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Short abstract:

Drawing on digital ethnographic research in Swedish municipalities, this paper shows how automation of public administration faces hurdles, blending old practices with tech ideals, leading to what is here referred to as click-level bureaucracy and duct-tape solutionism, delaying anticipated futures.

Long abstract:

Sweden is increasingly considering the possibility of automating public administration. Data-driven process automation is believed to help make administrative tasks more efficient and goal-driven. However, implementing these systems, or preparing for their implementation, involves a transformation in organisational practices and principles. These practices are adapted to imaginaries of automation technologies, often stemming from the digital industries. When the organisational logic of public administration clashes with the promises of emerging automation technologies, new organisational forms and temporalities take shape, here referred to as click-level bureaucracy and duct-tape solutionism.

Based on digital ethnographic research with stakeholders from approximately ten Swedish municipalities, this paper explores how these new organisational forms and temporalities take shape. Two central and interrelated ideas anchor this exploration. Firstly, the future will necessitate automation to prevent the public sector from collapsing as it is perceived as dysfunctional and in need of repair. Secondly, we must prepare for an automated future by transforming today's work forms and routines to be compatible with machine communication when needed.

The interaction between these two lines of thought reveals that preparations involve constant repair work, yet these efforts are rarely deemed satisfactory. Instead, they become temporary, makeshift solutions that continually defer the anticipated future. In this sense, repair becomes a form of future-making where the future is persistently delayed, making it a perpetually moving target while at the same time building up a new form of bureaucracy that requires novel competencies and forms of management that necessarily involves representation from the digital industries.