Short Abstract

This panel examines how AI and digital infrastructures in public administration materialise sociotechnical imaginaries of efficiency, neutrality, and control, and how such imaginaries reconfigure bureaucratic authority, responsibility, and the moral order of governance.

Description

Artificial intelligence (AI) and a growing ecosystem of digital technologies—ranging from data analytics and algorithmic decision-making tools to automated document workflows and software platforms—are increasingly woven into the infrastructures of public administration. These technologies promise efficiency, transparency, and rational governance. Yet such promises are not merely technical; they belong to broader infrastructural imaginaries that link visions of automation and digitalisation to ideals of control, neutrality, and trust in bureaucratic order.

This panel invites contributions in the sociology of technology and Science and Technology Studies (STS) that explore how AI and software-based infrastructures are co-produced with the institutional logics, moral economies, and epistemic practices of public administration. We seek theoretical and empirical papers examining how these systems are designed, implemented, and resisted within administrative contexts—from experimental pilots and digital twins to large-scale data infrastructures. How do such sociotechnical arrangements redefine what counts as evidence, fairness, or due process? How are administrative values translated into code, and how do civil servants interpret, negotiate, or contest these translations in their everyday work?

Particular attention is given to civil servants as epistemic actors who must reconcile algorithmic scripts and digital protocols with professional judgment and moral accountability. Their engagements with digital systems—as both tools for decision-making and sources of uncertainty—reveal how responsibility, discretion, and risk are redistributed across human–machine assemblages.

The panel also invites reflection on the political and ideological dimensions of digital infrastructures’ supposed neutrality. When automation and software systems are framed as depoliticised solutions, what forms of exclusion, discrimination, or opacity become institutionalised? Conversely, how might alternative infrastructural imaginaries foster transparency, care, and public trust?

By connecting grounded studies of AI and digital infrastructures to broader debates on governance and state transformation, this panel seeks to theorise how contemporary bureaucracies are being recomposed through code—and how sociotechnical imaginaries shape the moral and political futures of administration itself.

Propose paper