Morten Hjelholt

Digitalizing the welfare state: citizenship discourses in Danish digitalization strategies from 2002 to 2015

ABSTRACT As governments worldwide become increasingly reliant on digital technologies and e-government, ‘digital citizenship’ has become an important topic for research and policy-makers alike. While often described as the contemporary ‘ideal’ of citizenship, research has tended to downplay the normative dimensions of digital citizenship. Counter to such depoliticized approaches, this article argues that the digital citizen is a deeply political figure. Through a discourse-theoretical analysis of Danish governmental digitalization strategies from 2002 to 2015, the article shows how these have relied on a very particular image of the digital citizen. More specifically, we showcase how this figure has reproduced neoliberal conceptions of subjectivity, concerned with efficiency, productivity, individualization and collective responsibilization. By shedding light on these novel links between neoliberal and digital citizenship, the article challenges current views on digitalization. The article foregrounds how digitalization serves to reproduce and recast already-existing political rationalities and must be considered in relation to neoliberal hegemony.

Performative Actions in E-Adoption Processes: Strategic Efforts in a Local Government

In this paper the concept of performative action is introduced to address how individuals can engage in IT adoption processes. The study investigates how local government employees adopt and localize ideas from a Danish National IT initiative called eDay3. Particularly the actions of a project manager are highlighted to portray how individuals can engage with historically produced discourses making them performative. The case study presented spans a two-year time period and demonstrates a double loop adoption process. First, a localization-process as discourse is used to support the specificity and variance of the specific local government. Second, a feedback loop re-attaching the localized project to the national reform program in order to maintain and protect the newly formed local practices. The study concludes that individuals actively struggle for social positions in IT adoption processes. Through the use of performative actions the positions are never stable and firm but constantly enacted and changed in discursive practices.

Digital citizenship and neoliberalization: governing digital citizens in Denmark

ABSTRACT Digital citizenship is becoming increasingly normalized within advanced democratic states. As society and governmental institutions become reliant on digital technologies, citizens are expected to be and act digitally. This article examines the governance of digital citizens through a case study of digitalization efforts in Denmark. Drawing on multiple forms of data, the article showcases how digital citizens are governed through a combination of discursive, legal and institutional means. The article highlights the political, but also institutional work that goes into making citizens digital. Providing this case study, the article contributes to current critical perspectives on the digital citizen as a new political figure. It adds new insights into digital citizenship by connecting this figure to wider processes of neoliberalization and state restructuring, pushing for a more pronounced focus on governmental practices.

Digital state spaces: state rescaling and advanced digitalization

ABSTRACT Over the past decades, advanced capitalist states have increasingly used digital technologies to deliver state services and restructure public sector institutions. This practice has had profound institutional as well as political consequences. So far, however, little research has been conducted that examines the forms of statehood and governance to which the use of digital technologies gives rise. To fill this research gap, this paper examines governmental digitalization through the lens of political economies of state rescaling. In doing so, it engages with the production of state spatiality, ultimately advancing the concept of digital state spaces, which links scholarship on state restructuring with work in digital geography. Drawing on several years of empirical research, the paper demonstrates the connection between these fields with an in-depth case study of digitalization efforts in Denmark, a country that is often cited as an example of a highly digitalized European state. It traces how national policy efforts have created new digital state spaces in Denmark and examines the local consequences these state interventions have had. Taken together, these conceptual and empirical insights contribute to a more nuanced understanding of governmental digitalization as a regulatory instrument implicated in the production of new spaces of governance.

Rolling Out Digitalization: Hegemonies, Policies and Governance Failures

This chapter traces the gradual rollout of national digitalization policies in Denmark from 1994 to 2017. It excavates the different ideas, ideals and visions that have been tied to these political efforts over time, showcasing how institutional path-dependencies have shaped this area of policymaking in distinct ways. The chapter argues that discourses centred on sustainability, equality, participation and democracy (present in the early years of policymaking) have gradually been replaced with a decidedly economic set of ideas. Efficiency, flexibility, innovation, competitiveness and citizens-as-customers have become increasingly hegemonic ideas since the early 2000s. The chapter thus showcases how different governmental actors have proposed different hegemonic visions over time. In doing so, the chapter seeks to reactivate the contingent foundations of this area of governance, emphasizing its imminently political, rather than technical, character.

Cultural Political Economy

This chapter provides an introduction to the main theoretical current engaged in this book, namely cultural political economy (CPE). CPE is a post-disciplinary trajectory within (critical) political economy that seeks to rethink the role of culture within political economy. Outlining the main ontological, epistemological and ethical commitments of CPE, including the various twists and turns this orientation locates itself against, the chapter specifies the main concepts operationalized in this book. This includes, most prominently, the notion of discursive, structural, agential and technological selectivities, as well as the production of (counter-)hegemonies. Taken together, this theoretical chapter provides the intellectual backdrop to the remainder of the book. It explicates the philosophical underpinnings and political engagements of this work.

Localizing Digitalization: New State Spaces and Local Resistances

This chapter investigates the outcomes and consequences of national digitalization policies within local public sector institutions. Zooming in on citizen service centres, the municipal institutions primarily responsible for helping citizens use the digital platforms mandated by the Danish state, the chapter explores how this state space has changed due to digitalization efforts. Based on qualitative interviews in seven municipalities, the chapter showcases how new functions, roles and logics have emerged within these local institutions. It argues that citizen service centres have increasingly become disciplinary spaces concerned with turning non-digital individuals into digital beings. At the same time, the chapter also highlights the new counter-hegemonies that may be forming within the state itself, as welfare state professionals both deconstruct and circumvent the official policy visions in their daily work practices. Taken together, the chapter provides insights into the institutional consequences of national digitalization efforts on the ground.

State Transformations: A CPE-Perspective

This chapter continues the dialogue opened with cultural political economy in the previous chapter by engaging with some of its key empirical contributions. In particular, the chapter turns to historical analyses of state transformations and capitalism, outlining some of the major restructurings within the political economy of the capitalist state since the Second World War. Doing so, the chapter argues, not only provides an important historical backdrop to the second part of this book, but also allows for the study of digitalization to be reconnected to the wider literature on state theory and political economy. The chapter closes off by zooming in on competiveness and competition discourses as central to the post-Fordist accumulation regimes that have emerged at the end of the twentieth century. It argues that the idea of competition states, as proposed within critical state theory, may provide a solid conceptualization of recent transformations within the capitalist state.