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Public administration and digital technologies at work

Anne Bellon, Éric Dagiral et Jean-Marc Weller
Cet article est une traduction de :
L’administration et le numérique au défi du travail [fr]

Texte intégral

1Digital technologies have brought about major changes to various aspect of our social lives such as education, leisure, health or personal relations. They have also been widely adopted by public administrations, who increasingly rely on technical systems for tax declarations, educational guidance, social assistance applications, thus changing the relationship to users, the functioning of public organizations and or citizens’ participation in public decision-making.

  • 1 Examples of French journal published in recent years include Réseaux's special issue on local autho (...)

2The digitization of public services has accelerated in recent years becoming one of the pillars of the administrative modernization. It gave rise to successive representations of the State, from the “virtual state” (Fountain, 2001) in the late 1990s, then “E-Government” (Henman, 2010), or “Government as Platform” (O'Reilly, 2011), an emblematic figure taken up in France under the expression “Platform State”, eliciting as many justifications as criticisms (see in particular Chevallier, 2018 and Jeannot, 2020), and more recently the “algorithmic bureaucracy” (Vogl et al., 2020) with the use of artificial intelligence (Jeffares, 2020). The digital transformation of the State has received the attention of a substantial volume of work, and has already led to several collective publications in France committed to exploring particular aspects or areas of public action1.

  • 2 As human-computer interaction researchers Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper put it more than twenty (...)
  • 3 Even before the digital administration projects mentioned above, sociological papers highlighted th (...)

3In order to enrich these perspectives, RESET presents this issue dedicated to administration and digital technology, with a focus on the actual appropriation or innovation and the work actually accomplished within the public administration. If by “administration” we mean the deliberately broad range of public institutions in charge of providing non-market goods and services, and if by “digital” we mean more specifically the recent IT devices helping to endow organizations with unprecedented production capacities, it has to be said that their encounter comes with numerous tensions. The misnamed “dematerialization”, while it implies a reduction in procedures and paperwork, can also exclude people who are remote from the use of IT tools, particularly when the deployment of the latter favors the elimination of physical counters, mailings and telephone calls. The simplification of rules and procedures, which is supposed to be facilitated by digital technology, is in fact difficult to implement2, running up against existing practices, and paradoxically leading to new complexities for professionals and recipients alike3. In short, the ambition of this special issue is therefore to bring together contributions that, in various fields of public action, positively document the actual uses of digital technology, and even more centrally, what they do to work. Understood as the labor that actors must concretely accomplish, even if it is not formally recognized or experienced as such, work is indeed a useful angle of analysis. Firstly, because it points to the variety of concrete operations that every agent has to carry out, whether they're working in a decentralized department or being senior civil servants in a central office. Secondly, because the focus on work allows us to question both those who use these technologies on a day-to-day basis and those who design them, taking into account what the latter have had to do to bring them to fruition, their representations of work processes and the transformations they bring about, in terms of organization and employment. Finally, because digital tools are based on scripts that are as much technical choices as they are political ones, and whose ability to affect or bring about the world they design is experienced in action, through labor.

A dual relationship between government and digital technology

  • 4 On anthropological considerations relating to the role of writing forms in the production of politi (...)
  • 5 Regarding the case of the British administration, see for example (Agar, 2003). More generally on t (...)

4One must not forget that the digitization of public administration has a long history. It is a very old process, if we consider that it is first and foremost a graphic revolution, a form of writing, a constantly reinvented combination of numbers, letters, and figures4. In this respect, it is part of a long path that, from the account book to the file, from the typewriter to the computer, recalls the crucial role of technical, scriptural and classificatory devices in the construction of bureaucracies5.

  • 6 See Delphine Gardey's summary of this general history of information processing in public administr (...)

5One side of this story refers to the boom in information production and management, inherent in the emergence of large organizations and their growing need for coordination. Since at least the last third of the 19th century, the history of administrative work is embedded in written documents and standardized forms, as well as the telegraph, pneumatic tires and the telephone. Mechanization and computerization were part of a rational ideal based on calculation, accuracy, objectivity and speed. This turning point concerns the process of manufacturing “information”, which has become a detachable entity that can be produced, stored, processed and analyzed6. Likewise, what does digital technology change in terms of the work associated with this informational production and management?

  • 7 With the Minitel, citizens experimented for the first time with remote interactions, including acce (...)
  • 8 On this phenomenon and the resilience of early online services, see Éric Dagiral (2007).

