Assembling the Case

Abstract

This study examines caseworkers' and citizens' interactions when assembling resource development applications for citizens with serious health and personal issues. As with other types of welfare schemes, the application serves as a mechanism of both support and control. From our study, we illustrate how an increased reliance on data is transforming the citizen-caseworker interaction in social welfare. We characterize this transformation as 'datafication': a phenomenon where the increased reliance on data for decision-support across contexts of data production makes it challenging for individual citizens to contest or correct data-born accounts of their situation. Our contribution is two-fold: first, we empirically characterize the citizen-caseworker interaction in the application process. Second, we discuss how citizens' private resourcing complements the formal application process and provides them with strategies to give authority to their case and exercise personal autonomy. The private resourcing practices we observed show how integrating supplementary accounts from citizens into the systems that caseworkers rely on could make citizens' experiences and social context legible. This in turn has policy and technology design implications as public services increasingly introduce data-driven modes of case management.

Resisting Resolution: Enterprise Civic Systems Meet Community Organizing

“…In terms of the human component, the more widespread practice of datafication, where people become rendered as data and made legible to computational systems of governance has begun to have impact on a range of government and community-led projects [55][56][57][58][59]. When applied to social services, this process introduces new forms of highly tuned oversight on populations most frequently unable to contest the veracity of their own representations or the consequences that result [60].…”

EcoKnow

“…The EcoKnow project brings together researchers, municipalities, representatives for case workers, key industrial partners, digitalisation consultants and lawyers, collaborating in research and development of methods for co-creation and technologies for analysis of process logs and adaptive case management. The development is based on previous research in case management work practices [28] based on ethnographic studies, and adaptive case management technologies based on Dynamic Condition Response (DCR) Graphs (see e.g. [13-16, 25, 26, 36, 38, 52, 56]).…”

“…One finding of the ethnographic studies is that there is a difference to the classes of public service systems that are digitalised and how they transform the citizen-government interaction [28]: One class of systems is where civic services and interfaces are moved into digital forms and often take on the characterisation of policy implementation and enforcement (e.g. enabling public departments as they set policy and govern).…”

“…In the second case, the citizen is acted upon as professionals assess the effects of different programs (or treatments), and choose services based on the collected evidence of progress toward some resolution to the underlying condition (Ibid). What we learn from the study in [28] is that the different logics of systems for support of public services differ and in order to achieve the benefits of digitalisation, it is critical that we consider this difference, as we move forward to develop case management systems.…”

Data-Driven Futures of International Refugee Law

“…particularly valuable, not only as a means to ensure dialogue and a practice-oriented engagement for our research, but also in terms of probing how data and data categories are continuously produced by both authorities and non-state actors within RSD processes, and how this impacts decision-making processes(Møller et al 2019;Møller and Nielsen 2022).…”