Smart Technology and the Emergence of Algorithmic Bureaucracy: Artificial Intelligence in UK Local Authorities

• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Author: Thomas M. Vogl,Cathrine Seidelin,Bharath Ganesh,Jonathan Bright
• Date: 01 November 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13286

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 80, Iss. 6, pp. 946–961. © 2020 The

Authors. Public Administration Review

published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. on

behalf of The American Society for Public

Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13286.

946 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Thomas M. Vogl

University of Oxford

IT University of Copenhagen

University of Groningen

Bharath Ganesh is a media studies

scholar focusing on new media, political

communication, governance, and cultures

of hate and intolerance online using

computational and qualitative methods.

Email: b.ganesh@rug.nl

Cathrine Seidelin is a PostDoc at the

Computer Science Department at IT

University of Copenhagen. She studies data-

related work practices in multi-stakeholder

environments and explores how data may

become a design medium.

Email: cfre@itu.dk

Thomas M. Vogl is a researcher interested

in public administration, organizational

studies, and digital change.

Email: thomas.vogl@oii.ox.ac.uk

Research

Symposium:

Transformation

of Government in

the Era of Smart

Technology

Smart Technology and the Emergence of Algorithmic

Bureaucracy: Artificial Intelligence in UK Local Authorities

Abstract: In recent years, local authorities in the UK have begun to adopt a variety of “smart” technological changes

to enhance service delivery. These changes are having profound impacts on the structure of public administration.

Focusing on the particular case of artificial intelligence, specifically autonomous agents and predictive analytics, a

combination of desk research, a survey questionnaire, and interviews were used to better understand the extent and

nature of these changes in local government. Findings suggest that local authorities are beginning to adopt smart

technologies and that these technologies are having an unanticipated impact on how public administrators and

computational algorithms become imbricated in the delivery of public services. This imbrication is described as

algorithmic bureaucracy, and it provides a framework within which to explore how these technologies transform both

the socio-technical relationship between workers and their tools, as well as the ways that work is organized in the

public sector.

Evidence for Practice

• A new form of bureaucratic organization enabled by computational algorithms is beginning to emerge in

local authorities.

• Autonomous agents can assist citizens with their service needs, but they can also be used to help public

administrators to carry out their tasks.

• People using smart technologies in local authority service provision are attempting to deal with complexity

not by simplifying problems into set procedures, but through adaptive predictive algorithmic models that

can learn from new inputs and changes in conditions.

• When introducing new computational algorithms, practitioners should identify the relevant social groups

that are impacted by its implementation, understand the contextual implications from their perspectives,

and leverage internal capacity as much as possible in order to address local needs and challenges about which

outsiders may not be aware.

In the past decades, local governments have

developed digital information technology (IT)

infrastructures, which create an environment

that allows for the development of new applications

to support efficient digital service delivery. However,

these innovative possibilities create new socio-

technical challenges (Rodríguez, Pedro, and López-

Quiles 2018). This article focuses on the adoption of

new technologies that are enabled by computational

algorithms in local authorities, in particular looking

at autonomous agents and decision assistance

tools. It explores how computational algorithmic

technologies offer an opportunity to enhance

Weberian machine bureaucracy whilst preserving

key public sector values of fairness, impartiality, and

standardization (Cordella and Tempini 2015). In

this way, these types of tools could have profound

impacts on the structure of public administration in

local authorities.

Whilst smart technology could easily be interpreted

as a “neat and stylish term,” smart technology,

in this article, is understood as computational

algorithmic tools that are programmed so as to

be capable of some independent action, whereby

they are quick at learning and are able to react

or respond intelligently to their informational

environment, including differing requirements,

varying situations, or past events (Oxford English

Dictionary 2019). Following this definition, we

refer to autonomous agents and predictive analytics

decision assistance tools as smart technology. Four

key questions guide this research: (1) To what extent

are smart technologies being adopted in UK local

authorities? (2) What are the characteristics of these

technologies? (3) What are the ways in which smart

technology integrates into the organization of work

in local authority public administration settings? (4)

What are the implications of this change for how

Cathrine Seidelin

Bharath Ganesh

Jonathan Bright is a Senior Research

Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute,

specializing in the study of digital politics

and government.

Email: jonathan.bright@oii.ox.ac.uk

Jonathan Bright

University of Oxford

Smart Technology and the Emergence of Algorithmic Bureaucracy: Articial Intelligence in UK Local Authorities 947

we conceptualize the study of public administration in the era of

smart technologies?

