The power reinforcement framework revisited: mobile technology and management control in home care

Abstract

Whereas digital technologies are often depicted as being capable of disrupting long-standing power structures and facilitating new governance mechanisms, the power reinforcement framework suggests that information and communications technologies tend to strengthen existing power arrangements within public organizations. This article revisits the 30-year-old power reinforcement framework by means of an empirical analysis on the use of mobile technology in a large-scale programme in Danish public sector home care. It explores whether and to what extent administrative management has controlled decision-making and gained most benefits from mobile technology use, relative to the effects of the technology on the street-level workers who deliver services. Current mobile technology-in-use might be less likely to be power reinforcing because it is far more decentralized and individualized than the mainly expert-dominated and centrally controlled technologies that were the main focus of the 1970s and 1980s studies. Yet this study concludes that there is general support for the reinforcement framework in the contemporary application of mobile technology in public sector home care.