Paper 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.

Paper 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.