What is the value of digitalization? Strategic narratives in local government

As noted by Rose et al. (2015), in traditional Weberian governments, rules, due process, and neutrality are the core values that determine the actions of officials in the public sector. The public manager is a rational-legal authority that is limited by its sphere of competence and operates within a hierarchical organization that is structured around fixed jurisdictional boundaries and a division of labor. A bureaucracy is characterized by specialization, hierarchical authority, formal selection on the basis of skills and competence, rules and requirements, impersonal relationships, and career orientations that reflect domains of expertise (Weber, 1968, reprint of the original from 1922). Moreover, the bureaucracy ought to be independent, robust, consistent, and governed by a law-based system of rules in which the public record serves as the basis for accountability. According to this ideal, the role of e-government is to provide a flexible and secure digital public record that can support a standardized administrative procedure. The infrastructural role of IT is to maintain the bureaucratic record in a secure manner and in accordance with the law as well as to enable its faithful reproduction. Meanwhile, a bureaucracy also enables important values, such as accountability, durability, equity, and legality, to be realized (Rose et al., 2015).

2.2 The efficiency ideal

The 1980s witnessed the emergence of an ideal that is closely connected to the market economy, namely new public management (NPM). The reasoning that animates NPM is that Weberian bureaucracy fails to respond to customer needs, which leads to underperformance and low legitimacy. NPM, in contrast, is characterized by a focus on independent management, standards of performance, output controls (as opposed to bureaucratic procedures), decentralization, competition, the incorporation of ideals from the private sector, and cost reductions (Hood, 1991). The dominant value of NPM is efficiency. Public administration should be streamlined and efficient in order to minimize the dissipation of public resources, and citizens are perceived as customers whose demands can be satisfied through the provision of an adequate supply of public goods by the government. The ideal organization is structured into small competing units that are inspired by private sector corporations (Hood, 1991), and IT can enhance performance and reduce costs through the automation of administrative tasks (Rose et al., 2015).

2.3 The service ideal

The main criticism of NPM has to do with its emphasis on achieving efficiency by copying the features of the private sector. According to Moore (1995), individuals can refrain from consuming a product in the private sector if they perceive its value to be limited. In the public sector, conversely, the government exerts its coercive power of taxation to produce services whose consumption may be mandatory. The challenge for the public manager is to identify consequences that generate value for the public. The role of e-Government, as far as this ideal is concerned, is to produce online services. Meanwhile, IT serves to extend the range, availability, and quality of the services that are provided to citizens through, for example, the creation of electronic services (e-services; see Lindgren & Jansson, 2013). Dunleavy et al. (2006) invoked the term “digital-era governance” to refer to this paradigm shift and identified three characteristic themes: reintegration (as opposed to fragmentation), needs-based holism (i.e., reorganization to create seamless solutions), and digitization of processes (electronic service delivery).

2.4 The engagement ideal

The engagement ideal builds on the idea of active citizen engagement through participatory processes. In keeping with liberal democratic ideas, the members of civil society are expected to act as co-creators of, among others, policies. For example, social networks are technologies that may facilitate the realization of engagement values (Rose et al., 2015). According to the engagement ideal, which is sometimes called “new public service,” governance is based on democratic citizenship, community, and civil society. The primary role of the public servant under the engagement paradigm is to help citizens to articulate and further their shared interests rather than to attempt to control or steer society (Denhardt & Denhardt, 2000). The role of IT in this context is to facilitate networking by underpinning communicative interactions between governments and citizens (Rose et al., 2015). In e-Government research, technologically facilitated engagement processes form part of the e-Participation subfield (Medaglia, 2012; Susha & Grönlund, 2012; Sæbø et al., 2008).

2.5 Relationships between values

According to Rose et al. (2015), many researchers have adopted congruent views of values. However, since values diverge, the complexity of enabling the realization of multiple values through digital technology entails trade-offs and prioritization. For example, engaging with citizens may produce social capital, but this is not necessarily recognized as a value when the focus is on efficiency. Efficiency and service may also diverge because cost reductions can be achieved by providing fewer or lower-quality services. As Bertot and Jaeger (2008, title) put it when referring to “the E-Government paradox,” “better customer service doesn’t necessarily cost less.”

3.1 Materials

The Swedish local government consists of 290 municipalities, each of which enjoys a high degree of autonomy vis-à-vis the national government. The 290 municipalities are divided into 21 regional country councils. In order to define a digitalization strategy, we set the following criteria: there must be a document with a clear focus on digitalization, it must have been produced at a strategic level by a government body, and it must provide a formal and overarching strategy for an entire municipality. The strategies were gathered from the official websites of the Swedish municipalities. The search was conducted in two stages.

1.

