relationship between workers and their tools, as well as the ways that work is organized in the public sector.
Highlights
Scholars began to argue about new approaches to public administration (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2011), some of which focused on an approach that emerged in the 1980s and came to be known as New Public Management (Lynn 2001), which was characterized by managerialism and the use of market mechanisms, such as outsourcing, as a means to overcome some of the challenges associated with modern complexity and make government more efficient (Hood 1995)
There is evidence that local authorities are beginning to adopt smart technologies, in the categories of autonomous agents and predictive analytics for decision assistance, and that these technologies are having an unanticipated impact on how public administrators and computational algorithms become imbricated in the delivery of public services
Fifteen survey respondents (17%) mentioned that their local authority is experimenting with some kind of predictive analytics
Summary
This study suggests that smart technologies are at an early, but foundational, stage of adoption in local authorities and argues that smart technologies add a new element to the socio-technical organization of public administration in local authorities It is not just a shift from street-level to system-level discretion (Bovens and Zouridis 2002). In parallel with New Public Management changes, there were advancements in the development of IT that were impacting the infrastructure of public administration (Margetts 1999), in particular, the development of the internet as a means to communicate information quickly between computers (Naughton 2001) These changes had begun much earlier with the introduction of computation (Simon 1973; Wilkins 1968), and scholars realized that “[t]o design effective decision-making organizations, we must understand the structure of the decisions to be made; and we must understand the decision-making tools at our disposal, both human and mechanical - men and computers” (Simon 1973, 272). Algorithms may do more than improve analytics and automation; they may change the nature of public administration
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