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Short abstract

Studying Finnish wellbeing services counties’ strategy documents I reflect on what kind of implications the imaginary of quantification may have for the rationalities of giving and receiving care in the public welfare services.

Long abstract

In Finland, the wellbeing services counties face wide-ranging needs to renew and unify their information systems. Large-scale digitalization and utilizing produced data are considered as two of the main solutions to the wicked problems of public healthcare and social services. Data-driven services seek to translate (human) functions into structured data that can be combined and further utilized in knowledge-based management, research, innovation, and business. Research has shown that numbers are efficient in mediating power and shaping relations (Espeland & Yung 2019), but public discourse still evades ethical questions of quantification.

In this presentation, I will discuss how data-driven systems and their logics of quantification are depicted in the statutory wellbeing services counties’ strategy documents. In doing so I reflect on what kind of implications the quantification of welfare services may have for the rationalities of giving and receiving care.

What kind of digital and data-driven futures are imagined in the strategy papers? We have analysed the strategies using the theoretical concept of sociotechnical imaginaries. These imaginaries are seen as social and political worldbuilding; imagination is a cultural resource that describes and directs the possible futures. The results are interpreted through the literature on promissory data (Hoeyer 2019; 2023), data work (Bossen et. 2019) and critiques on New Public Management to highlight diverse but often overlooked aspects of quantification that data-driven systems in welfare services entail.