Search engines and/or website navigation tools were used along with keywords such as “digitalization AND policy OR strategy OR plan” (in Swedish).

2.

If no strategic documents could be found in Step 1, we used Google to search for “MunicipalityName AND digitalization,” with further refinements introduced as needed.

When these steps did not yield any documents, we would conclude that the municipality in question did not have a digitalization strategy. The search also revealed that many municipalities are currently working on formulating such strategies, as expressed in, for example, city council protocols. If multiple documents were found (e.g., both a strategy and a policy), the most recent one was used. This process resulted in the identification of 85 strategies, which are referred to as S1–S85 in the results section.

3.2 Analysis

We uploaded the 85 documents to Atlas.ti, a software tool for the analysis of documents and transcripts. In order to develop a formative categorization matrix (see, Mayring, 2004), we used the theoretical framework that was proposed by Rose et al. (2015). It employs four predefined categories, which take the form of value positions (professionalism, efficiency, service, and engagement). We combined them with the three categories (benefits, considerations, and risks) that were suggested by Toll et al. (2020). As noted by other scholars (Flak et al., 2009; Córdoba-Pachón, 2017), e-Government initiatives must be evaluated; therefore, we were interested in determining whether and how the municipalities proposed to evaluate the statements in the documents (RQ2). We thus used evaluation as an additional category. A total of eight categories were used to guide the analysis. Since our categories were predefined, we used directed content analysis, as proposed by Hsieh and Shannon (2005).

Our unit of analysis in the documents was the statement. A statement takes the form of sentences. One statement can represent between one and four values, and it could also refer to a benefit, a consideration, or a risk (see, Toll et al., 2020). Benefits are defined as the desirable or positive effects of digitalization on a municipality or on society. Considerations, to the present ends, are matters that public sector actors must think about carefully and persistently when implementing digitalization initiatives. Finally, the term “risks” captures the undesirable or negative effects of digitalization.

We coded the statements in the strategies on the basis of the examples that were provided by Rose et al. (2015). They reflect different perspectives on IT and the purpose of e-Government, and they are linked to the four value ideals and the content of the corresponding technological frames. Examples of the coding follow.

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Professionalism. Since the ideal of professionalism emphasizes the importance of creating robust and safe infrastructures, IT and cybersecurity-related topics were coded into this category. In addition, since the professionalism ideal is coupled tightly with observance of the rule of law, legal matters were also subsumed into this category, as were sentences that made clear references to the importance of equity and the equal treatment of citizens.

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Efficiency. This ideal emphasizes increases in productivity as well as cost reductions, for example through automation efforts. Swedish has one word for efficiency and effectiveness (effektivitet), which made coding challenging. Sometimes, it is not entirely clear which of the two English terms a specific statement refers to. Therefore, we only included statements that made it clear that technology would be used to increase outputs relative to inputs or simply to conserve resources.

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Service. Statements about making life easier for citizens were coded into this category. The examples include statements about the creation of services that citizens can use whenever they wish and proposals to increase service quality through the provision of e-services.

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Engagement. Since the engagement ideal refers specifically to the benefits, considerations, and risks that are associated with participatory and emancipatory processes and the provision of deliberative technologies, we focused on avoiding confusion with statements about higher service levels (which are not participatory per se). We strove to identify uses of digital technology that would include citizens in decision-making and similar efforts that would enable citizens to make their opinions known to their local governments.

The frequencies with which these statements occur in the materials were summarized via descriptive statistics and presented visually in the results section. The example statements were translated from Swedish and are presented in tables. We also determined how often specific values were mentioned together in a statement so as to measure value congruence. If two values were mentioned together frequently, they were deemed to exhibit a relatively high degree of congruence; values that were seldom mentioned together were deemed divergent. To visualize these relationships between values, we used a chord diagram. A chord diagram is useful for representing connections between entities (in our case, values). These connections (e.g., the number of service-value statements that also include efficiency-related statements) are represented by arcs. The stronger the connections between two value positions, the larger the corresponding arc.

Both authors participated in the coding of the documents. To ensure inter-coder reliability, we performed regular iterations and discussed specific statements and recurring themes in order to agree on the most appropriate codes. During coding, we encountered statements that were difficult to code into a specific value ideal. For example, the word “smart” was often used outside of a supporting context that would enable its meaning to be grasped easily. The word “quality” was also used frequently in a context that made it difficult to associate with a particular value position. Where a value position could be identified by reference to context, the statements were coded into the corresponding category. When this was not possible, we would refrain from coding the statement. The list of terms that were used frequently without a clear value proposal includes general statements about “innovation,” “improvements,” and “benefits.”