This study suggests that smart technologies are at an early, but

foundational, stage of adoption in local authorities and argues

that smart technologies add a new element to the socio-technical

organization of public administration in local authorities. It

is not just a shift from street-level to system-level discretion

(Bovens and Zouridis 2002). Instead, where there is a shift to

the system level, multiple stakeholders, representing different

relevant social groups with different forms of knowledge

and perspectives (Vogl 2020a), are involved in design and

implementation (Pinch and Bijker 1987). Where a tool in use

remains at the street level, attention is needed to how smart

technology mediates informational feedback loops and collective

intelligence. Based on these results, this article then contributes

to public administration studies by offering a socio-technical

framework for the continued study of smart technologies in

public administration.

Administrative systems have a long history of evolution in

response to the demands of modernity. Machine bureaucracy

embedded ideals of impartiality, procedural fairness, and

efficiency in a hierarchy of rule-governed offices supported

by files, an enhancement over previous systems, such as

patrimonialism (Weber 1968). However, since the middle

of the twentieth century, commentators have questioned the

ability of traditional bureaucracy to deal with the increasing

complexity of modernity and have worried about undesirable

inertia (Elgin and Bushnell 1977). Scholars began to argue

about new approaches to public administration (Pollitt and

Bouckaert 2011), some of which focused on an approach

that emerged in the 1980s and came to be known as New

Public Management (Lynn 2001), which was characterized

by managerialism and the use of market mechanisms, such as

outsourcing, as a means to overcome some of the challenges

associated with modern complexity and make government more

efficient (Hood 1995).

In parallel with New Public Management changes, there were

advancements in the development of IT that were impacting

the infrastructure of public administration (Margetts 1999),

in particular, the development of the internet as a means

to communicate information quickly between computers

(Naughton 2001). These changes had begun much earlier with

the introduction of computation (Simon 1973; Wilkins 1968),

and scholars realized that “[t]o design effective decision-making

organizations, we must understand the structure of the decisions

to be made; and we must understand the decision-making tools at

our disposal, both human and mechanical - men and computers”

(Simon 1973, 272). Unfortunately, whilst some had made early

predictions of the valuable role that computation would play in

decision support (Danziger and Kraemer 1985; Hadden 1986;

Hurley and Wallace 1986), there was a period where it was seen to

have been woefully neglected in the study of public administration

(Dunleavy et al. 2006; Pollitt 2011), with only a select few scholars

suggesting IT was changing the fundamental paradigm of public

administration to one with digitalization at its core (Dunleavy et

al. 2006).

More recently, there is renewed interest in the impact of new

developments in IT on the very structure of public administration

(Agarwal 2018; Margetts and Dorobantu 2019). Where written

rules and procedures are not fast enough and there are too

many for people to remember, algorithms are seen as a way to

provide support. Some research has begun to look at how more

sophisticated algorithms that rely on a foundation of computation,

administrative data collection, and information communication

create new ways to use data in public administration (Allard

et al. 2018; Mergel, Rethemeyer, and Isett 2016), though not always

for the better (Lavertu 2016). Other research suggests that smart

technologies could displace work through automation (Bovens and

Zouridis 2002). However, algorithms may do more than improve

analytics and automation; they may also change the nature of public

administration.

With the emergence of smart technology, this article suggests that

a new model of bureaucratic administration is combining people,

computational algorithms, and machine-readable electronic files

and forms to deal with complexity and overcome some of the

limitations of traditional bureaucracy, whilst preserving core public

sector values (Vogl et al. 2019). This change necessitates a new

framework within which to structure research of digital public

administration. In the following section, we situate the concept of

smart technology broadly within technological change and then

within public administration, highlighting lacunae in the current

literature on technology in local authorities. We will then set out the

approach we took to explore the current state of smart technology in

local authorities and its impact on the way public administration is

organized, which includes a survey and two illustrative case studies.

Following that, we present the results of the research, discuss their

implications, and conclude.

Theory

This study is situated in the context of evolutionary theories of

digital government progress, and the associated theories around a

shift from street- to system-level bureaucracy and from values of

procedural equality to equality of outcomes. These three constructs

are elaborated below.

Historically, changes through digitization were seen as the

prerogative of central government, with smaller orders of

government lacking the skills and capacity to deliver major

technological change (Dunleavy et al. 2006). Some scholars

suggested that as digital changes progressed, the environment

would evolve to include greater digitization in, first, state, or

regional, and then local government (Gil-Garcia and Martinez-

Moyano 2007). Some began to test this hypothesis in the context

of websites in municipalities (Moon 2002). Whilst IT may have

been more centralized early on, with those closer to local matters

less IT intensive, this has begun to change (Malomo and Sena 2017;

Rodríguez, Pedro, and López-Quiles 2018). In the UK, with

austerity and digital strategies, local authorities are looking for

efficiencies using technology and there are diverse approaches across

the country (Bright et al. 2019; Dencik et al. 2018; Symons 2016).

Whilst some comment on the persistent challenges that local

authorities face (Fischer et al. 2019; Malomo and Sena 2017), there

appear to be examples where local authorities are charting a new

course through the use of smart technologies. Despite this renewed