6The second side of this story concerns communication with the public, which for a long time was only marginally affected by technological innovations. Until the mid-1980s, neither computers nor even telephones were conceived as a strategic vector for exchanges between bureaucracies and their public. It was only with the emergence of telematics that, for the first time, a link was established between IT development and communication tools as such, embodied in France by the emblematic Minitel7. With the development of the Internet a decade later, this hybridization became more crucial, as an unavoidable instrument of new “electronic” relations between public administration and its “users”, a promise of modernity8.

7Whether the aim is to design new tools or put them to practical use, this dual relationship meets a number of challenges, particularly legal ones: access to social, political and economic rights as well as the accuracy of public decisions taken depend on it. Moreover, this dual relationship takes many forms at local level. From one administration to another, depending on the scale and field of public action, configurations vary, giving rise to experiments that are sometimes original, sometimes opposed, but in any case, different. The aim of this special issue is to show the diversity of these digital realities within public administrations, following the thread of work.

Investigating digital administrative work

  • 9 For case studies on an urban planning agency or various public administrations, see Matthew Hull (2 (...)
  • 10 On how a variety of sociological approaches - STS in particular - problematize and capture workers (...)
  • 11 On this example, see Christian Licoppe and Sylvaine Tuncer (2019), Camille Capelle (2010) and Chris (...)

8The first body of work is in line with the sociology of science and technology, and its concern with restoring the depth of laboratory work, emphasizing the importance of information systems, measuring and classifying instruments. It is marked by an attention to inscriptions, traces, graphs, and more broadly to writings, files, their circulation and transformation, to explore the work of agents and the practical conditions of regulatory decision-making9 or the manufacture of information (Girard-Chanudet, 2023). In so doing, such scholars demonstrate how these devices become vectors of inequalities, whether new or renewed ones, as much as the vector of their invisibilization. Digital technologies are examined here in terms of the ways in which they reshape not only workspaces, but also the processes by which information is produced, processed and circulated, notably through “big data” on which public policies are increasingly relying10. This body of work also stands out for its concern to describe professional activity as closely as possible, in the vein of a sociology attentive to the concrete uses of digital devices. The grain of the description is deliberately as fine as possible, using methodological procedures derived from observations (audio or video recordings, textual corpora, etc.), a prerequisite for reconstructing from the inside the reasoning of actors and the practical constraints they face in acting in a given situation. Whether we're talking about prison officers in charge of guarding inmates, teachers grappling with their exam papers, or magistrates conducting trial hearings, the work focuses on describing the practical activities they perform, in interaction with their material and human environment. Digital technologies are examined in this context, taking into account the variously adjusted resources they offer for action: what to do about the alarms triggered by the electronic surveillance system for people placed under bracelet? How can justice be dispensed from behind a screen?11 Is it even possible? This focus on interactional work and its equipment prompts us to take a closer look at the law that underpins all public action, and to reconstruct the reasoning that professionals deploy in order to act, given that their work is based on the law.

  • 12 The study of street-level bureaucrats has emerged as a particularly active field of research over t (...)

9A second perspective extends well-established studies of bureaucratic organizations and administrative reform policies into the realm of digital technologies (Bellon, 2025). State reformers have long framed administrative “paperwork” (Mesnel, 2017) as a public issue, and considered its reduction by digital means as a key dimension of “simplification” policies. Symmetrically, digital technologies and the discourses of their designers are receiving increasing attention in political science as new instruments of government (see Hood & Margetts, 2007). This bulk of literature is interested in administrative work but mostly to question how digital technologies transform organizational routines and hierarchies. The focus on social players, their respective interests and their struggles appears central in these works, whether they promote investigations “from below” to study practices on both sides of - and at a distance from - the counter, or invite us to reconstruct the implementation of a public policy from the institutions in charge of it. Administrative work is thus examined from the angle of the strategic uses of digital tools, as resources that can be mobilized and entail new social relations. Whether we're talking about computer-assisted unemployment management or policies to improve the distribution of social benefits, new dilemmas and need for arbitration inevitably arise, inspiring a whole body of literature. It examines the effects of digital technology on workers who are deemed to have considerable room for interpretation and to contribute to the concrete implementation of social policies12, as well as its effects in terms of access to welfare benefits and possible discrimination.

