digitalization and public sector transformations

DIGITALIZATION AND PUBLIC SECTOR TRANSFORMATIONS

Jannick Schou and Morten Hjelholt

‘Jannick Schou and Morten Hjelholt have written an important contribution to the literature on the evolution of digital public services. Rather than defaulting to the technocratic narratives of many writers, they demonstrate that digitalization is part of an ideological project. This book should be read by everyone interested in electronic government.’

—Karl Löfgren, Associate Professor, School of Government, Victoria University of Wellington.

Digitalization and Public Sector Transformations

Jannick Schou • Morten Hjelholt

Digitalization and Public Sector

Transformations

ISBN 978-3-319-76290-6 ISBN 978-3-319-76291-3 (eBook)https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76291-3

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Jannick SchouIT University of CopenhagenCopenhagen, Denmark

Morten HjelholtIT University of CopenhagenCopenhagen, Denmark

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76291-3

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Preface

This book explores the complex, yet often poorly understood, set of rela-tions between digitalization and contemporary forms of statecraft. For the last number of decades, advanced capitalist states have intensified their use of digital technologies in a wide variety of ways. Across public sectors and governmental institutions, states have become increasingly reliant upon digital platforms as a means of delivering services to citizens and interact-ing with private actors. The implications of these political reforms have, however, often remained in the dark. This book is our modest attempt to understand and dissect the contemporary restructurings within advanced capitalist states caused by digitalization. More specifically, the aim of this book is twofold.

First, this book seeks to showcase why cultural political economy (CPE) provides a productive and highly powerful entry-point for understanding the political implications of governmental digitalization. CPE is a rapidly growing field of research that seeks to make an ontological cultural turn within (critical) political economy. Doing so, it has paved the way for an analytical sensibility that takes both semiosis and structuration seriously within the study and critique of political economy. We want to argue that as a state-of-the-art theoretical current – offering a number of potent ana-lytical tools – CPE provides a much better starting point for understand-ing digitalization than do the current dominant approaches.

At the present moment, digitalization has often been either over-looked or approached using instrumental theoretical frameworks. From a critical sociological and political economic perspective, there is a lack

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of studies trying to examine how digitalization is adding to and extend-ing contemporary state projects. All too often, critical research on the capitalist state has neglected this particular political instrument, down-playing its significance in favor of other more traditional means of poli-cymaking and governance. By arguing for a CPE-informed approach to digitalization, we want to suggest that making governments digital ought to be considered as an important area of policymaking in its own right. Critical sociologists and political economists should (for all intents and purposes) have a lot to say about this field.

At the other end of the scale, the research that has concentrated on these questions has tended to either depoliticize or neutralize digital tech-nologies. Labelled under headings such as ‘e-government’ or ‘digital era governance’, this research has bracketed digitalization as a merely techni-cal issue or simply attempted to enhance the implementation of these technologies by mapping hindrances, best practices and providing scalable business models. In these cases, the proper political-economic significance of digitalization has been disregarded. And the complex processes involved in creating certain hegemonic visions for what this area should and should not include have been lost accordingly.

By arguing for a CPE-approach, we want to suggest that research ought to investigate how digitalization is created in the interplay between both structural and semiotic forces. If we wish to understand the proper signifi-cance of these processes, we must trace how and why different actors have promoted digitalization as an area of governance, what kind of imaginaries this has implied, and the implications this has had for the structures of the state itself. We must, in other words, adopt a both historical and relational mode of analysis, capable of following the production of (counter-)hege-monies across multiple sites and scales, including the frictions, tensions and contradictions this creates. This simultaneously implies going beyond stale images of digitalization as a technological quick fix, urging us to grasp the profoundly political implications this area of governance has entailed.

Second, the book makes an empirical contribution by providing a study of governmental digitalization efforts in Denmark. As is often said, the proof is in the pudding. With this book, we not only wish to pave the way for a cultural political economy of digitalization as a theoretical endeavor but also showcase how such an orientation may be put to use. Indeed, most of this small book is in fact dedicated to precisely this task. We thus examine how and in what ways digitalization has become an important

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means of statecraft within the Danish state since the early 1990s. Denmark has quite systematically been labelled as an international forerunner, example and leader within both European and international benchmarks and indexes. This makes the country a particularly instructive case if we want to understand what is currently being promoted as the bleeding edge of governmental digitalization. In this book, we do so by tracing both national policy efforts over time, their translation into specific legal, eco-nomic and technological measurements, as well as the implications these changes have had for existing welfare institutions. Providing this multi-level study, traversing both historical, national and local dimensions, we hope to showcase how CPE may be used to disentangle the both semiotic and structural components involved in producing digitalization as a genu-inely political instrument and hegemonic state project. In this way, we add to our current understanding of the practices involved in digitalizing advanced capitalist states.

Taken together, our modest hope is that these simultaneously theoretical and empirical trajectories may help advance and deepen existing dialogues on the profound changes caused by governmental digitalization. More than anything else, this book is our attempt to think through a number of perti-nent problems, offering a set of concepts, ideas and tools that may be of help and interest to others going forward. This book is less meant as an authori-tative statement, and much more as an open invitation to grapple with the complex and on-going developments caused by digitalization.

This book has been underway for quite some time. As this project has come into being over the years, we have accumulated a great deal of per-sonal and intellectual debt. For this, we would like to thank both our fami-lies and friends for their support and care. Thanks to Sharla Plant, our editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for her encouragement from the beginning of this project and until its final publication. Also thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their succinct comments, urging us to trust our arguments and develop their implications more fully. Thanks to Johan Farkas, for once again going patiently through the manuscript, providing detailed and important comments. We would moreover like to thank participants at the Third International Conference on Cultural Political Economy at Lancaster University, in particular Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop, for their valuable comments and inspirational talks. With this book, we hope to contribute to the exciting research area they have created, however limited and selective our rendition of “CPE” might be. Also thanks to participants at the DataPower 2017 conference at Carleton University in

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Canada and the 15th ESPAnet conference at the Universidade de Lisboa in Lisbon for their productive feedback. This work has been supported by the Velux Foundation as part of the Data as Relation research grant. We would like to thank Brit Ross Winthereik, Christopher Gad and the rest of the gang for support and feedback.

We take full responsibility for any potential errors, mistakes or inaccuracies.

Copenhagen, Denmark Jannick SchouJanuary 2017 Morten Hjelholt

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1 Introduction 1

Part I Thinking State Transformations Through Cultural Political Economy 19

2 Cultural Political Economy 21

3 State Transformations: A CPE-Perspective 39

Part II Landscapes of Digitalization 57

4 Rolling Out Digitalization: Hegemonies, Policies and Governance Failures 59

5 Localizing Digitalization: New State Spaces and Local Resistances 85

contents

x CoNTENTS

Part III Towards a Cultural Political Economy of Digitalization 107

6 Conclusion 109

Index 119

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Table 2.1 Selected twists and turns in CPE 29Table 2.2 Four selectivities provided by CPE 33Table 4.1 overview of main developments within Danish

digitalization policymaking 79

List of tabLes

1© The Author(s) 2018J. Schou, M. Hjelholt, Digitalization and Public Sector Transformations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76291-3_1

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract This introductory chapter sets up this book’s research questions, outlines its academic contributions, and lays out the main methodological and theoretical coordinates engaged with in this study. The chapter starts out by arguing for research that goes beyond the current narratives of digitalization promoted by policymakers and economic elites. Instead there is a need for critical interventions that are capable of unpacking gov-ernmental digitalization with a focus on both culture and political econ-omy. The chapter situates such an approach, drawing particularly on recent advances within heterodox political economy, against the current aca-demic landscape, arguing that all too often the political dimensions of digitalization have been neglected by research. It then proceeds to intro-duce the main empirical and methodological concerns of this book before outlining the plan for the rest of the study.

Keywords Digitalization • Cultural political economy • Critical sociology • Policy study • Governance

January 2017, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released a white paper named Unlocking Digital Value to Society: A new framework for growth (2017). Produced in collaboration with the global consultancy firm Accenture, with input from the Danish Ministry of Business and Growth,

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the document formed a part of the Digital Transformation Initiative promoted by the WEF since 2015. Advancing a self-described “unique economic framework” that would serve to “maximize the value that digi-talization could deliver” (p. 3), the white paper set the scene with the following opening passage:

Remarkable advances in technologies such as artificial intelligence, data ana-lytics, autonomous vehicles and cloud computing are transforming our world. Digital transformation is redefining industries, making new business models possible and providing businesses with unparalleled opportunities for value capture. Its impact, however, will not be limited to business; it is already dramatically changing how we live, work and relate to one another. Digitalization has the potential to deliver immense benefits for consumers, society and the environment, and to unleash unintended consequences that may have a profound effect on society. (World Economic Forum 2017, p. 3)

For those following the steady stream of reports, strategies and white papers produced by both the WEF and Accenture, these tales of great transformations and societal advances were hardly surprising. At this point in time, both of these actors had been disseminating similar ideas for a number of years, highlighting the immense economic potentials inherent in digital transformations. A somewhat arbitrary, if largely exemplary, illus-tration of this new discursive landscape of digitalization can be found in the report Digital Transformation: Re-imagine from the outside-in released by Accenture as part of their Accenture Interactive: Point of View Series in 2014. Here, we find an opening passage that seems to walk the very same terrain as those conjured up some years later by the WEF:

Digital is re-imagining the human experience. It is remaking how people live, work, play and connect. Everything is being rethought, simplified and improved – even things people have taken for granted throughout their lives. Most companies recognize that they cannot turn a blind eye to such a power-ful force shaping human behavior. What worked yesterday to attract, engage and retain customers may be fast becoming obsolete. So how can companies develop a customer-relevant digital business when change is the only constant and best practices are being redefined at warp speed? (Accenture 2014, p. 2)

These stories of societal rebirths and large-scale changes have not been limited to either big consultancy firms like Accenture or transnational networks like the WEF. Indeed, across the Western world, similar

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discourses are currently being transmitted at a rapid pace. Named as the Going Digital-project, the OECD has been actively promoting digital transformation as a new means of creating economic growth, restructur-ing public sectors and delivering new forms of governance for a number of years. In a similar fashion, the European Union has since the early 1990s pushed towards the construction of a European information society. This is today being branded as the creation of a Digital Single Market.

