Automated Discretion

Digital Discretion: Unpacking Human and Technological Agency in Automated Decision Making in Sweden’s Social Services

“…These communication modes are used in a process governed by rules and procedures that are carefully built into the technology. This process safeguards fair and uniform decision making (Zouridis et al, 2020). At Trelleborg, RPA alone makes about one third of the decisions.…”

“…The streamlined digital process at Trelleborg developed several years before digitalization was introduced. Digital discretion in form of streamlining means less internal processing and increased efficiency (Zouridis et al, 2020). By 2019, when RPA was well-established, the caseworkers were less involved in the application decisions.…”

“…In contrast to more theoretical perspectives (cf. Bullock, 2019;Young et al, 2019;Zouridis et al, 2020), our empirical study addresses the lack of digital discretion in automated decision making in social services. This context centers on individual clients' encounters with automated services (De Witte et al, 2016;Petersen et al, 2020).…”

Port Community System Business Models

“…The system level bureaucrat, on the other hand, regards the current state of the data itself, as aggregated in a spatial data infrastructure, and applies business rules and standards in digital services to achieve the consensus policy goals and adapts the outcome of case decisions to the dynamic status of the data for each individual case. The assessment process is increasingly being automated by standard business rules in the balancing algorithms (Zouridis et al, 2020). This would be fine if all the translation steps were verifiable and could be validated by policy makers.…”

Designing Call to Action: Users’ Perception of Different Characteristics

“…On the one hand, we adhere to the definition of Lipsky (1980) of a street level bureaucrat: "a public employee that deals directly with citizens in the course of their jobs, and who have substantial discreation in the execution of their work." On the other hand, we adhere to the definition of Zouridis, van Eck & Bovens (2020) of a system level bureaucracy/bureaucrat: "the discretionary powers of the street-level professionals have been disciplined by digital systems, and the locus of administrative discretion has shifted to those responsible for programming the decision-making process and translating the legislation into software".…”