Studying the state

Abstracts

Enacting the state through transnational criminal justice: A case of exercising hate crime in Norwegian courtrooms 

Randi Solhjell, Institute of Criminology and Sociology of Law, University of Oslo

This article engages with knowledge production of the state in expressions of justice and as a domain for political struggle in a ‘glocal’ setting. Specifically, the article engages with the active translation of global human rights concerns such as discrimination against minorities and experiencing dehumanizing incidents and the placement of these issues in a local setting, namely the courtroom. The author follows the cases of hate crime in Norwegian courts and argues that it represents a transnational issue beyond the state where criminal justice typically seek redress. The author traces the evolving issue of hate crime as an aspect of criminal justice at the state level, and the interaction between state actors such as law enforcement, prosecutors and judges, and citizens affected as either victims or perpetrators, as well as civil society actors. The article engages with how the state changes in the process by enacting transnational issues of criminal justice, such as histories of colonialism, war, racism and homophobia in the process. 

Administrative control of citizens: The changing nature of welfare administration

Ingunn Ikdahl & Christoffer C. Eriksen, Faculty of Law, University of Oslo 

Since the turn of the century, a series of amendments to the Norwegian National Insurance Act have provided the welfare administration with wide discretionary competence for accessing and processing information about individuals for purposes of control. New sources of data and new digital technologies contribute to a new landscape of administrative control. In this paper, we explore the rule of law effects of the emerging controlling welfare administration. 

Despite the attention to the digitalization of provision of services and benefits by the Norwegian welfare state (Nordrum and Ikdahl 2022) and to third party policing and multi-agency organized crime investigation (Bjelland & Vestby 2017; Dahl et al 2021), the welfare administration's employment of new types of data and technology for the purpose of control have largely gone under the radar, both in academia and in public debate.  

Our research builds on an analysis of legal amendments, preparatory works and debates in parliament, state budget propositions, documents from the Office of the Auditor General, the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, internal strategies and correspondence between the relevant ministry and the directorate, and media cases. On this basis, we argue that the combination of political signals, economic muscles, comprehensive legal competences with limited review, and the new and more effective forms of control brought about by datafication and new digital tools, has caused not only a change in scale of the welfare administrations’ control – but a significant shift in its very nature. 

Little tools of prevention: The Norwegian online patrol enacting preventive policing through social media

Guro Flinterud, Norwegian Police University College 

Prevention is the primary strategy of the Norwegian Police Service (NPS). According to the NPS, “Prevention includes everything done by the police, alone or in cooperation with others, to reduce crime and other unwanted incidents, reduce harmful effects and prevent recurrence.” (Norwegian Police Directorate 2020). Fulfilling such a strategy obviously necessitates a toolbox including softer tools than batons and handcuffs. Social media is one such tool. Using the notion of “little tools” (Asdal 2008), this paper will explore how the Norwegian online patrols’ social media accounts are tools for enacting the strategy of prevention laid out by the police directorate while simultaneously enabling the public to take part in the process. In their strategic documents they state that social media enable dialogue, but I will argue that it is a tool that works beyond communication. As “prevention” is enacted through documentation on a vernacular connective space, the police enable the public to partake in and shape the use of their tool and the meaning of “preventive policing” as an issue. In what ways does “preventive policing” become through social media? What is documented, how is this documentation used to govern, and what kinds of knowledges are produced? 

Digitalization and private economies of knowledge in criminal justice

Heidi Mork Lomell & Katja Franko, Faculty of Law, University of Oslo 

Digital technologies are redefining the meaning of knowledge and expertise in criminal justice and policing. Yet, while the how of digital policing is increasingly attracting academic attention we know far less about who the providers of new forms of digital knowledge are and what kind of impact they have on criminal justice decision making. In Norway, like in many other countries, the implementation of criminal justice reform has been promoted by, and relied heavily on, the use of private providers of expertise, particularly management- and IT-consultants. This paper brings focus on the connections between digitalization and privatization and examines how commercial and private knowledge regimes become encoded into state practices.  

Digitalization not only creates new knowledge hegemonies but also increases epistemic power of certain actors. The production of marketable knowledge has become a vital (if not the vital) aspect of the contemporary political economy (Zuboff, 2019). We argue that accounts of the changes in contemporary criminal justice also need to capture social transformations connected to the intersections of digitalization, privatization and marketization of knowledge. We need a better understanding of the relationship between science and the economy and how we should negotiate the boundaries of what should be considered private and public knowledge.  

