Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how power transition occurs at each stage of the datafication process in social cash programmes and how it affects surveillance moving beyond the panopotic vision.

Paper long abstract:

The datafication of government social protection programmes has implications on power, giving rise to new power relationships that also affect the digital surveillance or dataveillance landscape in the digital welfare state. The process of datafication, enabled through biometric technologies and data analytics, is conceived as a two stage process of targeting and disbursing social cash to beneficiaries. This has disrupted power relations between the State, beneficiaries and stakeholders. However, in the current Information Systems (IS) literature, there is little understanding on how datafication of these processes is connected with the transformation of data, power and surveillance. In this study, we analyse how datafication accounts for the transition of power between different institutional actors within the case of a social protection programme in Pakistan, and over the years, how it has been adapted for emergency cash transfers in times of crises. We discuss why Foucault’s popular metaphor of the panopticon to study power and surveillance is no longer suitable, especially, in the context of digital surveillance. Hence, a post-panoptic model of ‘surveillance assemblages’ is proposed that highlights alternative concepts of ‘network power’ that emerges through the datafication processes when utilising different kinds of digital technologies. This paper adopts a multi-disciplinary approach and contributes theoretically to strands of the IS, surveillance and development literature in tracing the connections between datafication, power and dataveillance through a dataveillance lens that has not been applied by scholars in previous IS research.