As often goes, these discourses have also made their way into the language promoted by national policymakers in advanced capitalist states. Especially, though certainly not exclusively, policymakers within the Northern part of Europe have been actively pursuing the “digital dream” for decades at this point. Investing large amounts of resources in implementing digital tech-nologies across public sectors, digitalization has been articulated as a way of heightening service delivery, cutting costs and modernizing existing institu-tions. Denmark, a small Scandinavian country, has for example promoted a highly proactive agenda towards digitalization since the early 1990s. This has, amongst other things, meant that large sums of economic and political capital have been spent on implementing digital technologies across the Danish public sector. The result has been that Denmark is often labelled as a ‘forerunner’, ‘leader’ or ‘example’ to be followed (Igari 2014), scoring some of the highest marks within European indexes intended to compare, rank and measure the “most” digital nations across the continent.

If we turn to this country’s newest national strategy, forged in the upper echelons of its bureaucratic field under the oversight of the Ministry of Finance, we find this opening salvo:

Denmark and the world are facing fundamental changes. Rapid ongoing digital developments are already changing the way in which we live, the way we run our businesses and the way our public services and welfare services are delivered. Technological developments have always played a role in alter-ing the way in which we live, and new technologies have given us opportuni-ties that not many of us would want to do without. The invention of the automobile gave us far more mobility and flexibility. Automation of process-ing and packaging processes within the food industry improved opportuni-ties within supply and flexible consumption. Old job functions have become defunct and new ones have appeared in their place. We have seen it all before. However, the rate and evolutionary power of technological develop-ments will accelerate in the years to come. Digital development will be so fast, profound and unpredictable that it will challenge and change society in ways we cannot even begin to imagine. (The Government, Local Government Denmark & Danish Regions 2016, p. 4, emphasis added)

INTRODUCTION

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What we find in these three small snapshots, then, seems to be very much the same basic narrative. It is a story of remarkable advances, new opportu-nities for value creation and fundamental changes all caused by the accelerat-ing advance of digital technologies. According to this story, digitalization is quite literary reimagining the human experience, remaking existing land-scapes of labor and leisure, and creating nothing less than a brand new society in its wake. These are unpredictable developments that are deep, profound and unparalleled. In their invocation of societal changes taking place at warp speed, there is something quite captivating about these scenes. It is as if they provide a testimony to a novel political grammar or language that is currently being rolled-out: a new policy world that seems to be gather-ing around the idea of digitalization.

Towards a CulTural PoliTiCal EConomy of digiTalizaTion

This book seeks to go beneath the surface of these glossy new descriptions of digitalization. It seeks to unpack and understand the policies, politics and practices of these new technological developments. And it attempts to do so by advocating for a cultural political economic approach to the study and critique of digitalization. As this short book will demonstrate, such an approach requires us to not just view digitalization as a set of fairly lofty ideas about the reinvention of society from within. Instead, we will have to investigate these ideas as a both political and regulatory set of practices that are being promoted and produced in equal parts by tech- consultancies, policymakers and big corporations around the world. Doing so, we might begin to understand the very real societal impact that digitalization is cur-rently having. As Hall (2008, p. 42) has suggested, “labels such as ‘pure rhetorics’, ‘hypocrisy’ or ‘symbolic politics’ which may be put on ICT policy are too functional or (implicitly) rational, and fail to grasp the sig-nificance of discourses to concrete policies.”

This book focuses specifically on how digitalization has become an important means of statecraft (Jessop 2002; Peck 2010). We are, in other words, particularly concerned with digitalization as a means of governing, regulating and partially restructuring existing public sector institutions. Digitalization efforts have certainly not been limited to state policymakers or governmental institutions. Indeed, as indicated by the snapshots pro-vided above, this new imaginary has found a resonance in a much wider


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base, cutting across different sectors, territories and geographies. That being the case, national policy efforts does constitute one of the particular areas where digitalization has become increasingly significant and intensi-fied. This book seeks to advance our current understanding of how advanced capitalist states have used digitalization to restructure, recon-struct and transform public sector institutions from within.

The book contributes to this project by arguing for a theoretical reori-entation within the study of governmental digitalization. With this book, we want to suggest that cultural political economy (CPE) may provide a powerful theoretical toolbox for understanding these processes. Broadly construed, CPE is a post-disciplinary research agenda, connected most prominently with the work of Lancaster scholars Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop (see Sum and Jessop 2013; Sum 2009, 2015; Jessop 2004). Located within the intersections of heterodox and evolutionary political economy, CPE aims to take the so-called “cultural turn” within institutional theory and political economy seriously by performing an ontological cultural turn. Culture, or more precisely sense- and meaning-making, should be con-ceived as ontologically constitutive of not only economic activities, but all social relations (Sum and Jessop 2013). How we perceive and give mean-ing to the world has great importance for the structuration of social rela-tions. In suggesting this ontological cultural turn, CPE views complexity reduction as fundamental to all human activities. The world is extraordi-narily complex and impossible to represent in its entirety through any one entry-point. ‘To go on in the world’ agents have to constantly reduce com-plexity by selecting certain elements, objects and subjects rather than oth-ers. It is this evolutionary process of variation, selection and retention that CPE seeks to understand and unpack. Pursuing such investigations may help us locate the construction of hegemonies, domination and ideology, and serve as the basis for critique, resistance and change.

This book will argue that the strength of CPE is not just its ability to take the cultural seriously within political economy. It also offers a set of heuristic tools useful for understanding global, national and local processes of capitalist restructuring. Indeed, for all its abstract theorizing, CPE pro-vides a productive starting point for empirical investigations of actually existing political economies. Looking at the CPE field, we can begin to see its scale and width: from studies on science and technology policies (Tyfield 2012), cities and urbanity (Dannestam 2008; Ribera-Fumaz 2009) and architecture (Jones 2009) to investigations of competitiveness (Sum 2009, 2015; Sum and Jessop 2013) and subaltern subjectivities

INTRODUCTION

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(Sum 2013, 2017). While sparking some controversy (Jessop and Sum 2017), CPE has shown itself to be a potent analytical frame of reference for understanding capitalism as a variegated, multi-scalar and deeply con-tingent set of processes.

The present book is as an effort to extend these existing approaches to questions of digitalization and digital governance. Our argument through-out this book will be that CPE provides a much more suitable starting point for understanding the profound political implications and conse-quences of digitalization than do the current hegemonic approaches. All too often, these approaches have turned digitalization into either a purely technical question – as if to cleanse it from its embeddedness in the messy realities of politics – or simply responded in instrumental fashion to prob-lems already posed by powerful industry and governmental actors. As Chini (2008, p. 46) has rightly argued, there has been a widespread “ten-dency to understand ICT policy as unambiguous and technical [which] has led to an underestimation of its political nature and implications.” We want to suggest that properly written, digitalization is not a chapter in either computer science, public administration or IT management, but political economy and state theory.

The book does, however, go beyond merely making a theoretical case for CPE as a powerful entry-point for understanding governmental digi-talization. As a way of diving into the intricacies of digitalization, we also present a multi-level study of digitalization efforts within the Danish state. As outlined above, Denmark is often considered to be a digital vanguard. For the last number of years, the country has consistently scored some of the highest marks on the European Union’s Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), being ranked the most digital society across the continent. Measurements such as these are, of course, never neutral (Galès 2016; Biebricher 2017; Sum and Jessop 2013). They promote (and penalize) certain ways of categorizing, classifying and quantifying the world. Whether Denmark is truly more ‘digital’ than other countries remains contestable, to say the least. However, if measurements and rankings like the DESI do indicate something, it is what we might call the current politi-cal temperature in terms of what is counted as progressive, leading and valuable. In this political scheme, contestable as it might be, Denmark has been continuously lauded as an example to be followed. In this precise sense, this particular case might bring out and accentuate otherwise latent trajectories, trends and pathways currently explored in a more general form across advanced capitalist states.


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We will put CPE to use within this case study as a means of navigating the complex set of historical relations – stretched out between multiple levels, branches and sites of government – involved in crafting a “digital agenda” in Denmark. Drawing on a historical policy study, we first trace how Danish policymakers have since the early 1990s attempted to create a completely digital society and public sector. Exploring the multiple path-ways, twists and turns that policymaking has undergone over these years, we showcase the different discourses constructed by policymakers in order to capture the purpose, shape and aims of such digitalization efforts. We then, based on qualitative interviews with local welfare professionals, look at the legal, institutional and economic impact these policymaking efforts have had on municipal institutions. To be more precise, we showcase the profound institutional changes that local citizen service centers have undergone as a consequence of national policymaking efforts. In this way, fusing studies on the national and local levels of the Danish state, we are able to portray both the high-level blueprints offered by shifting networks of state policymakers and the multiple ways in which this is shaping (and being shaped by) local institutions.

We will locate this case study against the context of broader restructur-ings facing advanced capitalist states from the 1980s and 1990s. To under-stand digitalization, we will argue, we have to situate this particular area of governance and policymaking within a wider set of state transformations. To our mind, this implies contextualizing digitalization against the grad-ual turn from a Keynesian-Fordist world order in the post-war period to the ascendance of the contemporary competition state as a response to the combined cocktail of globalization, neoliberalization and post-Fordism (Jessop 2002; Peck 1996). These transformations are vital if we wish to understand digitalization, as this latter area has never worked in a political or institutional vacuum. It has instead co-evolved and been co-articulated with a series of wider semiotic and structural changes. In this way, the main thrust of this book is both theoretical and empirical in nature. This also means that we will gradually move from a more abstract structural level, concerned with articulating the core components of CPE, to a more concrete institutional level, focusing on the implementation and negotia-tion of specific policy measurements in Denmark.

