Send message to Authors

Short abstract:

We develop a method to enhance the value embodiment potential of local governments in anticipation of disruptive technologies. This method is applied in practice and evaluated.

Long abstract:

Local government is confronted with new digitization issues. We argue that not (just) the ‘official’ imaginaries created through municipal discourse or articulated design requirements but rather the emergent processes of socio-material entanglement should be studied to identify and influence positive, negative and ‘digital undertow’ values of digitization (Orlikowski, 2023).

In a context of fast-paced new technological opportunities this however creates a dilemma for STS researchers: resilience to disruptive technologies can neither be (adequately) strengthened by strategic imaginaries, nor by socio-material practices as these haven’t occurred yet.

Therefore, we develop a method of organizational inoculation. Our method aims to inoculate local government by exposing it to real-life instances of digital disruption in a gaming situation (the ‘weakened pathogen’) to strengthen its responses (immune system) when these disruptions actually occur.

We focus on local governance in the city of Rotterdam and the potential effects of large language models (LLMs). We apply the method to explore the potential (risks to) public values in concrete instances like the use of LLM’s to generate complaints about city plans which lowers the threshold to submit complaints in a language that ‘bureaucracy takes serious’. In the game we involve authentic agents (ie civil servants whose daily work it is to address complaints and citizens that want to issue such complaints) and use real-life scenarios from other cities to create an authentic simulation. Can LLMs contribute to achieving (more) public value (Bryson et al., 2014) by decisively changing the way public services are provided to local communities?