The Nodality Disconnect of Data-Driven Government

• Author: Walter Castelnovo,Maddalena Sorrentino
• DOI: 10.1177/0095399721998689
• Published date: 01 October 2021
• Date: 01 October 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0095399721998689

Administration & Society

2021, Vol. 53(9) 1418 –1442

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/0095399721998689

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Article

The Nodality Disconnect

of Data-Driven

Government

Walter Castelnovo1

and Maddalena Sorrentino2

Abstract

We must ask critical questions regarding what actors are gaining influence,

and regarding why the centrality of government is to be preserved in a data-

intensive society. The article recognizes that the transformative capacity of

big data—and its artificial intelligence (AI)-based companion data analytics—

does not deterministically result from the technologies concerned. Instead,

the direction of change depends on both the technical features and the

intertwining of big data applications and governmental machinery. In short,

the reconfiguration of the government nodality remains an open question.

Overall, government is urged to think strategically about its future role

within digital ecosystems.

Keywords

big data, government nodality, cybernetic governance, evidence-based

policymaking, citizens’ segmentation

Introduction

The reliance on information and communications technology (ICT) in policy-

making and in service delivery has been a focal point in public administration,

policy studies, and public management for many years, at least since the work

1University of Insubria, Como, Italy

2University of Milan, Italy

Corresponding Author:

Walter Castelnovo, Department of Human Sciences, Innovation and Territory, University of

Insubria, via Oriani, 6, 22100 Como, Italy.

Email: walter.castelnovo@uninsubria.it

998689AASXXX10.1177/0095399721998689Administration & SocietyCastelnovo and Sorrentino

research-article2021

Castelnovo and Sorrentino 1419

undertaken by Dutton and Kraemer in the 1970s (Dutton & Kraemer, 1977;

Kraemer & Dutton, 1979). Traditionally, each of these disciplines has consid-

ered information to be a means by which to support governments’ activities

for achieving public purposes (Desouza & Jacob, 2017; Dunleavy et al., 2006;

Eggers et al., 2017; Salamon, 2002; Sun & Medaglia, 2019).

Nowadays, government’s deployment of the latest technological develop-

ments, primarily artificial intelligence (AI) and big data techniques (Bright &

Margetts, 2016; Clarke & Margetts, 2014; Giest, 2017; Kim et al., 2014;

McNeely & Hahm, 2014), in numerous settings, reinforces the belief that ICT

has the potential to affect public administrations as “information-dependent”

institutions (Fleer, 2018). Of particular interest are the data-driven decision-

making tools (most notably, big data) available to public agencies at present

(Mattingly-Jordan, 2018). Thanks to powerful analytics algorithms relying

more and more on AI and machine learning, which make it possible to extract

insights from large, heterogeneous, structured, and unstructured data sets,

these tools are expected to affect how governments (broadly considered, that

is, without distinction between institutional levels, policy areas, and national

and cultural contexts) work and alter the same nature of politics (Cukier &

Mayer-Schoenberger, 2013).

In current discourse, big data are portrayed as offering greater precision

and predictive powers with which to improve efficiency, safety, wealth gen-

eration, or resource management (Kim et al., 2014; Manyika et al., 2011).

More critical commentators, however, have begun to draw attention to

“socioeconomic, cultural, and political shifts that underlie the phenomenon

of big data, and that are, in turn, enabled by it” (Ekbia et al., 2015, p. 1527;

Lupton, 2015). Algorithmic profiling, the impact on the right of equal treat-

ment, and the dominant position of big internet companies are the areas in

which observers identify blind spots in the emerging governance landscape

(Royakkers et al., 2018). Thus, there is an urgent need for wider (systemic)

reflection on both the promise and the problems of big data in public gover-

nance (Desouza & Jacob, 2017; Ingrams, 2019; McNeely & Hahm, 2014).

With this in mind, the present article conceptually seeks to better under-

stand whether, and on what basis, embedding big data in public action can

really have a transformative effect on government, as seems to be implied by

the mainstream literature (McAfee et al., 2012; Mergel et al., 2016), by ask-

ing the following: What, if any, is the contribution of big data to the transfor-

mation of the role of government in a data-intensive society?

In trying to answer this question, the article extends past scholarly work

to the linkages between “the digital” and government. It does so by offering

a framework of analysis that refers to the “orders of change” in system

development (Baptista et al., 2020; Bartunek & Moch, 1987; Kuipers et al.,