10Based on these insights, the initial call for papers was intended to bring together various empirical contributions sharing the same focus on work. In many respects, the proposals received proved to be fascinating, covering a wide range of public action fields. And this is a fortiori the case of the publications gathered in this issue: all testify to the same concern to render the different modalities of a public work transformed by digitization. Admittedly, the paths taken by the authors do not cover the full range of envisioned possibilities. The pragmatic or praxeological approach, which would have described activities performed in situ by staff to reconstruct the specific reasoning that accompanies them, has been little explored. Digital tools, which are in many ways intriguing innovations, have mostly been examined from the angle of the promises they are associated with and the uses to which they are actually put, without specific consideration of the process of their design, the expertise mobilized, the choice of processes or materials, the debates raised and the resulting arbitrations in terms of IT, economic or ergonomic choices. On the other hand, the articles gathered here fully capture the depth of the work of agents and users, showing the diversity of possible configurations, the issues at stake and the political and social consequences of digitization policies.

The dual work of agents and users

11This issue explores two distinct aspect of the digitization of public administration and puts them into perspective: on the one hand, the work of agents and the way it is organized within or at distance from public administrations, and on the other, the work willy-nilly performed by users, or their representatives when they delegate this chore to relatives or professionals.

The reconfiguration of bureaucratic work

  • 13 On the difficult identification of users by digital means for online services, or the long work of (...)
  • 14 On this issue and its discussion since the classical works on street level bureaucracy, see Jean-Ma (...)
  • 15 Consider, for example, Annabelle Allouch and Delphine Espagno-Abadie's (2024) investigation into co (...)

12Most often embodied in writing operations for the production of administrative acts or decisions, the work of bureaucrats involves the manipulation of equipment that digital technology modifies in various ways. Sometimes, it shortens processing chains by automating calculations or writing, thereby reducing the number of interventions required to produce robust administrative statements. Sometimes, it lengthens them, because the digitization has led to introduce other procedures designed to ensure the reliability of statements that were thought to be definitive, or to repair simplification measures that turned out to be more complex than anticipated13. In terms of authenticating and interpreting documents, exchanging information with users, keeping records, or making decisions, the digital equipment of administrations potentially affects the day-to-day working practices of civil servants that needs to be investigated (Jonckheere, 2013). Among the cases studied in this issue, we would like to mention Maëlle Moalic-Minnaert, Pauline Seiller, Vassili Rivron and Hélène Marche's study of archivists, who must deal with the digitization of paper documents and supervise the conservation of new electronic archives, or that of immigration application assessors in Italy studied by Daniela Truco, who are forced to work with digital files whose completion is partially automated. The introduction of digital technology shifts the old divisions of labor and professional hierarchies. Remote control, made possible by automatic devices for monitoring and supervising work (indicators, dashboards, statistics, sensors, etc.), has imposed itself to the detriment of older forms of bureaucratic control (such as field visits), inviting us to re-examine the terms of agents' discretionary power, an old question inherent to bureaucratic organization14. It is important to remember that the tension between mass processing and the need to consider each individual case is a permanent feature of governmental departments, and all the more so because they deal with a large number of people. While everyone agrees that industrial management is essential when thousands of cases have to be processed, it would be hard to understand why this rationalization should prevent the close study of individual situations, rendered necessary due to their sometimes singular, complex or strange nature15. Some analyses have thus seen bureaucracy as a vast machinery designed to produce indifference (Herzfeld, 1993). Yet this reduction seems excessive in view of real practices: bureaucratic organization produces a priori as much indifference as concern; and the whole question is to know how the division between the standard and the particular, the general and the singular, the mass and the case, is thought out and regulated in practice with the use of digital technologies. From the invention of the reception desk in the 1960s to the tele-procedures of the 2000s, from the telephone pools of the 1980s to today's chatbots, it is key to analyze the successive organizational responses that mark the history of administration and technologies, describing conceptions and concrete ways of envisaging “personalization” in bureaucracies that are as much mass-based as they are local.

