Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
ICTs are helping to install a virtual state, whereby
citizens become more marginal to its operations
(Frissen 1999). Along similar lines, Bovens and
Zouridis (2002) argue that the evolution of IT
systems to progressively automate administrative
processes has involved an associated evolution of
public sector agencies. They argue that original
street level bureaucracies
, in which front-line
public servants make administrative decisions
within the legislative framework and with the
support of ICT, have transformed to
screen-level
bureaucracies
, in which ICT leads the activity
of government officials whose administrative
discretion is reduced as it becomes codified. This
is then argued to be replaced by
system-level
bureaucracies
, in which front-line government
officials become superseded by an integrated and
all-encompassing, automated IT system. Bovens
and Zouridis see system-level bureaucracies
generating significant constitutional challenges
arising from the complete automation of policy
and the displacement of street-level bureaucrats
by automated and codified organisational opera-
tions. While this author does not fully embrace
these somewhat dystopia analyses, they do raise
considerable insights about the contribution of
ICTs in subtle reconfigurations of social and
public policy, governmental power and the nature
of citizenship.
that “technologies of government” can give rise
to new “political rationalities”. This theoretical
framework was deployed in examining the use
of ICTs in Australia's national welfare delivery
agency, Centrelink, where the widespread and
varied nature of ICT use is clear.
While ICTs are often seen as instrumental, in
that they implement the dreams and ambitions
of those who seek to govern, this chapter has
sought to stimulate a critical approach to ICTs as
a mechanism of governing that has power effects.
Indeed, it was demonstrated that ICTs have been
an important component in the reconfiguration
of social policies. Increasingly, universal social
policies are being individualized through targeted
and conditional policies. Such developments are
neither unambiguously good nor ill, but provide
significant positive and negative elements. On the
positive side, such policies enable governments
to maximize the effectiveness of their policies
and their resource investments by focusing more
directly on those populations that are seen to need
more direct and intensive intervention. On the
negative side, such policies tend to neglect the
social dimensions underlying social problems, and
may lay the blame and responsibility for addressing
them on the individual. Moreover, targeted policies
necessarily involve inequality of treatment, which
itself can improve policy outcomes, but may also
exacerbate social divisions. Targeted policies also
imply targeted forms of surveillance. The use of
ICTs in social and public policy also raises ques-
tions about the nature of contemporary government
and citizenship. Some authors provide dystopian
images of systemic control and surveillance by
the state. Such accounts may well be too extreme,
but they can point to significant transformations
in government and citizenship which might oth-
erwise be too subtle to detect.
The main message of this chapter is that ICTs
are central to the practice of contemporary poli-
tics and power in a manner that simultaneously
alleviates and adds to social problems.
concluSion
It has been argued in this chapter that ICTs play
an important role in the development and delivery
of social policy. The governmentality framework
has provided a way in which to understand ICTs
as a component in governmental practices. Such
an approach firstly highlights that ICTs can be
understood as a mechanism in governing individu-
als and populations. While such “technologies of
government” are often understood as implement-
ing “political rationalities” as expressed through
public and social policies, it was also demonstrated
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