The paper is exploratory in nature and a) aims to present an overview of the various types of private knowledge providers in the field of criminal justice, and b) explore the normative issues raised by their growing influence. Its main argument is that digitalization of knowledge should be examined not only as a techno-cultural but also as a socio-economic phenomenon which raises pressing questions about the relationship between the state and the market and the proper role of private interest. Private knowledge providers are shaping not only the understanding of expertise but also the nature and quality 

The knowledge model 'digital transformation' and what it does in an audit of the Norwegian police

Gro Stueland Skorpen, TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo 

This paper explores the knowledge model ‘digital transformation’. Based on 6 months of ethnographic fieldwork, it follows a team of auditors as they define their questions, shape and carry out their evaluation of the ongoing digitalisation projects Norwegian police themselves refer to as ‘a digital transformation’.  

The paper looks at the work done by the knowledge model, a model that is central to the evaluation optics (Reinertsen 2016) employed in the audit. ‘Digital transformation’ is a methodological tool for the auditors, but also an object of audit, as the auditors as well as employing it also study how it is used by police. Alongside established management models such as “agile”, it is argued, the knowledge model ‘digital transformation’ is one of several epistemic schema that shape the digital in Norwegian bureaucracies. 

It is shown how the model ‘digital transformation’ is most portable, travelling from consultants to bureaucracies and between different bureaucratic agencies. But ‘digital transformation’ does not only travel from meeting room to meeting room, it also enables different temporalities. Although the auditors insist that their evaluations are always retrospective in nature, in this audit their practice is shaped by the need to picture a digital future, an optic they come to share with their auditees in the police. 

Impact governance: On the socio-technical aspects of governance in Finnish impact investing and impact bonds

Olli Tiikkainen, University of Helsinki 

Impact investment is a financial practice where both economic profits and social or environmental impacts are actively pursued. Impact bonds, on the other hand, are a policy instrument version of impact investing, where private investors provide the capital for projects and are only payed back with interest by public sector actors if the impact has been achieved.  

These both have been taken upon recently also in the Nordics, with for example Finland becoming the EU country in which most capital has been raised for impact bonds. The claim justifying this has been that these practices will complement the welfare state with the help of increased evaluation efforts and sector-crossing dynamics, and thus provide solutions to resistent problems like youth exclusion and the eutrophication of the Baltic Sea. 

In my presentation, I analyze above phenomena via the speculative notion of impact governance, where the processes of financialization, responsibilization and increased evaluation efforts are entangled with governance shifts of welfare states. In my view, impact governance especially provides a case to further understand the economy-state relations in the contemporary 'good economy'. Here, the role of the state indeed seems to be modelled upon the enterprise, with for example the investors becoming significant actors in funding policy efforts and these efforts taking the asset-like form of specific 'policy packages'. STS, with its strength in analyzing down-to-earth knowledge practices, is useful here especially in complementing disciplines like political economy and sustainability transition studies that focus on the structural and infrastructural states of states. 

Artificial intelligence: A disruptive or symbiotic innovation?

Emrah Karakaya & Mats Engwall, KTH Royal Institute of Technology 

Artificial intelligence comes in a variety of forms, encompassing a family of technologies with a multitude of applications. Taking account of such variety, an increasing number of scholars address the phenomenon of how artificial intelligence affects industrial change and organizations. While scholars of innovation studies bring a system perspective at industry level, organization studies shed lights on management aspects of the phenomenon at firm level. One of the key questions that both domains of literature debates is whether artificial intelligence has disruptive or symbiotic implications for established industrial sectors and firms. In this paper, we address this long-debated question, taking stock of the recent empirical evidence from the innovation and organization studies. To do so, we draw inspiration from the socio-technical transition literature (as well as STS) and revisit the concept of disruption at sectoral and firm level. Then, based on a structured review of selected articles, we synthesize the insights from phenomenon-driven empirical research published in the main journals of innovation and organization studies. Preliminarily, our results provides a tentative framework, conceptualizing for whom and under which conditions artificial intelligence becomes disruptive or symbiotic. We then argue that the question of whether artificial intelligence is disruptive or symbiotic is not a black-and-white issue but instead contingent upon the variety of technological, organizational and sectoral factors. 