13That's the whole point of the contributions gathered here, as they describe original solutions found locally to address this issue. At the same time, the authors remind us that these responses are also fragile, as they sometimes run against implicit professional ethos and norms, valuing the public’s empowerment and the scrupulous examination of individual situations. In fact, the introduction of digital devices into public services has far from unequivocal effects on agents' relationship to their profession, in that it can both make them reappraise their job or cause them to lose autonomy over case management. The contributions reveal the diversity of these adjustments, through which agents seek to minimize the negative consequences of digitization on their profession – discrimination, loss of meaning, intrusion into users' private lives. Positive appropriations can be seen, for example, in the instrumentation of digital procedures as a support for a learning relationship that professionals engage in with residents suffering from psychiatric disorders in supported housing, as studied by Céline Borelle and Anne-Sylvie Pharabod. Other contributions, however, also point to occasional resistance, such as the reintroduction of orality and paper forms in the Italian immigration services observed by Daniela Trucco. In many respects, digitization represents a challenge that potentially redefines professional territories, between the defense of activities valued as central to the “real job”, and the temptation to delegate digital tasks as “dirty work”, passed to subordinate agents or even the users themselves.

Extra work for the user?

  • 16 The notion of co-production is borrowed from a number of distinct yet overlapping fields of researc (...)
  • 17 The seminal article by Moynihan, Herd and Harvey (2015) conceives administrative burden as the prod (...)
  • 18 For example, on the office of farmers faced with the constraints of administrative management, see (...)

14Certainly, the user does something. However, it is not self-evident to consider the actions he or she performs as a job. In many respects, he or she participates in the assessment of his or her own situation, and intervenes in the decision-making process through interactions with professionals: the literature has long spoken of “co-production” of in this respect16. Why, then, should we consider his or her participation as work, as the literature already describes for consumers (Dujarier, 2008) or Internet users engaged in diversified digital activities (Casilli and Cardon, 2015)? Isn't this going too far, when we remember that the “user” of digital services sometimes seems like an abstract, not to say ectoplasmic, entity, that the promoters of digital administration have turned into a rhetorical figure, if not an ipse dixit, in their own narratives? This issue recommends further investigation. Considering the actions of citizens as work invites us to question the modalities of their involvement, which may well be in the process of changing with the spread of digital technologies. Co-production or participation happen under terms and conditions that deserve scholarly attention, given the relentless work involved in appropriating the Internet and the various digital devices required to reclaim one’s right or meet one's obligations to the state. Yet, despite the exceptional spread of digital practices over the last twenty years, little attention has been paid to the work done by users. There is a growing body of literature on the “administrative burden” placed on users by the complexity of bureaucratic procedures. These studies highlight the social consequences of this burden in terms of access to social benefits and citizens' relations with public administration17. The work of the user is thus undoubtedly political18. Through its cumbersome nature or facilitation, it engenders a more or less distanced and differentiated relationship with the state. But the challenge of describing what this “burden” really means, in context and in the digital age, remains largely unaddressed: how do you file your documents on your computer's hard drive or servers? How do you organize yourselves to keep track of the countless logins and passwords for services we use more or less occasionally? In addition to opening and filing mail, papers and forms, citizens now have to manage e-mails, request PDF files, or even ask for an electronic signature: how do people invent efficient routines to prepare for this? There's the need to buy or to access the required equipment, which may involve a whole range of maintenance activities to carry out digital and, more broadly, administrative tasks: maintenance and updating of computer software and hardware, which often includes a printer, sometimes a scanner, and backup devices (USB key or hard disk) to prevent breakdowns and document loss. As digital uses become more widespread, these numerous and diversified systems continue to develop. In the space of fifteen years, tablets, and above all smartphones, have been added to this range of digital tools. What’s more, these technological developments are part of a prescriptive dynamic: it is less and less about choosing your own media than having to adapt to an unavoidable digitization of services. Whereas citizens used to be able to choose from a variety of contact channels (written, oral, at the counter or remotely), digital access have become the sole option for a growing number of public services. These include monthly registration for jobseekers or tax returns, as well as various procedures that now require online appointments before physical access to a counter. Against this backdrop, the users’ workload seems to be getting heavier with, on the one hand, the increasingly sustained use of digital tools and, on the other, the double effort of maintaining technologies and managing personal and family administrative data. As this work intensifies, we can envisage the emergence of a “digital burden” that adds to or helps redefine what is likely to constitute such an “administrative burden”.

  • 19 Sooner or later, we’ve got to get to it’ is the phrase that would best sum up the general spirit, (...)

