Paper short abstract:

Through ethnographic study of a digital transformation model used in an audit of the digitalisation efforts of Norwegian police, we show how the model and its aesthetic – boxy steps leading upward – works as a political device for the audited party, and as a methodologial one for their evaluators.

Paper long abstract:

Digital transformation frameworks are the current idiom for guiding digitalisation practice within key Norwegian state agencies. These frameworks quite literally model digital statecraft, in that they make figurative the steps the state needs to take to create what is often referred to as "better digital services". In this paper, we trace one such digital transformation framework as it makes its way into bureaucracy from the land of consultant knowledge practices, travelling by way of Powerpoint presentations, books, and word of mouth. We follow a team of Norwegian state auditors in their efforts to evaluate the digitalisation efforts of the Norwegian Police Service, and see how for them, the model serves as a methodological tool, enabling them to evaluate the object ‘digitalisation’. For the auditees in the police, we argue, the model becomes a political technology reinforcing them in their effort to carve out political space for their digitalisation work in the encounter with the political interests of their superiors.

The reduction of complexity that is offered by the model and the aesthetic of its definitive, boxy (Schlünder et al 2020) steps leading toward greater digital sophistication helps steady the gaze of practitioners working within an optics of evaluation (auditors), and with an optics of execution (police), giving both a handle on their very different ways of performing digital statecraft. In the paper, we explore the agencies of the model (Bourgoin and Muniesa 2016; Doganova and Eyquem-Renault 2009) and how it can simultaneously model both enquiry (Morgan 2012) and authority.