In the Nordic countries, the boundary between public and private has become obscure when public services are provided in this borderland. In the digitalization of services, the heterogenous assemblages of actors who design new technologies become shapers of society. When AI policy puts new pressures on the public sector, our hypothesis is that the government, municipalities, private software companies, and private service providers want to harness the employment service system to generate data to serve their own needs. In the paper, delivered in the Nordic STS conference in Oslo, we asked:
1.What kind of administrative and economic interests do different actors have in the digitalization of employment services?
2.How do technological, political, economic, and legislative boundaries and conditions drive actors in the service design?
Drawing on actor-network theories and the recent discussions of datafication, we examine how the actors, implement and benefit the state’s fast-paced digitization and digitalization policy through employment services. In our preliminary analysis, we found the following official and hidden agendas of data collection:
- to promote employment and access to training
- to modernize and develop the employment services
- to boost knowledge management systems in private and public sectors
- to foresee the employment prospects
- to make administration more efficient
- to make it possible to develop AI-based services in the future
- to promote the business opportunities of Finnish software companies
The collection of research material is still continuing, so the actual analysis of the data will start at the end of the summer.
Teräsahde, S., Parviainen, J., Rantala, J., Alanen, P. & Koski, A. (2023) Datafication in public self-services – Hidden agendas on data providing systems in employment services. Paper presentation, the 6th Nordic STS Conference, Disruption and Repair in and beyond STS, the University of Oslo, 7-9 June 2023.