15The performance of these various tasks does not univocally affect all citizens. An ethnography of the digital practices of low-income groups has highlighted the worries and irritations generated by the growing importance of online services, alongside undeniable satisfaction19. In some respects, it is accepted that digital transformations have met long-standing demands for simplified procedures, shortening long processing sequences and reducing the number of trips to administrative offices: these gains have undeniably benefited those who are best adapted to digital culture and whose standard situations are in line with automated processing. On the other hand, it is regularly pointed out that this process has operated at the cost of a growing divide between those digitally savvy and the most vulnerable populations, for whom increasing digitization has meant additional hassle, a loss of confidence and more difficult access to their social benefits (Deville, 2023; Okbani et al., 2022). Between these two poles lies a great variety of situations. The contributions of this special issue illustrate different configurations, reminding us that the work done by users in relation to the administration is plural and multi-faceted. More broadly, the papers invite us to consider the wider spectrum of contemporary digital practices (for leisure, health, culture, sociability, etc.) in which people engage, some of which bear undeniably similarity with those involved in administrative procedures (booking appointments online, answering questionnaires and forms, etc.). For example, Marine Al Dahdah and Javed Alam's study of the implementation of the platform state in India shows that digitization requires many adjustments for people living in small villages. In addition to the temporal costs of visiting administrative centers, there are also financial costs resulting from the emergence of multiple ancillary services, such as printing and assistance with paperwork, offered by small private entrepreneurs. In India, digitization thus weakens the access to social services for village populations who are less equipped and less electronically literate, but also fosters the emergence of a parallel market that partially covers the high costs of digitization. Céline Borelle and Anne-Sylvie Pharabod study another audience: the residents of supported housing projects. They point out that managing e-mails and online accounts is just one of the many difficulties these residents face in their dealings with various administrative services, given their social and mental situation (psychiatric disorders). The question of their empowerment is no less important, and knowing how to balance between the necessary learning process and helping them is a real challenge for the employees who support the residents. In the case of the formalities required by the EU Common Agricultural Policy to obtain subsidies, the Spanish farmers studied by Blandine Mesnel are less directly confronted with administrative officials. Indeed, they tend to delegate most of the digital formalities to advisors appointed by banks or trade unions. In all the cases studied in the special issue, the work done by users is not operated in isolation, but is part of a range of activities and social relations that need to be understood, especially when they fall within situations deemed to be extremely vulnerable.

The thickness of socio-technical intermediation

16Between the work of agents and of users, this issue intends to demonstrate the importance of a boundary-space of intermediation that links administrative, associative and commercial players to favor the appropriation and the use of digital tools.

Digitization and reintermediation

  • 20 It's worth pointing out that this observation about digital administration is fully in line with th (...)
  • 21 With regard to the re-intermediation of public action through new “relays”, we draw your attention (...)
  • 22 See for example Laurent Jeanpierre and Olivier Roueff (2014). On the case of public policy, users a (...)

17To attract customers some twenty years ago, a newly-created online bank came up with a catchy slogan: “No counters between us”. Counters may have been removed but powerful mediation infrastructures surely remained, because money does not circulate magically. The same is true of public services and individual rights which are claimed and accessed through a series of unavoidable intermediaries made up of civil servants, counters and offices, files, databases and documentation, as well as volunteers and association workers, advisors and technicians of all kinds. The tangle woven by these multiple material and human entities is worth remembering, despite or precisely because one of the promises of digitization lies in its ability to simplify and reduce bureaucratic operations. In this respect, the contributions gathered here have one common merit: to reassess the alleged disintermediation heralded by the digital transformation20. They show indeed that this did not necessarily mean a closer relationship between the public administration and its users – quite the contrary. Admittedly, the growing intermediation of administrative work is not a new process, and has already been studied in many areas of public action21 - such as culture, health or agriculture22 - where the number of coordination and support activities for administrative operations, taken on by non-profit (Hély, 2009) or commercial organization, is increasing. But it remained to be studied to what extent digital tools contribute to modifying these interventions or fostering their development (Okbani, 2022): it is precisely one of the main contributions of the articles here to specify and analyze the variability of intermediation situations. To characterize them, we might point out that digitization impacts the length of intermediation chains: depending on the situation and the population, the number of people involved may increase, physical distance lengthens, and the number of documents to be completed swells, while in other cases, they shrink. With the emergence of interpretation and assistance services that are flourishing as opportunities to commoditize access to the public administration, the case of the Indian platform state provides an eloquent illustration of this observation. It can be compared with other situations, such as those described in relation to the EU CAP, where applications for subsidies are delegated to specialized advisors mandated by professional organizations or banks. We can also distinguish, among these multiple intermediation activities, their varying degrees of informality. The intermediation work can be carried out by a caregiver or a professional, so that the very nature of support takes on contrasting forms, embracing work routines and habits that necessarily differ according to whether they are governed by domestic or professional logics. Finally, we might consider the role of computational infrastructure in these intermediation practices, and with them the various possibilities of automation. With self-filling forms and decision-support algorithms, the distribution of public services is mediated by technological devices that take on some of the work of writing or classifying, changing what is expected from users with an important work of “verification” or “supervision” of pre-filled numbers in the case of online tax returns.