Taken together, we hope that these pathways may help us push towards a renewed take on digitalization. Combining both theoretical and empiri-cal arguments, we want to suggest that digitalization is not just a set of floating ideas or an area left best to technical engineers. Digitalization is a

INTRODUCTION

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very concrete set of political measurements being rolled-out on the ground floor of advanced capitalist states. Contemporary policy efforts are leading to the forging of new state spaces, hegemonic projects and institutional geographies. Every bit as unrealistic as the three snapshots provided above may sound, their impact have, in many cases, been quite real: they have prompted policymakers to implement novel legal measurements, invest in digital infrastructures and recreate preexisting regulatory frameworks. Rather than dismissing these changes, we ought to pull their cultural political economy apart and look at the cogs in the machinery. If we wish to understand the contemporary restructuring of advanced capitalist states, we cannot do without looking at how digitalization is being employed as a genuine means of policymaking and statecraft. To borrow the words of Jamie Peck (2001, p. 446), formulated almost twenty years ago, the “con-cern in this work is to tease out the wider implications of complex changes in the practical and ideological strategies, organizational and normative structures, and political-economic and sociological situation of the state under conditions of accelerated neoliberal restructuring.”

whaT doEs digiTalizaTion mEan? somE ConCEPTual and mEThodologiCal PrimErs

By now it has become a truism to argue that the internet, digital technolo-gies and digitalization have impacted western societies in profound ways (Castells 2010). Indeed, since the 1990s, digital technologies seem to have only become more and more integrated parts of most people’s daily life (Isin and Ruppert 2015; Lindgren 2017), at least in the western world (Ragnedda and Muschert 2018). That being the case, the notion of digi-talization has remained a notoriously slippery term that is often not defined in the literature. To clarify the approach developed in this book, it might be useful to reflect on how our use of this term differentiates and distances itself from others.

Despite its recent hype (or perhaps because of it), digitalization often remains a vague concept. In the works that do define the concept, this tends to be done in a mainly technical way. In some works, such as Michael Vogelsang’s Digitalization in Open Economies: Theory and Policy Implications (2010), digitalization is defined as “the expression of informa-tion in strings of 0 and 1” (p. 3), making the term an essentially technical concept descriptive of certain mathematical logics. A somewhat similar


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approach can be found in the work, Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm, co-edited by Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen (2005). They propose the term “sociodigitization” which they understood to be “the rendering of facets of social and political life in digi-tal form” (p. 16). They distinguish this term from the notion of digitiza-tion, which, according to these authors, “as a concept has been around for some time as it is closely associated with the efforts of librarians, publishers, artists, and others to convert analog content to digital form” (ibid.). In this way, digitization roughly corresponds to Vogelsang’s conception of digita-lization. By adding the ‘socio’-prefix to this latter concept, Latham and Sassen argue, the processual and social implications of these practices might be brought back into view. Latham and Sassen undoubtedly provide a quite interesting starting point. However, adopting a CPE- perspective, we take a somewhat different approach to these terminological questions.

Within the existing literature dedicated to questions of governance and public administration, concepts such as ‘digital era governance’, ‘e- government’ and ‘computerization’ have often been used to describe the digitalization of advanced capitalist states. Yet, as “the phenomenon of e-government can be traced back to the 1950s, when computers were brought into government departments in the United Kingdom and United States” (Margetts 2009, p. 114), most of these concepts are in fact not that new. Indeed, research has been exploring parts of these processes for decades at this point: from the pioneering studies of Rob Kling (1978, 1980) and the Irvine School in the 1970s and 1980s (Danziger and Kraemer 1986; King and Kraemer 1985; Kraemer and King 1976, 1986) to the work of scholars such as Jane Fountain (2001, 2008, 2014), Helen Margetts (1999; see also Hood and Margetts 2007; Margetts and Dunleavy 2013), Patrick Dunleavy (Dunleavy et al. 2006), and others in the late 1990s and onwards (see also Milakovich 2011; Weerakkody and Reddick 2013). There is today a very large body of work, stretched out between a number of different posi-tions and schools, dedicated precisely to exploring the ways in which digital technologies are impacting states and public institutions.

Often originating in the fields of public administration and political sci-ence, these works have gone some way in linking digitalization and digital governance to questions of power, institutions and organizational change. Fountain’s work on digitally mediated institutions (2014) provides one example of this. Drawing on institutional theory, her work foregrounds the ways in which institutions both facilitate and constrain the implemen-tation of digital technologies. An even more recent stream of research,

INTRODUCTION

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drawing on Lipsky’s (1980) classic work on “street-level bureaucracy”, provides another example. It has given important insights into how public sector institutions and interactions with citizens are undergoing significant changes due to digitalization efforts (Buffat 2015; Jansson and Erlingsson 2014; Hansen et al. 2018; Pors 2015a, b).

With this book, we do not seek to simply dismiss or reject the existing literature: it is too large, heterogeneous and multi-layered to be critiqued en bloc. Important lessons can clearly be drawn from it. However, we do want to suggest the viability of taking a slightly different entry-point to questions of governmental digitalization. We want to argue that CPE – and the post-disciplinary dialogue it seeks to establish around scholars such as Marx, Gramsci and Foucault (Sum 2009, 2015) – may provide us with a fundamentally different way of understanding governmental digita-lization. In our view, the existing research on e-government and digital era governance has tended to work from a somewhat skewed premise. In seek-ing to support the implementation of technologies within advanced capi-talist states – by giving applicable maturity models, suggesting new policy frameworks, highlighting ways of mitigating errors or disseminating best practice – research has at times been framed within the same narratives as those produced by policymakers and state officials. In accepting the under-lying idea that governments should ‘take advantage’ of digitalization, research has downplayed the (cultural) political economy of digitalization. By doing so, the profoundly political implications of this policy instrument have been obscured, turning digital technologies into seemingly neutral tools capable of providing more ‘lean’, ‘efficient’ and ‘flexible’ forms of service delivery. In this context, Löfgren and Sørensen (2011, p. 299) have rightly argued that “there has so far been a strong technical bias in the literature on e-government towards the design of integrating different systems, whereas the public administration and policy research of the pro-cesses has [...] been almost completely absent from the field.”

By bringing digitalization into a CPE agenda, as a form of policy, poli-tics and practice, we are attempting to provide a corrective to these exist-ing approaches. Contrary to these, we want to advance a self-reflexive, historical and political reading of digitalization. This means that we are first and foremost interested in digitalization as a political strategy and hegemonic project: that is to say as a genuinely political instrument aimed at restructuring and transforming the state itself. As we will show in the empirical part of this book, such restructurings take place through a rich tapestry of policymaking efforts, rhetorical strategies, regulatory frame-


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works, institutional changes and technological developments. This is what we might call an ensemble of discursive, agential, technological and struc-tural selectivities (Sum and Jessop 2013). From this point of view, digita-lization is less about ‘strings of 0 and 1’ and much more about political practices embedded within and shaped by specific institutional, geographi-cal and political-economic path-dependencies.

The implication of this theoretical reframing is that what digitalization is or is said to be remains a strictly empirical question. We cannot deduce, by way of theoretical abstraction, how actually existing policymakers and governmental officials will deploy this concept as a regulatory strategy (or to what effect). Instead, we will have to trace how political actors actually utilize this term and the kind of work it does within the political economy of specific states, regions and institutions. This also means that any con-ception of digitalization as a unified political behemoth, changing the entire landscape of the West in one smooth swing, must be dismantled from the get go. Indeed, while policymakers across western states may have become attached to this (or highly similar) concepts during the last decade; and while these policymakers may inspire and import solutions from each other, particularly in the form of fast policy (Peck and Theodore 2015); digitalization remains firmly embedded within its specific institu-tional and political contexts. It is a variegated, geographically situated and ultimately contingent process, driven less by its own silent inertia, and more by the active efforts of policymakers, managers, bureaucrats, politi-cians and citizens themselves.

The methodological impetus to follow the policy, invoked by Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore (2015) in their recent book Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism, thus serves as an ample catch-phrase for the kind of empirical grounding we are getting at here (though the empirical scope of our small investigation is obviously much more lim-ited than theirs). Within this methodological frame of reference, digitalization serves as a moving target that we use to empirically group together a rich variety of political attempts at regulating and steering digital technologies within advanced capitalist states. Policymakers may not always have labeled this process as ‘digitalization’, but have instead used a number of different terms throughout the years to designate the use of information and communication technologies within government. In lieu of a better name, we use digitalization as a kind of empty signifier that allows us to hold together certain political and historical trajectories within a common frame of reference so as to trace their bumpy, fragmented and polymor-

INTRODUCTION

12

phous development over time. Digitalization does not emerge fully formed: it has to be gradually enacted, produced and maintained if it is to stay alive. And often, this road is full of policy experiments, failures and contradic-tions. By grounding digitalization in this CPE framing, we avoid having to work with a strict and a priori definition of what it is or does. In this way, we do not take for granted that digitalization is leading to more efficient, innovative and productive forms of governance and statehood. Instead, we want to suggest that these notions are in and of themselves part of the dis-cursive and political web in which digitalization is caught.

The broader implication of this conceptual argument is that digitaliza-tion should not be considered an exceptional site of statecraft; a technical question best left to engineers, data scientists or programmers. Instead, we contend that it must be considered on par with other political instruments yielded by contemporary states in their building of certain hegemonic projects. In this way, drawing on CPE and its analytics of the capitalist state (Jessop 2002), we will argue that digitalization should be seen as institutionally embedded, unevenly developed and locally negotiated. The landscapes of digitalization are interwoven and co-articulated with the landscapes of the capitalist state. And these partially convergent topogra-phies both have to be continuously produced, upheld and created anew.

