CERGAS Seminar "Towards a platformised welfare state? How public administration, personal data, and third-sector welfare get entangled in a nation-wide digitalisation project"

In the era of digital governance, the concept of “government as a platform” (GaaP) has gained significant attention. This article studies the implementation of this concept, taking the German ‘social service platform’ as a case study. The catalyst for the development of this public platform has been the German Online Access Act (Online-Zugangs-Gesetz or OZG), which marks a pivotal moment in the country’s government digitalization efforts. Employing the analytical toolkit of the Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), the article studies the sociotech-nical processes shaping the evolution of this platform. It provides a thick description of the dynamics of translating generic ideas into an already existing landscape of institutions and technologies and explores how, through the actors’ interpretations, their negotiations, and their interactions with technologies, both ideas of traditional welfare governance (subsidiari-ty, welfare pluralism, and executive federalism) and ideas related to the platform concept (agility, user-centered design, once-only) are continuously redefined throughout the process.

 

Reference

Einhaus, Maximilian & Tanja Klenk (2024): Towards a platformised welfare state? How public administration, personal data, and third-sector welfare get entangled in a na-tion-wide digitalisation project, dms – der moderne staat, Vol. 17, Issue 1/2024, 4–25 https://doi.org/10.3224/dms.v17i1.02

 

Tanja Klenk has been a professor of public administration at Helmut Schmidt University Ham-burg since 2017 and previously served as a professor of the theory and empirics of healthcare at the University of Kassel. Her current research primarily focuses on the digital transfor-mation of the welfare state: How does the introduction of portals and platforms change the governance and organisation of public service provision? What influence does digitalization have on leadership and working conditions in public administration? And how can innovations succeed in the public sector?

Tanja’s work has been published in Public Administration Review, European Policy Analysis, Administration & Society, Public Management Review, and European Jour-nal of Social Security, and dms – der mo-derne Staat. She is speaker of the issue net-work ‘Digitalization and social service pro-vision’ of the DIFIS (German institute for in-terdisciplinary social policy research) and co-leader of a third-party funded research on digitalization of public services in rural eras (smart&agile).