18The delegation of digital administrative tasks is therefore a two-way street. It doesn't just concern civil servants, who tend to delegate part of this digital work to non-state organizations. It may also concern users, who entrust third parties with some of this tedious work, even if it means that the specificities of their situations would not be considered or their privacy not so much protected. Contrary to the promises of digital empowerment, some citizens see this third sector as an opportunity to get rid of administrative chores that digitization has sometimes made even more burdensome. Unlike some unequivocal conclusions on digitization as a factor of State’s privatization (Jeannot & Cottin-Marx, 2022), this issue highlights the multiple forms of delegation to an interstitial space developing between administrations and households, in which non-for-profit organizations as well as commercial firms are involved. Moreover, delegation to the private sector is not always synonymous with a reduction in the influence of the State, whose agents develops new tools to supervise the activities of those intermediaries, notably through the use of digital technology (Rivet, 2023). The aim of this issue is thus to describe this interstitial space, which includes both public IT markets and new professional territories, and the objects and exchanges that run through it, with various actors and their multiple relationships.

Investigating the “interfaces” between administrations and their public

19Because intermediation chains have changed, sometimes becoming longer or more complex, and because intermediation situations are increasingly varied, investigating administrative work and its digitization presents a methodological challenge for social science researchers. The aim is to capture the full breadth of interventions, whether social or technical, that contribute to the successful completion of administrative procedures. In order to study these interfaces of digital work, the authors of this issue have often chosen to focus on a particular administration – national archives, support housing or immigration services - in order to study the complex configurations within which the digitization of these domains of public action unfolds. From note-taking to data management, from reading files to making decisions using sophisticated software, from assisting users to responding to them, the work of agents is the thread that runs through their papers. Ethnographic fieldwork, as an approach favored by the contributions, has the merit of restoring, through detailed observations and interviews, the diversity and nature of these activities and the interactions they entail with users. Admittedly, the methodology used by each author may differ, depending on the precision of description or the place occupied by material objects in the reconstructions. Admittedly, the specific nature of the activity duly observed - in this case, legal action - only appears in the background, at the risk of being diluted in the context of the phenomenon we are seeking to understand, even though it is an essential element. Admittedly, the choice of authors favors the viewpoint of agents rather than users, so that the latter's experience of broader digital practices remains a blind spot. But it is important to underline the nature of the challenge facing any researcher concerned with providing an empirical insight on these situations: describing the digitization of the administration in the context of work is no easy task.

20The importance of intermediation that emerges from this special issue opens up new avenues of exploration that could further improve our understanding of the impacts and meanings of digital transformation of the State. For example, one could take an even closer look at technological devices used by administrative agents and users alike. In fact, the screenshots sometimes chosen by the authors of this issue to illustrate their argument only partly capture the technical thickness that surrounds access to public rights and services. Although these digital devices sometimes appear self-evident, the role of academic research is to question their deployment, in order to measure the progress of digitization, which is gradually restricting the modalities of access to the State. The aim is to better record the visual and textual memory of administrative technological interfaces, their design, ergonomics and practical constraints. Through the notion of intermediation, we can only invite future work to empirically investigate these “boundary objects” (Star & Griesemer, 1989) that circulate between public administration and citizens, and enable the translation and classification of each situations, whether it's electronic devices - from smartphones to shared scanners - computer standards - such as .pdf or .csv - or the various software layers that make up online platforms.

21Another venue to further explore is user’s experience of the state. If digitization affects the length of intermediation chains and contributes, as Blandine Mesnel's study of farmers shows, to increasing the feeling of greater distance to the state, one should test this hypothesis more widely. This could also extend the recent theoretical proposal by Marie Alauzen and Fabien Gélédan to study the modalities of state presence (Alauzen & Gélédan, 2021), between “spectacular” tests of opposition and the “spectral” presence of the administration, where the state obliterates itself by intervening through a variety of social and technical intermediaries. What would the generalization of a “digital” relationship with the State mean? What possibilities for negotiation, contestation and, more generally, political action do these new interfaces offer citizens? While archivists hope that digitization will encourage the circulation of public documents, and thus provide greater transparency on the part of the State, it is also clear that the pre-filling of forms and the automation of interactions can just as easily reduce citizens' room for manoeuvre. To what extent, then, does digital technology accentuate state violence, expressed both through technical methods of control and surveillance, and through increasingly rigid IT categories, that could expand inequalities and exclusion of vulnerable population?