As mentioned earlier, we also focused on the evaluations of values. Coding the evaluation statements required us to change the unit of analysis from statements to paragraphs. At this stage, we combined the evaluation codes with the value codes. However, as the analysis progressed, we noticed that many evaluation proposals could not be tied to a specific value position. As noted by Humble (2009), content analysis may shift between deduction and induction. Since we did not have a theory to depart from at this stage, we generated additional codes inductively (e.g., “digital maturity”) from the empirical material by adding a “what” code – in effect, it refers to an object of evaluation. The next step in the analysis included a “how?” question because we were interested in the methods and tools that are used for evaluation.

We expected that our analytical approach, taken in its totality, would help us to initiate a discussion about the content of the strategies and the relevant omissions. Nevertheless, directed content analysis has certain limitations, in that it does not necessarily unveil broader patterns and dynamics in the content of the materials. To overcome this limitation, we remained open to the additional impressions that we obtained from the texts. This enabled us to reflect on the discursive patterns that we would discover during the analysis.

4. Results

This section presents our findings from the analysis of the strategies. First, we present a map that visualizes the frequency of municipalities with digitalization strategies in each Swedish region. Then, in Section 4.1, we describe the distribution of the values in the strategies. In Section 4.2, we visualize the relationships between the value positions through a chord diagram. Finally, Section 4.3 presents the findings from the analysis of the evaluation-related statements.

Figure 1 displays the percentages of the municipalities in a that has a digitalization strategy (the region of Gotland, an island in the southeast, only has one municipality and therefore has 100%). No clear pattern could be identified on the map (e.g., differences between north/south, large cities/rural areas) – a majority of regions account for between 20% and 40% of municipalities with digitalization documents divided by the total amount of municipalities in the region.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Our analysis of the digitalization strategies yielded several interesting findings about the distribution of values and the relationships between them, as well as about evaluation efforts. In this section, we discuss those findings by reference to the two RQs.

Our findings, in line with those of Toll et al. (2020), indicate that most of the statements in the strategies anticipate the beneficial outcomes of digitalization and articulate few risks. Moreover, we encountered several statements that are difficult to associate with a value position, many of which reflect optimistic narratives about the outcomes of digitalization (e.g., “smart”). Therefore, the strategic narratives that we found in the documents can be described as predominantly optimistic. In addition, the strategies draw on a repository of identical statements; a sort of “parrot syndrome”. A plausible explanation is that the municipalities borrow from the discourse in higher-level documents, such as those produced by national and pan-national bodies. It appears that, unlike in other policy areas (see, Verhoeven et al., 2022), in the context of digitalization, municipalities are apt to use content from higher authorities rather than adapting digitalization to local conditions.

These results lend support to the argument that the process of digitalization is characterized by techno-optimistic narratives. As Büchner et al. (2022, p. 23) noted, “Similar to the well-known discourses on innovation, digital technologies are often connected in a persuasively positive sense or appear as universal solution strategies.” One of the negative consequences of the aforementioned “parrot syndrome” becomes apparent in this context: municipalities refrain from facilitating local translations of strategies and instead circulate common and universal stories from other sources. There is thus a risk of the narratives becoming rigid, overoptimistic and expressing an agenda about the superiority of digitalization. Ideally, the documents in question would express and assess a diverse range of technological frames (Orlikowski & Gash, 1994). Instead, these narratives may lead to the stabilization and institutionalization of the dominant positions and representations of problems (and solutions) that are associated with digitalization (Lindberg et al., 2022). These overly optimistic stories may, in turn, lead to failed implementations that neglect risks or lack clear value-enabling purposes (Cui & Osborne, 2022). As noted by Sundberg (2019:2), similar stories can be found in strategic documents on IT from the 1990s, with setbacks and disappointments after the turn of the millennium.

Meanwhile, the strategic narratives that we observed were closely linked to a service-dominant logic, often in congruence with efficiency benefits. This result is in line with previous studies on values in the Swedish government (Sundberg, 2019:1; Sundberg, 2019:2). Those studies indicate that values have shifted over the last decade, with government institutions adopting an increasingly service-oriented logic. Our analysis shows that efficiency and service values are often mentioned together in strategic documents. This tendency may be inherently contradictory because efficiency is often gained by limiting services, which reduces costs (Bertot & Jaeger, 2008). We find this narrative to be potentially questionable, especially given the lack of evaluation procedures. As Wilson (2022, p. 8) noted in a study of national AI strategies, “the consistency of congruent relationships is worth noting and might raise concerns about whether the policy frames and value ideals advanced by national strategies are acknowledging the policy trade-offs necessarily implied by AI design and implementation.”

