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- Convenors:
-
Timm P. Sureau
Thomas Götzelmann (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg)
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- Chair:
-
Larissa Vetters
(Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
- Stream:
- Morality and Legality
- Sessions:
- Thursday 1 April, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Commercial software, globally shared programming practices and libraries are shaping the digitalisation of bureaucracies. How do such elusive international networks affect decision making, the focus of responsibility and the redistribution of accountability?
Long Abstract:
The materiality of documents, Hull (2012), plays a substantial role in bureaucratic processes, as translations and reductions between reality and document shape scopes of action and perpetuate hierarchies and norms. Along with administrative procedures, aesthetics, morality, legal understanding and established categories, this produces bureaucratic sentiments (Bens/Zenker 2019), whose affective-emotional power influences decision-making processes and redistributes accountability. Such sentiments within administrations do not represent layers beyond law, but a dimension within law and bureaucracy. Thus, the ascription of responsibility is a comparatively simple act compared to giving an actual account which needs to reflect this very complexity.
The digital transformation adds complexity since the 1980s and continues transforming the legal infrastructure of society. Tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966), and established processes are being re-thought and re-ordered. Global networks of standards, shared program libraries, design languages, efficiency and process logics and corporate products for government and commercial administrations are altering and creating new procedures and aesthetics of legal decision-making. Responsibilities turn towards functioning computer programs, repositioning legal standards. We therefore wonder how these emerging (inter-)national networks, rhizomatic in the Deleuzian sense (1987) - relevant, often unconscious, elusive - affect distributed accountability in administrations and how bureaucrats and society deal with these new added layers of connectivity.
We seek abstracts that shed light, ethnographically and critically, on these digital-rhizomatic changes of hierarchies and digital workflows, the blurring of public and private boundaries, and the resulting reconfigurations of accountability within the state and between states and (non-)citizens.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 1 April, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
If 'public service provisions' register inhumane to those using or receiving them: How does that feel for service-providers? A (digital) sensory ethnography with South Wales Police asks this by illumining conflicts of 'acting accountably' and responsibilities to 'make people (feel) safe'.
Paper long abstract:
South Wales Police (SWP) have the self-acclaimed task to "make people (feel) safe". From a Sensory Ethnography (SE) angle, this implies a co-production of 'safe places' through interactions with others (Pink, 2009). Empirically, SWP rely on their skills of 'reading people' and engaging with them at face-level to make them feel cared for as 'one of them': An unarmed, friendly community service, responsible to serve the community they belong to.
Within (discursive) networks of attitudes that position 'communities' against 'the police', however, officers' professional decision-making is being increasingly policed and standardised. Rather than relying on their 'human' skills to make split-second decisions, care about and respond to people's situational needs, protocols and guidelines diminish officers' Discretion. Moreover, the goodness of their performance is measured in statistics and tracked with 'machines' of various kinds.
Based on (digital, sensory) ethnographic work with SWP, this paper highlights how demands of 'paperwork' make officers feel that they are no longer allowed to be (seen as) 'human' on-duty but forced to police like 'robots'. These sentiments are interlaced with narratives that equate transparency with accountability and responsible policing (Brucato, 2015), as well as erratic assumptions about predetermining human behaviours and identifying 'safe places' via crime statistics. Conflicting notions of digital and offline 'safe (place-)making' affect what it means to be a 'responsible' police officer externally and internally. This paper zooms in on the 'humanness' and self-identified vulnerability SWP rely on and feel in need of defending.
Paper short abstract:
CAD software plays a crucial role in everyday work of planners and practitioners. Our thesis is, that CAD software affects the following discussion and decisions in planning.
Paper long abstract:
Since the 1990s, CAD software plays a crucial role in everyday work of planners and practitioners. CAD software is used to draw official plans, perspectives and sketches in civil services as well as in the private planning sector. Our thesis is, that the reduction of complexity due to visualisation with CAD software affects the following discussion and decisions in planning. Drawing on theoretical concepts borrowed from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and empirical examples from planning practice in Germany, this article investigates the powerful role of CAD software in complex planning processes. We show how planning becomes limited by the technical possibilities of the CAD software and how at the same time the program leads to the stabilisation of planning by labelling, naming and counting, due to layer functions. It is the aim of the paper to contribute to a more critical research of practices and work flows within the German planning system.
Paper short abstract:
My contribution will be a discourse analysis of speeches at the 2020 GovTech Summit. Addressing public governance as a presumably profitable enterprise, I will analyse the speakers' consideration (or absence of) the notions of responsibility and accountability to states and citizens.
Paper long abstract:
Early innovation in computer technology hails from the government and had always been importantly related to transformations in modes of governing. Hicks (2017) and Agar (2003) show that shifting responsibility for policy decisions to scientists, engineers and other technical specialists is not a novelty. What is new is GovTech or Government Technology, which Filer characterises as both a policy domain and an industry (Filer, 2019, p.17). GovTech proponents explicitly consider public administration, or governing, a profitable enterprise; it is supposedly a win-win situation for different stakeholders, from citizens, governments to start-ups and investors.
My contribution to this panel will inquire into GovTech, a subset of the industries that governments turn to for outsourcing their political functions. I will present a discourse analysis of speeches at the 2020 GovTech Summit, delving into the speakers' consideration (or absence of) the notions of responsibility and accountability to states and citizens. I will focus on the United Kingdom, coupling my analysis of the present with a historical consideration of (a)political decisions that led to the current situation.
Agar, J. (2003). The government machine: a revolutionary history of the computer. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.
Filer, T. (2019). Thinking about GovTech: a brief guide for policymakers. [online] Bennett Institute for Public Policy. Available at: https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/Thinking_about_Govtech_Jan_2019_online.pdf [Accessed: 22 January 2021].
Hicks, M. (2017). Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing. Cambridge and London: MIT Press.