Summary of the special issue

22With these thoughts and perspectives in mind, the special issue brings together five articles, each proposing an original way of exploring administrative work and digital technology.

23The first paper analyzes the recent Indian platform-state program in the light if information infrastructures and technology studies. Marine Al Dahdah and Javed Alam take a closer look at the case of the Common Service Centers (CSC), which have been developed to offer a whole range of electronic services in villages, in education, health, medicine, banking, etc., based on public-private partnerships. They carry out an extensive survey in two separate regions (Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu), interviewing 50 employees and 250 users. The results show that the CSC as new intermediaries have played a decisive role and have become indispensable, but at the cost of numerous limitations for village populations.

24The second contribution extends this focus on market players’ intermediation between the public and the administration, through the case of Spanish farmers studied by Blandine Mesnel. The research explores the role of private mediators who take charge of administrative procedures, replacing the work of users and, to some extent, that of local administrations, which have been relieved of their support and advisory missions.

25The third contribution stands out for the specificities of the population under study, in this case people in assisted housing, enrolled in a rehabilitation program for mental disorders. How, in this context, can we think about assistance with administrative formalities? Céline Borelle and Anne-Sylvie Pharabod focus their attention on the work of the staff, who intervene according to a dual logic of assistance and care-giving: how do these two modalities of action fit in with the necessary empowerment of residents? How do they combine, given the normative horizons in tension (personal data management, boundaries between work and non-work, etc.)?

26The fourth article looks at the discretionary power of Immigration service officers in Italy. Daniela Trucco shows how the reconfiguration of their work (downsizing, automation, etc.) contributes to reducing the margins of interpretation, and describes the strategies deployed in response by these professionals, who see their power and the professional identity disappear.

27Finally, the fifth contribution looks at changes in the work of archivists. Maëlle Moalic-Minnaert, Pauline Seiller, Vassili Rivron and Hélène Marche show how the digitization of public documents affects agents differently, depending on their status and professional socialization. The old division of labor within departments, based on the historical periods of the collections (“ancient and modern archives” versus “contemporary archives”), is now being replaced by divisions of labor dependent on the digital environment. However, not all positions occupied in this professional space are equal: as the archivist's missions expand, professional hierarchies are being established (or reaffirmed), according to different scales of professional legitimacy.

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Notes

1 Examples of French journal published in recent years include Réseaux's special issue on local authorities and digital government (2019, no. 218), Gouvernement et Action Publique's issue on IT systems in the social sector (2015, vol. 2, no. 4), Revue française des affaires sociales's issue on big data in social protection (no. 4-2017), and Revue française d'administration publique's issue on the production and use of public data (2018, no. 167).

2 As human-computer interaction researchers Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper put it more than twenty years ago in their analysis of the “myth of the paperless office” (Sellen & Harper, 2003).

3 Even before the digital administration projects mentioned above, sociological papers highlighted the link between the microcomputer's initial pre-eminence in the workplace and its slow domestication in the home (Gollac & Kramarz, 2000). A number of studies have also documented how microcomputers and Minitels found their way into farmers' homes from the late 1980s onwards, in connection with accounting and administrative activities - not without causing tensions within couples over their use (see Rieu, 1993).

4 On anthropological considerations relating to the role of writing forms in the production of political knowledge, administrative knowledge and bureaucracies, see Jack Goody (1986), and especially chapter 3 of this book: “The State, the Office and the File”.

5 Regarding the case of the British administration, see for example (Agar, 2003). More generally on the issue of administrative categorization associated with the individuals concerned and their legal consequences in the case of racial (re)classification in South Africa during the Apartheid regime, see Geoffrey Bowker & Susan L. Star (1999), chapter 6.

6 See Delphine Gardey's summary of this general history of information processing in public administration (2008).

7 With the Minitel, citizens experimented for the first time with remote interactions, including access to information and administrative documents, the “electronic” modalities of which would continue to expand (3615 VosDroits, 3615 Ravel, etc.). On the project and the development of Minitel in France, see Valérie Schafer and Benjamin Thierry (2012).