The relatively low frequency with which engagement-related values occur in the texts, which accords with past research (see, e.g., Persson et al., 2017; Toll et al., 2020), is important. One implication is that in local government, digitalization is not intended to promote e-democracy. The professionalism ideal, unlike the other value positions, entails an equal number of benefits and considerations. A plausible explanation is that bureaucratic values are often expressed in terms of obligations and means rather than in terms of outcomes and ends: they are built on a rule-based logic rather than by reference to outcomes and consequences.

Interestingly, most of the paragraphs that refer to evaluation simply state that it is necessary to evaluate the outcomes of digitalization without identifying precise methods or tools. A few tools concerned evaluation of efficiency and service values. Quantifiable indicators such as citizens’ access to broadband, and references to tools for digital maturity are also present in the materials. Overall, the discussions of evaluation tools and methods lacks specificity with regards to the outcome of digitalization in local government. Although the strategies are overarching in nature, their legitimacy and utility, we argue, can be greatly improved by establishing links between digitalization initiatives and the assessment of outcomes in relation to values. While benchmarks and comparisons between the levels of digital maturity that different organizations exhibit may be useful, the tools in question are not tied to the outcomes (values) of said maturity.

These results have important implications for practice. We could not tie some of the terms from the strategic documents to specific value ideals. Although this finding may be partially explained by the use of everyday language in the documents, it is also possible that their content was diluted by the introduction of terms such as “smart” and “quality” as well as by references to general notions about the benefits of digitalization. We argue that these general notions may generate difficulties for municipalities that attempt to evaluate the strategies. While evaluation efforts are mentioned in the materials they are expressed at a high level of generality. The materials comprise strategic documents that are designed to be interpreted by a wide range of actors in a municipality and therefore include statements that those actors would need to refine in practice. This said, clarifying the expected outcomes, in terms of the forms of the values that digitalization should realize, and proposing means of evaluating these values would arguably be beneficial. Echoing Córdoba-Pachón (2017), we contend that such a clarification would likely contribute to grounding evaluation in the day-to-day operations of e-government stakeholders as well as support continuous learning.

Accordingly, we argue that the next generation of digitalization strategies would benefit from a shift from techno-optimism (i.e., an exclusionary focus on the potential benefits of digitalization) to a more nuanced narrative that reflects more risks and links values to evaluation efforts. Thus, as noted in Heidlund and Sundberg (2022), additional studies on e-Government evaluations that are based on best practices (if such practices exist) are needed – our search for such evaluations in the digitalization strategies only identified a few general statements.

6. Conclusions, limitations and suggestions for further research

The purpose of this paper was to gain an understanding of the narratives in the digitalization strategies articulated by the Swedish local government. The findings generated insights into the distribution of values in these documents as well as important knowledge about the proposed evaluation efforts. The study builds on the theoretical and methodological foundations of value positions that are derived from previous research on e-Government. The results contribute to an overall understanding of the strategic narratives that surround digitalization, including the distribution and evaluation of values.

The findings generated insights into the distribution of values in the policies, which enables comparisons with previous research in the field. In line with the results obtained by other scholars, we found that participatory and democratic values feature in a minority of statements, which suggests that local governments in Sweden do not focus on the use of digitalization to promote e-democracy. Instead, a recurring narrative in the strategies binds the values of service and efficiency together. The dominant story is based on digitalization promoting services and reducing costs or the time that it takes for a service to be provided. As Nyhlén and Gidlund (2022) suggested, that there is a taken for granted logic of digitalization being a solution to many problems even though existing research has shown that this reasoning is fallacious (i.e., Bertot & Jaeger, 2008). At the same time, highlighting service and efficiency values obscures narratives about the story of democracy and engagement (intentionally or unintentionally, as suggested by Bekkers and Homburg, 2007).

Most of the statements in the strategies anticipate the beneficial outcomes of digitalization, and few risks are articulated. We also noted that the strategies share a repository of identical statements from national strategies as well as general assumptions about benefits. Numerous vague statements that cannot be tied to a value position are employed. This vagueness, together with a general lack of specificity about evaluation methods, may pose challenges for organizations that wish to use the strategies to guide their work on digitalization.

In addition to these practical implications, the study makes a twofold contribution to the literature. First, we applied and extended Toll et al.’s (2020) methodology for policy analysis. We merged the methodology that those authors developed with directed content analysis, and we extended the scope of the analytical exercise to examining value congruence, and evaluation statements as objects of study. Second, we contributed to research on the mapping of the discursive landscape of digitalization (i.e., Nyhlén & Gidlund, 2022; Bekkers & Homburg, 2007; Schou & Hjelholt, 2019) by highlighting how certain values are prominent in certain narratives while others are left out. In the case under observation, the missing narrative or alternative story is that of democracy, which we believe to be vital for both government and e-Government.