In exploring this particular agenda to digitalization, placed at the inter-face of critical policy studies and political economy, we are not alone. A growing body of work has since the end of the 2000s started to scrutinize the implicit political ideas and rationales found within information, data and digitalization policies (Chini 2008; Hall 2008; Hall and Löfgren 2004). Within this small body of work, quite a few scholars have begun to dissect the novel links being made between such policymaking efforts and neoliberal forms of statecraft in particular. Verdegem and Fuchs (2013) showcase this in their comparative study of the European Union’s Digital Agenda and Swedish ICT policies, leading them to argue that the “notion of the sustainable information society is today primarily a neoliberal ideo-logical concept aimed at forestalling more fundamental changes and discus-sions that aim at a socio-economically just, ecologically preserving, culturally inclusive, and politically participatory information society” (p. 17). Franceshetti (2016) makes similar arguments in a study of Open Government Data policies in an Italian context, while Gurumurthy, Chami and Thomas (2016) have traced how “particular and unequivocally gen-dered narratives of governance, public discourse, and economic develop-ment are generated through India’s digital agenda, shaping a culturally


13

resurgent hypermasculine nation aspiring to compete in the global market-place” (pp. 391–392). This, these authors argue, demonstrates how “digi-tal technologies […] intertwine with local articulations of development in a globalized, neoliberal world” (p. 392). In a study of Open Government Data in the United Kingdom, Bates (2014) emphasizes “the strategic role that information policy is playing in the UK government’s response to the crisis of the neoliberal state” (p. 394), revealing the deep links being made between novel landscapes of digitalization and crises- prone modes of neo-liberal retaliation. In a 2014 blog post for the LSE Impact Blog (hosted by the London School of Economics and Political Science), Eric Kansa asked whether “the Open [Data] Movement really stands for reform and not just a further expansion and entrenchment of Neoliberalism?”

To our mind, it is exactly these types of questions we should be asking. Instead of naturalizing digitalization, we ought to inquire into its relation to existing political rationalities and forms of statecraft. This book can thus be seen as a further continuation of and contribution to some of these newer research developments. By pushing for a CPE approach to digitali-zation and presenting a multi-level empirical case study, we hope to pro-vide new insights into the ways in which digitalization is becoming a potent means of statecraft within capitalist states. We want to argue that questions of information, data and digital policies should never have been dislocated or detached from questions of statehood and the critique of political economy in the first place. Digitalization has from the very begin-ning been a question of policy, politics and practice. To claim otherwise is to contribute to the deep mystification of these processes as otherworldly questions best left to technical personnel.

ouTlinE of Book

This book is organized into six chapters. Following this introductory chapter, outlining the main themes addressed in this work as well as their wider implications, Chap. 2 provides an introduction to cultural political economy. This chapter discusses some of the main theoretical arguments levelled by CPE, including the various twists and turns this post- disciplinary current engages with. It also outlines a number of heuristic tools that may be used within empirical studies of political-economic developments. Chapter 3 advances this dialogue, albeit in a more historical register. Drawing on existing research, we retrace the transformations of capitalist states from the post-war period and up until the present day, including the

INTRODUCTION

14

breakdown of the Keynesian-Fordist order in the face of globalization, neoliberalization and the rise of the knowledge-based economy.

We then use these theoretical and historical trajectories as an entry- point to our case study of digitalization efforts in the Danish welfare state. The study falls in two distinct halves. Chapter 4, Rolling out Digitalization, examines the historical road that policy-efforts have taken from the 1990s and up to 2017. Exploring the path-dependencies shaping Danish policymaking, the chapter showcases the ideational shifts tied to digitalization over time, highlighting the discursive and agential selectivities involved in the process. Turning from this national level, Chap. 5 looks at the impact these reforms have had on local welfare institutions. More specifically, we examine how Danish citizen service centers have been radically transformed due to the digital policy offensive. We will argue that these have become new state spaces intended to softly disci-pline and take care of the residual categories caused by national policymaking. This has not only meant a new set of practices for welfare state professionals, but also implied that these centers now become home to the excluded and marginalized digital population. At the same time, new counter-hegemonic projects may also be found within this frontline, showcasing how contradic-tions and complexities arise within the state itself.

The book concludes with Chap. 6, which ties the theoretical, historical and empirical trajectories presented throughout the book together. It argues that a genuinely critical account of digitalization ought to view this process less as a technical project and more as a political instrument. In doing so, we might begin to develop a cultural political economy of digi-talization, capable of laying the groundwork for transnational compari-sons, deep ethnographies and theoretical work going forward.

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INTRODUCTION

PART I

Thinking State Transformations Through Cultural Political Economy


CHAPTER 2

Cultural Political Economy

Abstract 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 intel-lectual backdrop to the remainder of the book. It explicates the philo-sophical underpinnings and political engagements of this work.

Keywords Cultural political economy • Material • Semiotic • Selectivities • Post-disciplinarity • Ontological turn

This chapter provides a brief introduction to cultural political economy (CPE) as a particular approach to the study and critique of political econ-omy. As outlined in the previous chapter, one of our main aims with this book is to showcase how and why CPE might provide a powerful analyti-cal framework for understanding governmental digitalization. This chapter


22

opens this dialogue by outlining some of CPE’s key theoretical arguments and analytical tools. These will then be used, within the empirical portion of this work, as a way of navigating the complex semiotic and structural forces at play in our particular case study.

Our overriding argument is that if we wish to understand digitalization as a partially new political instrument, we need a set of tools that can help us excavate, contextualize and historicize the structures of the present. To our mind, CPE provides such a toolbox that allows “for explanations that are adequate at the level of causality as well as meaning” (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 132) as the German sociologist Max Weber stressed that all soci-ological inquires ought to do many years ago.

The purpose of this fairly dense theoretical chapter is to take the role of social theory seriously within the study of digitalization. One of the big problems that has continued to haunt the fields usually investigating this area has been their neglect of sociological and theoretical questions con-cerning ontology, epistemology and critique. As we briefly touched upon in the previous chapter, this has all too often meant that scholars have simply taken over the rather crude ideas about digitalization promoted by capitalist corporations and political elites. In doing so, digitalization has been reduced to quick technological fixes, capable of optimizing existing forms of labor while creating more flexible and lean institutions. To pave the way for a cultural political economy of digitalization – putting this area back in its place as a political instrument implicated in the restructuring of advanced Western states on par with other regulatory instruments – we need theoretical tools that are capable of explaining this area in an ade-quate, self-reflexive and consistent manner. We need concepts that might help us navigate the complexities involved in producing digitalization as a hegemonic state project.

CPE is a growing field of study mainly associated with Lancaster schol-ars Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop (2013; see also Jessop and Sum 2006). One of its main ambitions is to take the so-called cultural turn(s) within both political economy and institutional theory seriously. It does so not by adding mechanically “the study of ‘culture’ to studies of politics and economics […] through simple aggregation” (p. 22). Instead, pro-posing an ontological turn within political economy, CPE “stresses the role of semiosis in enabling social actors to ‘go on’ in a complex world in all spheres of social life. It does not accept that there is a separate field of culture (comprising semiotic practices and relations) that can be con-trasted with other kinds of social relations” (ibid., original emphasis). In


23

this way, CPE can be seen as an attempt to re-ground political economy in the existential necessity of semiotic processes by treating sense- and meaning- making as constitutive of all social relations.

While CPE has mainly been advanced by Sum and Jessop, it has found a much broader audience and comprises a growing community of scholars today. As we also mentioned in the introductory chapter, CPE has informed a great deal of different scholarly interventions over the years, providing powerful analyses across a variety of fields and empirical sites (Tyfield 2012, 2014; Dannestam 2008; Ribera-Fumaz 2009; Jones 2009; Jessop and Sum 2011; Jessop 2004, 2005, 2009; Sum 2009, 2013, 2017). To our mind, this showcases the broad palette of work currently undertaken under the banner of CPE. It provides a testimony to the rich explanatory potential of this agenda for understanding global, regional and local forms of capitalist development, crises and change. Our very modest contribution to this field is to add questions of digitalization and digital governance to the inventory of empirical sites explored by CPE. We want to suggest that if we are to understand these new political instruments, we ought to not reify these as neutral technological fixes, but instead reclaim and unearth their wholly political character (see also Markusson et al. 2017).

It should be stated from the beginning of this chapter that our particu-lar rendition of CPE is very much informed by our own theoretical con-cerns, inclinations and intellectual path-dependencies. Keeping within the post-disciplinary orientation of CPE, which stresses the multiplicity of entry-points to any given problem, the approach advanced in this book is informed by our specific preoccupation with questions of discursivity, power and institutions (Schou and Hjelholt 2017; Hjelholt and Schou 2017a, b; Schou 2016; Hjelholt 2015). This also means that while we certainly concede to the main lines developed by CPE – namely that struc-turation and semiosis are co-constitutive processes, folded-into each other dialectically – we nonetheless tend to locate this argument within a per-haps more pronounced focus on political discourses and organizational power. In this sense, our presentation of CPE is decisively tinged towards our own specific concerns and predispositions.

With these opening remarks in place, the following sections turn to a more in-depth consideration of CPE, outlining core ontological argu-ments and analytical concepts along the way. Our presentation moves from the abstract theoretical level, articulating the ontological, epistemological and ethical foundations of CPE, towards the more empiri-cal level, concerned with the analytical heuristics offered by CPE.

CULTURAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

24

Cultural PolitiCal EConomy as Grand thEory and analytiCal sEnsibility

CPE has gradually come into being over the last decades through an engagement with a number of existing theoretical positions and argu-ments. Unashamedly labeled as a grand theory (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 1), CPE can best be conceived as an intellectual and theoretical orienta-tion rather than a closed, monolithic system. As Sum and Jessop (2013, pp. vii–xiii) emphasize in Towards a Cultural Political Economy, this orien-tation has been constructed through an on-going engagement with a number of other disciplines, including, but certainly not limited to, the different schools making up the so-called Regulation Approach (Jessop and Sum 2006; see also Boyer and Saillard 2002 [1995]), critical dis-course analysis, Foucauldian dispositive and governmentality analysis, neo- Gramscian approaches to hegemony, critical realism, and Jessop’s (2008) own work on the strategic-relational approach, broadly informed by Nicos Poulantzas, Marxism and other theoretical strands. In this sense, CPE is a fairly heterogeneous ensemble of insights, arguments and prepositions generated within a large and sprawling body of intellectual work. Rather than resorting to eclecticism or patchwork, however, CPE is founded on a fairly explicit ambition to provide a contribution to the critique of political economy. Indeed, as Sum and Jessop (2013) state, CPE “focuses on the semiotic dimensions of political economy considered both as a field of inquiry and as an ensemble of social relations. Introducing semiosis is not intended to replace, but to deepen, critical political economy” (p. viii). This addition to political economy is simultaneously to be located within a broader disciplinary horizon, as Sum and Jessop deliberately describe their approach as “pre-disciplinary in inspiration, trans-disciplinary in practice, and post-disciplinary in its aspiration” (ibid., p. ix).