8 On this phenomenon and the resilience of early online services, see Éric Dagiral (2007).

9 For case studies on an urban planning agency or various public administrations, see Matthew Hull (2012) and Jean-Marc Weller (2018a) respectively.

10 On how a variety of sociological approaches - STS in particular - problematize and capture workers grappling with digital “data”, see the synthesis proposed by Jérôme Denis (2018).

11 On this example, see Christian Licoppe and Sylvaine Tuncer (2019), Camille Capelle (2010) and Christian Licoppe (2006).

12 The study of street-level bureaucrats has emerged as a particularly active field of research over the past twenty years. On the two cases mentioned, see respectively Jean-Marie Pillon (2016), and Vincent Dubois, Morgane Paris and Pierre-Edouard Weill (2018).

13 On the difficult identification of users by digital means for online services, or the long work of cadastral digitization with a prospect of “greening” agricultural policy, see respectively Marie Alauzen (2019) and Léo Magnin (2019).

14 On this issue and its discussion since the classical works on street level bureaucracy, see Jean-Marc Weller (2024).

15 Consider, for example, Annabelle Allouch and Delphine Espagno-Abadie's (2024) investigation into complaints and challenges to French algorithmic system for allocating places to universities, Parcoursup, which examines criticisms from various users, whether teachers, high school students or parents.

16 The notion of co-production is borrowed from a number of distinct yet overlapping fields of research, which this note can only rapidly introduce. Originally coined in the United States in the 1970s in the field of service businesses, it emphasizes the importance of involving the customer in the process of developing the service he or she is receiving. At the turn of the 1990s, a whole body of literature in French-speaking countries referred to it as an essential element of the service relationship, to characterize local administrative relations, often in reference to the interactionist model of reparation posited by Goffman in Asylums (1968), and to investigate the managerial reconfigurations of the administrative relationship. At the same time, the notion was also being used in political sociology, in connection with citizen participation in the definition of public policies and the possible contribution of users to the running of institutions, in the name of a renewed democracy that was being questioned (Godbout, 1987). Finally, the notion is also used in the literature on innovation to study the design process, during which user participation takes on variable forms (Oudshoorn & Pinch, 2003), and is more widely mobilized by STS to designate the diversity of knowledge mobilized by Sheila Jasanoff (2004).

17 The seminal article by Moynihan, Herd and Harvey (2015) conceives administrative burden as the product of learning, compliance and psychological “costs” borne by users in their exchanges with the administration. For a critical discussion of this work, particularly with regard to the vagueness surrounding the assessment of these costs, see Baekgaard and Tankink (2022).

18 For example, on the office of farmers faced with the constraints of administrative management, see Jean-Marc Weller (2018b).

19 Sooner or later, we’ve got to get to it’ is the phrase that would best sum up the general spirit,” concludes sociologist Dominique Pasquier at the end of her survey of internet usage among modest families living in rural areas (2018: 195).

20 It's worth pointing out that this observation about digital administration is fully in line with the numerous analyses carried out in economic sociology based on fieldwork in market sectors: while the emergence of the Internet is generally accompanied by an initial movement of opening up, “it is always accompanied by a symmetrical movement of re-intermediation: certain players gradually come to occupy important positions in the new market configuration” (Beuscart et al., 2019: 181-182).

21 With regard to the re-intermediation of public action through new “relays”, we draw your attention to the special issue of the journal Gouvernement et Action Publique on the activities of professionals at the margins of public action (Frau & Taiclet, 2021). It should be noted that the various contributions in this issue of Gouvernement et Action Publique do not really raise the question of “digital” relays.

22 See for example Laurent Jeanpierre and Olivier Roueff (2014). On the case of public policy, users and the principle of proximity that is supposed to inspire social bureaucracies, see Jean-Marc Weller (2003).

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Anne Bellon, Éric Dagiral et Jean-Marc Weller, « Public administration and digital technologies at work »RESET [En ligne], 14 | 2024, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2024, consulté le 21 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/reset/5881 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13bn2

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Auteurs

Anne Bellon

Université de Technologie de Compiègne (UTC), COSTECH, Institut universitaire de France (2024-2029)

Articles du même auteur

Éric Dagiral

Université Paris Cité, CERLIS

Articles du même auteur

Jean-Marc Weller

CNRS, LISIS

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