The beginning of AI-driven welfare? A mapping of how public sector AI experiments matter for social- and health services in Denmark 

Jakob Laage-Thomsen, Ida Schrøder & Helene Ratner, Danish School of Education, Aarhus University

In the post-digitalized public administration, citizen and bureaucratic data are viewed as an untouched asset for the development of more accurate and efficient welfare services. Key to mining this data are Artificially Intelligent (AI) technologies, such as predictive algorithms, which have led to experimentation across all sectors in the Danish Welfare State. However, not all AI projects are created equal. In this paper we investigate how the configurations of public sector AI experiments matter for the development of AI-driven health- and social care services in Denmark. Through a comparative study of public investments in 40 Danish AI projects, we map out how different kinds of pressures and inter-organizational arrangements matter for the possibilities of developing AI-driven welfare services. For one, we show how the maturation of AI-legislature have put many AI projects under pressure, but critically that this pressure does not have equal impact across all areas of welfare provisioning. Notably, we expose how the difference in the inter-organizational configurations of AI experiments within health- and social care services matter for AI development. Where the healthcare sector, through its interpenetration with universities and research, have access to certain long-term resources, the social sector is more vulnerable to dissuading long-term investments in technologies and research. The two kinds of future imaginaries that this confers, result in markedly different pressures for the AI projects. While this dichotomous view does not explain all variability, it provides an important corrective for thinking about how and why welfare services will be driven by AI technologies in the future. 

Beyond the office. Cultivating situated knowledge and expertise in energy policy

Ask Greve Johansen, Aalborg University; Peter Holm Jacobsen, CBS; Jens Iuel-Stissing, AAU  

How is expertise assembled in government offices to promote future carbon-neutral energy systems? In recent years, the production of biogas in Denmark has increased rapidly. This increase coincides with a broad political agreement made in 2012, which increased subsidies and designated a governmental task force in the Danish Energy Agency (DEA) to overcome barriers to growth in the industry. 

We describe the task force as activities cultivating situated knowledge on technical, systemic, and economic challenges concerning biogas. We draw on interviews with bureaucrats, lobbyists, scientists, and NGO representatives participating in the Task Force activities, as well as document analysis (Asdal & Reinertsen 2021) collected from 2021. 

Bureaucratic expertise is often portrayed as a highly disciplined and procedural affair (Asdal, 2014; Mangset and Asdal, 2019; Nass, 1986; Weber, 2019). From an STS approach, we describe a bureaucratic expertise concerned less with establishing facts, legibility, formal authority, and more with extending agency beyond the formal competence of the DEA, being committed to practical problems experienced by industry actors and investors. 

We show how government office pursues extensive collaboration with 'stakeholders', and a collective articulation of biogas as a viable future energy source, rather than establishing the viability of biogas as a fact and the state as the legitimate authority on the matter. Governing through less formal practice and with select stakeholders might be deemed proper but may undermine the legitimacy of this form of exercise of state power. Interested publics may disappear from view - and knowledge asymmetries between market actors and government regulators may be exploited. 

The mundane governance of education through bureaucratic practices: the case of national testing in Norway

Ida Martinez Lunde & Nelli Piattoeva, Faculty of Educational Sciences, University of Oslo 

National tests in Norwegian, English and Mathematics are part of the Norwegian National Quality Assessment System, and are mandatory in 5th, 8th and 9th grades. They have a dual task: to provide state insight into and to improve education quality (Skedsmo, 2009). The national tests represent a new practice of governing that attempts to align diverse policies and practices in dispersed Norwegian schools, and to clarify and (re)distribute responsibilities between local, municipal, and national levels. The tests govern in two ways: by way of rendering legible through knowledge production and by way of developing a new layer of state bureaucratic practices. In this presentation, we focus on the latter, arguing that this aspect has not been addressed in research on governance by knowledge/assessments. 

We draw on the literature on mundane of governance (Woolgar & Neyland, 2013), policy instrumentation (Le Galès, 2016), STS approach on technical and bureaucratic documents (Asdal & Reinertsen, 2022) and time governance as a sociomaterial practice (Adam, 2004; May & Thrift, 2001) to examine the temporal aspects of mundane bureaucratic practices underpinning the implementation and use of mandatory national assessments. We analyse documents from the Directorate for Education and Training outlining recommendations and guidelines for the preparation, execution and interpretation of national tests and ‘Statistikk’ (the Directorate’s webpage) that provides visualizations of national testing data. We argue that the mundane bureaucratic practices appear surprisingly prescriptive, and that their temporal qualities play a central role in governing, that is, aligning different actors across the country and across levels. 