Post-disciplinary is here meant in a very genuine way. Working towards a post-disciplinary aspiration or orientation is taken to encompass a particular self-reflexive turn that does not fit easily within (or concerns itself too much with) pre-existing disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, Sum and Jessop (2013) summarize the main thrust of such an approach in the following way:

This approach refuses historically contingent disciplinary boundaries. Instead, post-disciplinary analyses begin by identifying specific problems independent of how they would be classified, if at all, by different disci-plines; and they then mobilize, develop and integrate the necessary con-


25

cepts, methodologies and knowledge to address such problems without regard to disciplinary boundaries. In sum, this research orientation is criti-cally self-aware of both the epistemic and ontological limits of inherited disciplines and is explicitly problem-oriented rather than tied to disciplinary blinkers. As such, this is a research programme that should be discursively and structurally resistant to disciplinary institutionalization, that is, to becoming another discipline alongside others. (p. 15)

This commitment to post-disciplinary also has more concrete implica-tions for the CPE agenda. It means that CPE works with a non-exclusive, self-reflexive and inherently open frame of theorization that cannot be reduced to mechanically applying a set of predefined concepts or ideas. This is not, Sum and Jessop stress, an anything goes mentality. CPE is indeed based on a certain set of epistemological, ontological and norma-tive commitments. But it does signal that there are multiple and contin-gent entry-points to the same problem. To reduce the complexity of the world (one of the major methodological slogans promoted by CPE), there is a need to mobilize different conceptual tools and ideas. In this way, CPE is inherently pluralistic in its approach insofar as it “works with a critical- realist and strategic-relational approach that relies on a pluralistic logic of discovery and a logical–historical method of presentation. Pluralism […] is grounded ontologically in the complexity of the world, which entails that it cannot be fully understood and explained from any one entry-point. Nonetheless, this does not exclude well-grounded critiques of individual entry-points as an important part of scientific practice. It is not a recipe for an ‘anything-goes’ relativism” (p. 7).

(ontoloGiCal) twists and turns

Building on these post-disciplinary foundations, CPE can be read as a response to and radicalization of a number of so-called turns within both political economy, institutional theory and beyond. The most prominent of these is undoubtedly the cultural turn within political economy. During the last decade, there have been a number of different efforts to integrate the study of culture within political economy (Best and Paterson 2010; Paterson 2007; du Gay and Pryke 2002). Attempted by several schools and theoretical trajectories, the depth and implications of these cultural turns (in the plural) have varied a great deal: from thematic turns seeking to study ‘culture’ as a specific functional sub-system from the perspective


26

of political economy to methodological turns, arguing that the study of culture might be worthwhile within the critique of political economy (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 73). CPE does not simply seek to make an either thematic or methodological cultural turn. Instead, in a more pro-found manner, it seeks to make an ontological cultural turn, claiming that “[s]tudying ‘culture’ is essential because semiosis is foundational” (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 73). Structuration, the term adopted by CPE to refer to the structuring of social relations, cannot be understood without also grasping the cultural (or semiotic) components of these processes.

To understand the full implications of this ontological turn, we have to understand how it is articulated and integrated with a so-called complexity turn. Within this latter turn, the world is seen as enormously complex. As such, it cannot be represented in its totality through any one means of semiosis or structuration. In order to make sense of this complexity there is an ontological need for it to be reduced, managed and contained in certain ways. This concretely implies that (a) science (scientific knowledge pro-duction) is in the “business” of developing theories and models of inher-ently complex systems (to reduce complexity), and that (b) for individuals to be able to ‘go on’ in the world, there is an existential need to reduce complexity (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 21). For Sum and Jessop, this last argument is not just one important entry-point amongst others but consti-tutes a foundational claim of CPE altogether. Complexity reduction is an ontological (and hence foundational) component of all social relations. One of the core intellectual tasks for critical research, Sum and Jessop (2013, p. 3) argue, is to explore how complexity reduction takes place and the implications that different kinds of complexity reduction has.

It is based on this ontological cultural turn and its integration with a complexity turn that CPE develops its main theoretical arguments. According to CPE, complexity reduction works along two – equally real – mechanisms: semiosis and structuration. In this way, “[s]emiosis and struc-turation are both necessary for social agents to ‘go on’ in the world, and each involves specific forms of enforced selection and selectivities. Semiosis is a dynamic source of sense and meaning. Structuration sets limits to compossible combinations of social relations and thereby contributes, as far as CPE research interests are concerned, to the institution of specific political economies” (ibid., p. 148).

Semiosis refers to the ways in which individuals (social actors) create meaning by reducing the complexity of the world. This takes place both through language, as the medium of meaning par excellence, but it also


27

includes other ways of making sense of the world. In this way, semiosis is taken to be a “generic term for the social production of intersubjective meaning” (p. 165). Complexity reduction takes place (in the case of semi-osis) insofar as some (not all) aspects of the world are picked out, under-stood in certain ways and attributed certain characteristics. To go on in the world, there is a need to reduce the range of potential objects, subjects and processes that can be given meaning. At the same time, sense- and meaning-making may impact how we act, engage and live in the world. Our way of making sense of the world can have very real performative effects on the organization of the world itself.

This last argument should be qualified up front. CPE should not be conceived as an idealistic orientation, as semiosis should always be grasped within its wider historical setting as well as co-evolution and co- articulation with extra-discursive, structural components. CPE does not, in other words, advocate an only textual approach, focusing on the construction of language alone, as any such analysis ought to grasp the ways in which semiosis is folded into and reliant upon non-semiotic components. Additionally, just because we (as individuals) can imagine and give mean-ing to the world in certain ways does not mean that our image and under-standing will have any impact on it. We are, for better and worse, always thrown into a world that is perpetually pre-given and where certain hege-monies have managed to become sedimented over time (on this last con-cept, see also Laclau 1990; Glynos and Howarth 2007).

In this context, CPE draws a distinction between construals and con-struction. While construals are taken to be certain ways of reducing com-plexity through semiosis and structuration, the constructive impact of such forces is dependent upon their mobilization and resonance with other social, intellectual and material forces: “construals may shape the natural and social world in so far as they guide a critical mass of self-confirming actions based on more or less correct diagnoses of unrealized potentials” (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 4, added emphasis). Construals may construct the world – but not necessarily. This is also why the building of hegemonies, as a continuous process of negotiation, is so central to CPE. Why is it, CPE asks, that certain construals (and not others) are chosen and start to have a performative impact on the world itself? Why is it that certain dis-courses, structures and imaginaries become dominant? Because, CPE answers, these have managed to become more or less hegemonic through the interplay of discursive, agential, structural and technological forces (more on these below):


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[while] social construals are equal in the face of complexity, some are more equal than others in their impact on social construction. In other words, some are more fundamental to structuring interaction and to limiting pos-sible combinations of social relations. These hegemonic (or at least domi-nant) construals provide fundamental Denkformen (forms of thought or, for Foucault, epistemes) and Existenzweisen (modes of existence, forms of life). (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 163, original emphasis)

Semiosis is, however, only part of the picture here. The other, equally important, form of complexity reduction is structuration. This term is taken to designate “emergent pattern[s] of social interactions, including direct or indirect human interactions with the natural world” (p. 149). In this regard, CPE builds a fairly comprehensive and dialectical understand-ing of structure. If, Sum and Jessop argue, “interactions are not to be random, unpredictable and chaotic, possible connections and sequences of action must be limited – but not so tightly constrained that adaptation in the face of changing circumstances is impossible” (pp. 149–150). Structure is, in this sense, seen as the emergent, contingent and partially unstable outcome of structuration efforts. Like semiosis, structuration also serves to reduce complexity by providing certain generalized and general-izable patterns of social interaction that can be carried across spatio- temporal boundaries.

Broadly construed, the purpose of CPE is to understand how semiosis and structuration, as two equally real mechanisms through which complex-ity is reduced, evolve and develop over time. One way of doing this is not just to understand how certain semiotic and structural forms of complexity reduction become normalized and dominant over time, but also to trace the crises, contradictions and tensions that arise from the sedimentation of such forms. Given that CPE is broadly informed by the Marxist critique of political economy, one of its basic arguments is that political-economic structures are inherently contradictory and incomplete. The continuous reproduction of the capital relation is highly improbable (Jessop and Sum 2006). There thus needs to be a continuous process of negotiation and repair in order for the capitalist system to be able to go on. As we will dis-cuss more in the following chapter, outlining the relation between domi-nant accumulation regimes and historical state forms, one of the primary structural causes behind the major state restructurings happening in the 1970s and 1980s within advanced capitalist states has precisely been such crises tendencies and the search for new spatio- temporal “fixes” .


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EPistEmoloGy and CritiquE

Having now outlined the main ontological components of CPE, including the different twist and turns it engages with (see Table 2.1. for an over-view), we now move to some brief remarks on its epistemological as well as ethical commitments.

CPE works with may best be described as a historical epistemology argu-ing that any form of knowledge – as a means of complexity reduction – is always contingent and incomplete. No form of knowledge can ever exhaust the complexities of the world. This also means, Sum and Jessop stress, that “against a universal, trans-historical account of the ‘economy’, we empha-size the inevitable contextuality and historicity of knowledge claims about historically specific economic orders” (2013, p. 6). The ‘economy’ should here be conceived as merely one amongst other differentiated parts of society, as CPE does not take a universal approach to any form of knowl-edge whatsoever.

These epistemological foundations also mean that CPE privileges both multiple entry-points to the same problem as well as a historical mode of analysis. Instead of merely analyzing the semiotic and structural composi-tion of a certain hegemonic project in a “synchronic” manner, CPE instead aims to showcase the processes through which multiple hegemonies (rid-

Table 2.1 Selected twists and turns in CPE

Selected turn Description and consequences

Ontological cultural turn

Culture (semiosis) is foundational to studying any kind of social relation … need to integrate semiosis within the study and critique of political economy

Complexity turn

The world is inherently complex and cannot be grasped through any one form of representation or structuration … existential need for complexity reduction in order to go on in the world (semiosis and structuration)

Post- disciplinary turn

Disciplinary silos constitute straitjackets that limit the range and scale of potential problems, approaches and questions … need to traverse and integrate different methodologies, theories and knowledges to solve problems through multiple entry-points

Self-reflexive turn

Scientific research is the product of specific historical contexts, path- dependencies and assumptions … need to continuously scrutinize and question ontological, epistemological and ethical predispositions and logics

Source: Compiled by authors


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dled with contradictions, crises-tendencies and internal divergences) have been negotiated over time. In this sense, there is a genuine ambition not to reduce multiplicity and complexity to single, monolithic and stable explanatory principles. This is also why CPE prefers to speak of hegemo-nies (in the plural) rather than hegemony (in the singular).