A system for classification of ADM in the public sector

Ellinor Blom Lussi and Stefan Larsson, Lund University 

The push to make the public sector more efficient overlaps with arguments for the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) (Larsson & Ledendal, 2022), as well as the increased use of automation (Juell-Skielse et al., 2022), in the public sector. While the use of AI in the public sector is increasing (Toll et al, 2019), the use of (non-AI) automated decision-making (ADM) in the Swedish public administration can be traced back to the 1970’s (RiR 2020:22). There have been multiple attempts to map out the use of ADM in the Swedish public sector (RiR 2020:22; Diskrimineringsombudsmannen, 2022), but due to the ambiguity of the concept, the results of these mappings and subsequent policy-discussions have been fragmented. 

Drawing from previous attempts to classify ADM, this paper proposes a structure that may include both ADM and recent development in the field AI for further studies of public sector practices. Previously, six different ideal types of ADM were identified based on the level of automation incorporated in the decision-making (Roehl, 2022). Considering that a previous mapping of the Swedish public administration’s use of ADM have indicated a tension between ADM using, and not using, AI (Diskrimineringsombudsmannen, 2022), we argue that there is a need of a classification system that comprise everything from static automated decision-making to decision-making with predicative elements.  

In sum, this paper presents a developed framework for a classification system to further contribute to the understanding of different types of ADM in the Swedish public sector, thereby aiding future empirical analysis. 

Synthesising research findings for policy use - the relationship between formalised procedures and expertise in fisheries management reviews

Maria Paulsson, Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, University of Gothenburg 

Organisations in marine policymaking request increased formalisation of scientific assessment processes. At the intersection between science and policy, actors with different agendas, interests and understandings of common problems meet. Actors at this intersection may be regarded as boundary organisations that must balance scientists' and policymakers' sometimes conflicting interests and requirements. Scientific knowledge travels between these actors, undergoing a translation process as efforts are made to align findings with actors' various commitments. Along these travels, formalised procedures for collating information are designed to structure and control the practices involved. 

Issues relating to the importance of scientific knowledge and expertise in climate change and sustainable development debates have long been addressed in STS. Such issues include the relation between formalised procedures and non-formalised expertise in knowledge production for policy use. The advantages and disadvantages of the implementation and reliance on standards are often discussed. 

This paper will focus on the roles and understandings of the formalisation of procedures and non-formalized expertise at the science-policy interface. My focus area is Swedish coastal fisheries and the work of the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management with commissioning research overviews on fisheries and marine environment policies. I will examine how the agency handles guidelines, protocols and other formal tools, and discuss the importance of formal and non-formal expertise in making use of overviews. 

Optics of evaluation and objects of critique: An analysis of report writing at the Norwegian Office of the Auditor General

Hilde Reinertsen & Gro Stueland Skorpen, TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo

This paper starts from a long-standing interest in understanding the varied practices and histories of public sector evaluation. More specifically, we describe and analyse this field’s changing methods, routines, and infrastructures of evaluation, conceptualised as ‘optics of evaluation’ (Reinertsen 2016, 2018). We investigate the practices of report writing within the Norwegian Office of the Auditor General (OAG), more specifically its ‘performance audits’ (of the implementation of parliamentary policies). Here, the OAG employs social science methods similar to those used in most other evaluations, yet through classical audit routines. 

Through a close textual, ethnographic, and institutional account, we probe the tensions between evaluation and audit. In analysing the report writing process, we highlight three moments: (1) identifying potential risk and transforming it into an audit object; (2) collective writing culminating in a quantified and visualized statement of critique; and (3) moving this critique into Parliament and public debate. While this is indeed a long-drawn, complex and fascinating process, it is also signified by the simplicity of OAG being the sole actor involved in producing its reports; all other actors involved are either the reports’ objects or their recipients. This feature is highly notable when juxtaposed to the general system of state-initiated evaluation processes, in which publicly announced tenders and the engagement of external evaluator teams make the evaluation processes more heterogenous and distributed, yet also more transparent and less closely controlled. 

In our analysis we develop the concept of ‘optics of evaluation’ in order to describe these differences and their practical implications, and explore the following questions: How do optics of evaluation give form to their objects of evaluation? What is the relation between the optics and those actors employing them to sharpen their evaluative gaze?