As argued above, despite its wide-ranging sources of inspiration, CPE shares a basic adherence to being a critical (and, ultimately, Marxist) ori-entation. This also means that CPE has a certain ethical and normative commitment. According to Sum and Jessop (2013), CPE is “concerned with revealing and evaluating the often implicit ethical and moral values, sentiments, commitments, feelings, temporal horizons, attitudes to the environment and judgments that shape everyday life, organizational prac-tices, institutional orders and societal self-understandings” (2013, pp. 7–8). The aim is, to phrase it slightly differently, to scrutinize the ways in which particular semiotic and material structures reinforce and repro-duce domination, exploitation and inequalities. In this way, CPE seeks to re-politicize otherwise sedimented structures by showcasing why these should not be taken as neutral, natural or necessary. Instead, such hege-monic projects are the result of active actions, practices and processes accumulating over time. They can be undone and recreated, if not be sheer imagination alone, then by material forces.

CPE does not shy away from an explicit normative engagement. In this regard, it shares certain arguments with the so-called Essex School of Discourse Analysis, represented most prominently by the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2014 [1985]). Though especially Jessop (1990) has always been sharply critical of this work, we would say that CPE does share the ambition to re-activate, de-naturalize and re-politicize the contingent grounds of otherwise stable social formations with this school (see e.g. Laclau 1990, pp. 35–36; Schou 2016). CPE moreover shares the notion that research ought to engage actively in the world by constructing and engaging in new (counter-)hegemonic projects. Instead of moving away from normative questions, because of positivist claims about the need for absolute grounds based upon foundational and unshakeable notions such as Reason (Howarth 2001), this can be seen as a self-reflexive political engagement, highlighting the role scientific knowl-edge production might have in social struggles. However, what CPE does not share with the Essex School, and similar poststructuralist projects con-cerned with deconstructing universals, is its ambition to explain and understand the construction of such hegemonies through a combination


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of both structural and semiotic entry-points. For CPE linking the semiotic and the structural is completely necessary if we want to understand exist-ing forms of domination, inequality and exploitation.

sElECtivitiEs and hEGEmoniEs

Up until this point, we have laid out a series of fairly abstract prepositions governing CPE as an intellectual and political project. However, more than simply a theoretical system – concerned with introducing complexity, culture and post-disciplinary mechanisms to the critique of political econ-omy – CPE should be considered as providing a set of heuristic tools for understand actually existing empirical cases. It is precisely in its capacity to bridge high-level theoretical thinking with analytical concepts aimed at both the meso and micro-level that CPE showcases its potency in our view. In this regard, the most important concepts include the notions of hegemonies and selectivities. We shall explain both of these below.

We have already used the concept of hegemony a number of times. This notion derives from the work of Antonio Gramsci (1971) and is taken to mean “the modalities of securing domination through social practices ori-ented to the winning of overt or tacit consent” (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 201). As stated above, hegemony is often used in the plural sense by CPE to designate the multiple and processual character of such projects. In keeping with the arguments laid out above, hegemonies are seen as projects that must be actively constructed, which takes place in the semiotic and material interplay between both dominant groups and subaltern identities. Moreover, by developing a dialogue between the work of Gramsci and Foucault – in order to Marxianize Foucault and governmentalize Gramsci – CPE “emphasizes the multi-faceted nature of hegemonies and extends its scope from intellectual and moral leadership to include self- leadership (i.e. responsibility of the self as a moral agent to guide the self)” (ibid., p. 201).

Adding even more depth to this argument, CPE stresses not just the (re)production and construction of hegemonies but also their destabilization and dislocation through counter-hegemonic projects. This allows, once again, for an inclusion of conflict, contradictions and tensions at the core of any given analysis, displacing attempts at imposing neat boundaries and limits to particular social formations. “Hegemony” Sum and Jessop (2013, p. 223) emphasize, “is not a cohesive, unilateral, monovalent relationship of leaders and led; it is riddled with tensions, contradictions and depends on the ‘sutur-ing’ of difference that is always vulnerable to pulling apart and ruptures.”


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To help explain the production of (counter-)hegemonies, CPE pro-vides a set of heuristic tools, centered on the notion of different selectivi-ties. To understand this concept, however, we need to move back to what we labeled as the underlying historical epistemology that CPE works with. This epistemology is to a large degree premised on an evolutionary approach to the construction, sedimentation and structuration of hegemo-nies. Evolutionary should here not be understood as teleological, i.e. as having a definite or necessary end goal. What it does mean is that the selec-tion of particular ideas, material forces, practices, institutional logics and so forth takes place over time and through a gradual process. CPE splits this into three key moments concerned with variation, selection and reten-tion. We can explain these more in-depth by taking so-called discursive selectivities as our entry-point.

On a day-to-day basis, there is an on-going variation within the dis-courses employed by individuals to ‘go on’ in the world, as “sites, subjects and stakes of action” (p. 161) are redefined and rearticulated over time. While most of this variation fades out or is replaced by other discourses, some ideas and discourses have a longer life and a bigger impact. These are, in other words, selected from the pool of variation. This happens, Sum and Jessop argue (2013, p. 162), “because they resonate discursively with other actors and social forces and/or because they are reinforced through various structural mechanisms.” These selected moments may be retained if these resonating discourses start to become integrated and ingrained into the structures of everyday life, through “inclusion in an actor’s habi-tus, hexis and personal identity, enactment in organizational routines, integration into institutional rules, objectification in the built environ-ment, material and intellectual technologies, and articulation into widely accepted accumulation strategies, state projects or hegemonic visions” (p. 185). There is nothing automatic about this process. Instead, it is a question of accumulated political decisions over time, the spread of certain resonating ideas and the exclusion of others. Moreover, we are, as previ-ously stated, always-already thrown into a world that is pre-given. In this way, the world does not need to be discursively created anew every morn-ing. What this notion of selectivities allows for, then, is to see how certain forms are created, discarded and/or retained over time, with a focus on why and how certain selectivities are chosen rather than other.

CPE is not limited to discursive selectivities. Instead, it works with a four-fold set of heuristic selectivities, including so-called agential, technological and structural selectivities notwithstanding the discursive selectivities just dis-


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cussed. Table 2.2 delineates the main content of each of these in turn. These selectivities are non-exclusive and others may be added to the list, such as gendered selectivities (Jessop 2008), temporal selectivities or spatial selectivities (Jones 1997; Brenner 2004). In conducting empirical analysis, at both an institutional meso-level and an interactional micro- level, the aim is to inves-tigate how these different selectivities co- constitute, intermingle and overlap in the production and contestation of (counter-)hegemonies. By locating the

Table 2.2 Four selectivities provided by CPE

Mode of strategic selectivity

Description and effect Limitations, constrains and caveats

Structural selectivities

“The asymmetrical configuration of constraints and opportunities on social forces as they pursue particular projects” (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 214). Grounded in structuration as an existential form of complexity reduction

Structure is always relational and does not constitute an absolute constraint; applies differently to different actors (asymmetrical); favors certain interests, identities, agents and strategies rather than others; shaped by path-dependencies

Discursive selectivities

The capacity of different discourses, genres and styles to frame and give meaning to subjectivities, objects, feelings, identities and social circumstances. Grounded in semiosis as an existential form of complexity reduction

Discourses rely on and are embedded within historical conjunctures and are therefore always pre-given through sedimented forms of meaning; discursive selectivities function on multiple scales: from self-descriptions of the world to everyday life

Technological selectivities

The capacity of different technologies to shape and produce subjects, objects and understandings of the world. These can serve to influence the distribution of resources, choices and potentials for acting

Technologies are bound up with power/knowledge relations in a Foucauldian sense; technologies can be both material, governmental, social and disciplinary; the source and product of knowledge asymmetries

Agential selectivities

The capacity of different agents (or groups) to influence and shape particular contexts and circumstances. Embedded and intertwined with structural, discursive and technological selectivities

Social agents (and groups) are always already placed in contexts and historical conjunctures that they have not made or influenced

Source: Compiled by authors based on Sum and Jessop (2013, pp. 218–219)


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production of such hegemonies within the evolutionary variation, selection and retention of selectivities, CPE offers a powerful set of heuristic tools for understanding how and why particular semiotic and structural forms become sedimented, dominant and hegemonic.

Within this book, we take these different selectivities as our main ana-lytical tool for understanding and investigating how digitalization has come into being over time. We do so by exploring the particular hege-monic projects in which digitalization has been enrolled and articulated, as well as the institutional, technological and economic implications these hegemonies have had on welfare institutions within the Danish state. Our entry-point for this analysis will be discursive selectivities, exploring the normative ideas, argumentative structures and imaginaries linked to digi-talization as an area of policymaking over time. To account for these selec-tivities, we will place them in contact and dialogue with their co-evolutionary structural, agential and technological selectivities. Moreover, while we take discursive selectivities as our entry-point, they do not constitute our exit-point. Instead, we shall turn to the institutional, structural and tech-nological implications these have had in the last half of our case study in order to provide a more coherent empirical outlook.

Retracing the history of digitalization through this theoretical lens, we are able to go beneath the surface provided by policymakers today. What is often presented as a coherent, simple and neutral technological fix has in fact been riddled with tensions and contradictions. Not only has there been different imaginaries and discourses tied to digitalization over time – showcasing the evolutionary struggles to select and retain a hegemonic vision for what digi-talization should be – these ideational changes have also led to structural, agential and technological developments that are inherently contradictory. By adopting a CPE approach to the study of digitalization, we are in a much better place to understand the implications and processes involved in these developments. Instead of working with any kind of a priori sense of what digitalization is and does, we instead have to actually retrace the different selectivities that goes into the making of this area of governance.

ConCludinG rEmarks

This chapter has provided a brief introduction to cultural political econ-omy as a particular post-disciplinary orientation to the investigation, cri-tique and engagement with political economy. Laying out the key ontological, epistemological and ethical concerns of CPE, through an


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engagement with particularly the work of Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop (2013), we have sought to explicate (and hopefully make clear) the spe-cific analytical mentality operationalized in this book. As stated from the outset of this chapter, we do not pretend to provide a full explanation or description of the many intricate and fairly multifaceted arguments pro-vided by CPE. Instead, in a much more modest manner, we take CPE to be a productive heuristic foundation for providing new empirical insights into complex social phenomena. For all its abstract theorizing, CPE is to our mind first and foremost an analytical toolbox with a set of fairly pro-ductive concepts that allows us to disentangle, interpret and critique the political economy of digitalization efforts within advanced democratic states. That being the case, our aim is very much to take CPE’s arguments seriously by developing a narrative that tries to take into account both the structural, discursive, agential and technological selectivities involved in our particular case study. Doing so, we would argue, allows us to provide a more finely detailed and nuanced account of the both structural and semiotic mechanisms under scrutiny.

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Brenner, N. (2004). New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Dannestam, T. (2008). Rethinking Local Politics: Towards a Cultural Political Economy of Entrepreneurial Cities. Space and Polity, 12(3), 353–372.

Du Gay, P., & Pryke, M. (Eds.). (2002). Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life. London: Sage.

Glynos, J., & Howarth, D. (2007). Logics of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory. London: Routledge.

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Hjelholt, M., & Schou, J. (2017a). Digital Lifestyles Between Solidarity, Discipline and Neoliberalism: On the Historical Transformations of the Danish IT Political Field from 1994 to 2016. TripleC, 15(1), 370–389.


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Hjelholt, M., & Schou, J. (2017b). Den digitale borger [The Digital Citizen]. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag.

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Jones, P. (2009). Putting Architecture in Its Social Place: A Cultural Political Economy of Architecture. Urban Studies, 46(12), 2519–2536.

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a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd paperback edition. London: Verso.Markusson, N., Gjefsen, M., Stephens, J., & Tyfield, D. (2017). The Political

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CHAPTER 3

State Transformations: A CPE-Perspective

Abstract 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 analy-ses 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 litera-ture 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 pro-posed within critical state theory, may provide a solid conceptualization of recent transformations within the capitalist state.

Keywords State theory • Fordism • Keynesianism • Competitiveness • Competition states

This chapter continues the dialogue opened with cultural political econ-omy (CPE) in the last chapter. It does so by shifting the gears slightly. Rather than taking a theoretical entry-point to CPE, we now move into


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empirical and historical territory. More specifically, our aim with this chap-ter is to chart a route, following the pathways explored by existing scholar-ship, through the major structural and semiotic changes within capitalism and the capitalist state from the post-war period and to the present day. Covering a considerable amount of political-economic changes, we exam-ine the paths from the “Fordist-Keynesian” (Harvey 1989) compromise in the aftermath of the Second World War to the consolidation of competi-tiveness discourses, post-Fordist accumulation regimes and competition states at the end of the twentieth century (Sum and Jessop 2013; Jessop 2002). We do so with a focus on wider international developments, but also with a keen eye to the specific historical-institutional circumstances found in Denmark (Pedersen 2011; Torfing 1999, 2001; Nevers and Olsen 2015), our main object of inquiry in the second part of this book.

Retelling these historical trajectories provides us with a powerful his-torical and contextual backdrop to the specific empirical sites explored in this book, namely digitalization as an emergent regulatory and political instrument. These moreover showcase some of the explanatory capabili-ties of CPE in action. As we have argued from the beginning of this book, CPE not only provides a powerful set of theoretical concepts and analyti-cal tools. It has also served as a catalyst for important empirical studies, charting and dissecting the intricate dynamics of capitalism and the capi-talist state (Jessop 2002; Sum and Jessop 2013; Sum 2009, 2015). Engaging with these empirical pathways allows us to push the CPE approach even further, situating our own contribution in a more detailed manner amongst these already existing analyses. The point of this chapter, then, is not simply to reiterate a large set of historical developments within capitalism and the capitalist state. In a much more substantive way, we want to argue that these historical-empirical trajectories provide a solid historical canvas to many of the issues discussed in this book. Understanding digitalization requires us to release this area from its institutional and political-economic vacuum and place it in its proper historical context.

We start out by describing the rise of Atlantic Fordism and the Keynesian Welfare National State (Jessop and Sum 2006; Peck 1996; Brenner 2004; Sum and Jessop 2013). Using the language of CPE, this analysis fore-grounds the ways in which different selectivities came together in the post- war period in order to form a relatively stable political-economic order. We will describe how this Fordist-Keynesian compromise, broadly confined to geographical areas such as the United States, the UK and parts of Europe, came to be the catalyst for economic growth, state-building and profound


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institutional developments. Moving from this initial starting point, we will then highlight the gradual breakdown and crisis of this compromise in the 1970s and 1980s, including the search for new recovery discourses. Doing so, we will show how new ways of organizing economic activities and state institutions have emerged since the 1990s and 2000s. These political- economic restructurings include the rise of the knowledge-based econ-omy, new discourses on competitiveness (Sum 2009, 2015) as well as competition states (Cerny 1997; Hirsch 1995; Jessop 2002) intended to promote, sustain and legitimize new forms of capital accumulation (Sum and Jessop 2013). These changes have also been labeled, under slightly different theoretical circumstances, as the gradual entrenchment of neo-liberalism as the hegemonic political-economic project of our times (Peck 2010; Wacquant 2009; Harvey 2005).

As this small outline suggests, we will cover a substantial amount of ground. As a consequence, this chapter will only retell these developments in a somewhat schematic manner (as a necessary act of complexity reduc-tion). Nonetheless, the narrative presented here should provide a histori-cal framework in which we may situate our study of governmental digitalization. Against the all too common tendency to bracket digitaliza-tion – as if distinct from wider historical developments within the capitalist state form – we want to foreground this area’s connection to the hege-monic rationalities, discourses, ideas, and structural logics that have char-acterized wider transformations within the capitalist state form. Doing so, it becomes possible to showcase how governmental digitalization has been embedded within, and sought to partially rework, broader political- economic transformations within advanced capitalist states.

From AtlAntic Fordism to the Knowledge-BAsed economy

This chapter takes its point of departure in a description of Atlantic Fordism and its corresponding state form, namely the Keynesian Welfare National State (Jessop 2002; Sum and Jessop 2013; Jessop and Sum 2006). Using these concepts as our starting point, we will lay out the his-torical developments of capitalism and the capitalist state from the post- war period and up until the present day.

Atlantic Fordism can, broadly construed, be understood as the eco-nomic paradigm that rose to increasing dominance in countries such as the

STATE TRANSFORMATIONS: A CPE-PERSPECTIVE

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US, Canada, Australia and North-Western Europe during the aftermath of the Second World War (Jessop 2002; Sum and Jessop 2013). Taking its name from Henry Ford, the great social engineer of the early twentieth century (Harvey 1989), Atlantic Fordism encapsulates a particularly way of regulating labor, organizing production and securing the on-going means of capital accumulation (Lipietz 1985). As a concept, Fordism can first of all be seen as a specific accumulation regime, that is to say “a com-plementary pattern of production and consumption that is reproducible over a long period” (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 246). Doing so, Jessop (2002) argues that Fordism was based on mass production, particularly in the form of moving assembly-line work in factories, and mass consump-tion of standardized goods. The idealized aim of this regime was to increase the accumulation of capital through “a virtuous circle of growth based on mass production, rising productivity based on economies of scale, rising incomes linked to productivity, increased mass demand due to rising wages, increased profits based on full utilization of capacity and increased investment in improved mass production equipment and tech-niques” (Jessop 2002, p. 56).

Fordism did not only constitute a particular accumulation regime, however, but may also be seen as a generalized pattern of societalization (Jessop 2002): a particular way of organizing and orchestrating how soci-ety ought to function. In this scheme, workers were dependent upon their wage to “satisfy their needs from cradle to grave” (ibid., p. 58), with the nuclear family in cities and suburban areas consuming standardized collec-tive goods and services provided by the bureaucratic state apparatus.

While Fordism consolidated as the dominant model in the post-war period, this did not mean that the entire economy was organized accord-ing to Fordist principles. Indeed, as Jessop (2002) emphasizes, for this mode of growth to be realized, other sectors of production had to provide complementary labor processes.

Atlantic Fordism developed together with the rise of the so-called Keynesian Welfare National State (KWNS): a state form intended to sup-port and sustain the modes of capital accumulation inaugurated by the coming of Fordism. The period up until the early 1970s is often labeled as the Fordist-Keynesian golden age (Peck 1996, p. 193), as the post-war “economic boom” (Jessop 2002, p. 79) meant almost full employment, economic growth and the expansion of welfare benefits into new areas. “In short,” Jessop argues, “if the KWNS helped secure the conditions for


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Fordist economic expansion, Fordist economic expansion helped secure the conditions for expansion of the KWNS” (ibid., p. 79).

While following different trajectories and national path-dependencies, the construction of these welfare states took place throughout the US, the UK and large parts of Europe. In a Scandinavian context, Denmark pro-vides but one example of the diverse welfare states that were constructed in the post-war period. Increasing its public sector significantly, establish-ing social security systems and expanding the rights associated with citi-zenship, the Danish welfare state grew quickly in shape and size from the 1950s to the 1960s (Kaspersen and Nørgaard 2015). Christiansen and Petersen (2001, p. 184) thus observe how the “decades between 1950 and the mid-1970s were the golden years of the Danish welfare state”, as this was the time where “a series of social reforms […] transformed both the social security system and the way in which social problems were talked about. Denmark became a modern welfare state in the Nordic sense: tax financed, universal social security organized in a rational, scientific way formulated as social rights” (ibid.).

Jessop’s (2002) analysis of the KWNS can be unfolded further in terms of the four key notions it unites: Keynesianism, Welfare, National and State. The KWNS was Keynesian in the sense that it sought to secure full employment through demand-side management and labor market poli-cies. In this way, the KWNS “normalized and moderated macroeconomic fluctuations in order that, at the microeconomic level, Fordist enterprises could anticipate market stability and growth” (Peck 1996, p. 192). The KWNS was oriented to welfare in that it sought to mobilize state help and collective bargaining as a means of generalizing mass consumption. This state form sought to increase welfare support in the form of unemploy-ment benefits, pensions and other forms of state help. In this way, the KWNS actively promoted the expansion of social and political rights con-nected to citizenship through new policy measurements, implying a com-mitment to universal welfare and a management of the “social problems associated with Fordist growth, such as those derived from accelerated commodification and urbanization, around which welfarist ‘solutions’ could be formulated” (Peck 1996, p. 193).

Jessop argues that the KWNS was a national state in that it took the nation as its primary territorial and spatial boundary. This meant that the national economy became the primary unit of measurement used to guide policy efforts. “The economy” was perceived as a relatively closed and nationally bounded entity, with the national economy being the primary


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scale of economic intervention. In this sense, there was less concern for the international economy or transnational flows. This also implied that the nation state was seen as a sovereign state with international initiatives first and foremost being framed as facilitating corporation amongst otherwise auton-omous actors. Within this context, questions of “population, reproduction, citizenship, migration and territorial defense” (Jessop 2002, p. 71) consti-tuted some of the KWNS’ key problems and areas of concern.

Finally, the KWNS was statist because the state took on the task of regulating economic and social activities in order to mitigate market failures:

To the extent that markets failed to deliver the expected values of economic growth, balanced regional development inside national borders, full employ-ment, low inflation, a sustainable trade balance, and a socially just distribu-tion of wealth and income, the state was called on to compensate for these failures and to generalize prosperity to all its citizens. (Jessop 2002, p. 61)

Within this CPE analysis (Sum and Jessop 2013, pp. 253–257; Jessop and Sum 2006), it was the coupling and co-evolution between Fordism and the KWNS that laid the groundwork for the heyday of Atlantic Fordism. However, as Jessop goes some way to clarify, the KWNS consti-tutes an ideal-typical construct. The actually existing instances of this state form have been variegated, complex and widely dependent upon national path-dependencies. Furthermore, the coupling between Fordism and the KWNS was not always free of problems or contradictions – far from it. In Britain, for example, Fordism never quite managed to stabilize, instead emerging as a “flawed Fordism” (Peck 1996, p. 193). In a similar way, describing the situation in Denmark, Torfing (1999, p. 379) has called it “a special type of ‘Fordism without Ford.’” Seen in this perspective, there has never been any pure Fordism or KWNS, but only a number of varia-tions, differences and alterations on the features described above.

Crises and Recovery

By the 1970s and 1980s, both the KWNS and Atlantic Fordism experi-enced a series of crises, making their relatively stable co-evolution more and more prone to failures and contradictions (Jessop 2002). From a CPE per-spective, this is hardly surprising, as both semiotic and structural complexity reduction are seen as inherently contradictory and unstable. That being the


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case, Sum and Jessop (2013, p. 395) argue that crises should be seen as complex phenomena that demand the use of different entry-points in order to be investigated and understood properly. Crises disrupt sedimented and taken for granted ways of relating to the world. In doing so, they prob-lematize and question existing political solutions and policy paradigms. Adopting a CPE perspective to such events thus means seeing how “crises is never a purely objective, extra-semiotic event or process that automati-cally produces a definite response or outcome” (ibid., p. 396).

Neil Brenner (2004, p. 161) has aptly described the complex set of interlinked crises and contradictions facing the KWNS and Fordism in the following way:

During the early 1970s, a number of tumultuous political-economic shifts sent shock-waves through the North Atlantic Fordist configuration of ter-ritorial development. These included, most crucially, the breakdown of the Bretton Woods monetary order, the eruption of the 1973 oil crises, the intensification of economic competition from newly industrialized coun-tries, the decline of traditional Fordist mass production industries, the rise of mass unemployment, the increasing saturation of Fordist mass consumption markets, and the fiscal crises of Keynesian welfare national states. […] These developments significantly destabilized the interscalar arrangements on which the Fordist-Keynesian political-economic order was organized.

As can be seen from this passage, the causes and mechanisms implicated in these interlinked crises tendencies spanned across economic, fisco- financial, political and social dimensions (Jessop 2002; see also Lipietz 1992). These complex international developments also surfaced in a Danish context. During the 1970s and 1980s, the Danish welfare state increasingly came under attack, not least due to the economic and finan-cial crises tendencies sketched out above (Petersen et al. 2013). As Christiansen and Petersen (2001, p. 194) note, a “word often heard describing this period is the crisis of the welfare state.” In the political system, there was widespread belief that the welfare state, as it had been organized, legitimized and put into practice up until that point, had not only become economically cumbersome, but that it also took freedom away from its citizens and made them into “clients” through heavy admin-istration and bulky bureaucracy (Kaspersen and Nørgaard 2015, p. 77; Pedersen 2011, pp. 11–12). Though this critique was formulated across the political spectrum, it found its key point of legitimacy by importing


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and modulating neoliberal discourses: what was demanded was a more entrepreneurial, market-driven and “modern” form of governance; one that could release new economic energy through a leaner and more com-petitive state.

One of the defining features of crises is that they generate a number of different, and sometimes conflicting, recovery discourses. In dislocating the existing structures, “[c]rises are particularly important moments in the general dialectic of sedimentation and reactivation because they often pro-duce profound cognitive, strategic and practical disorientation by disrupt-ing actors’ sedimented views of the world. They disturb prevailing meta-narratives, theoretical frameworks, policy paradigms and/ or every-day life, and open the space for proliferation (variation) in crisis interpreta-tions” (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 402). Amongst this variation of potential interpretations, only some will be selected and only some will be retained. So the gradual breakdown and crises of both the KWNS and Atlantic Fordism simultaneously signaled the search for new economic imaginaries and state forms, seeking to provide the grounds for the continued accu-mulation and expansion of capital (Sum and Jessop 2013).

The Knowledge-Based Economy and Post-Fordism

According to Sum and Jessop, one of the specific economic imaginaries that was eventually retained following the crises of Atlantic Fordism was the so-called knowledge-based economy (KBE). The retention of this imaginary was, however, not always a smooth process and there was noth-ing necessary about the selection of the KBE as the particular imaginary that came to be hegemonic in the aftermath of the Keynesian-Fordist political-economic order. Instead, it was the outcome of a number of highly contingent, strategic and semiotic-structural selectivities. Sum and Jessop (2013, p. 263) retrace the historical development of the KBE to the early 1990s and 2000s. At this point in time, the KBE emerged as a specific societal self-description, intended to promote a certain image of how society and the economy ought to be structured. Rather than a neu-tral way of describing the actual state of economic activities, the KBE represented a certain normative idea of how economic activities ought to be structured in order to maximize economic growth and capital accumu-lation. One of the reasons why the KBE eventually managed to consolidate as a hegemonic imaginary, Sum and Jessop argue, is because it came to be promoted by a number of powerful international organizations, such as


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the OECD, the World Bank and the European Union. Indeed, as these organizations started to support the KBE, others quickly followed suit:

States at local, regional, national and other levels have been accorded a key role in […] implementing the structural changes and wide-ranging policies needed to promote an innovative, entrepreneurial and competitive KBE. Many other international organizations as well as regional blocs in the semi-periphery and periphery have jumped on the KBE bandwagon. These include the Arab League, ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations), Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (especially through its Economic Committee), the Asian Development Bank, the IMF (International Monetary Fund), NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), the United Nations in its various organizational guises, the Viségrad Four, the WTO (World Trade Organization) and the World Intellectual Property Organization. (Sum and Jessop 2013, pp. 270–271)

The retention of this economic imaginary has thus been due to what CPE would call the strategic selectivity of a number of powerful actors seeking to gather around a common device for crises recovery and capital accumulation. What, then, are the main features of the KBE as an eco-nomic imaginary?

Here, it should first of all be stated that the KBE has been closely aligned with, and in many cases dependent upon, a number of related nar-ratives, including ideas such as the creative economy, the information soci-ety, the information economy and so forth (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 270). As “an innovation-led, flexicurity-oriented, multi-scalar and governance- based mode of growth” (ibid., p. 284), the KBE has been both translated and transferred to a number of different policy areas, such as “smart machines, expert systems, knowledge transfer, creative industries, intel-lectual property rights, lifelong learning, e-government, smart weapons, the information society and cybercommunity” (ibid.). Despite its wide- ranging application and resonance across a number of sites and areas of society, the KBE can nonetheless be characterized in terms of its promo-tion of knowledge, innovation and knowledge transfer as key components in capital accumulation and economic activities. Knowledge work and informational labor are seen as fundamental to the growth of capitalism (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 279). As Sum and Jessop furthermore argue, this has entailed the “promotion of entrepreneurialism and an entrepreneurial culture supported, in more recent policy paradigms, by calls for investment in social capital and for the promotion of good gover-


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nance” (ibid., p. 282). This has been further sustained through the cre-ation of a whole array of new international benchmarks, rankings and measurements seeking to categorize and penalize particular areas, regions, states and firms for their performance within this new economic space.

As an economic imaginary, the KBE has meant a redrawing of the boundary between economic and extra-economic activities. It has signaled a movement from taking the national scale as the primary unit of macroeconomic measurements and interventions to working with complex and layered scales of economic activity (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 281). Moreover, the sphere of the ‘economic’ has been widened to encompass areas of social life previously deemed outside or foreign to this functional system. In this way, factors formerly deemed as ‘extra-economic’ are increasingly included into economic activities. Amongst other things, this signals a gradual marketization and neoliberalization of areas of life previ-ously deemed as private, personal and intimate (see also Brown 2015; Dardot and Laval 2013).

In its function as a new hegemonic imaginary, the KBE has been closely aligned with the rise of post-Fordism as a new accumulation regime intended to mitigate some of the flaws of Fordism (Jessop 2005). Following Jessop (2002), we may think of post-Fordism as representing a gradual turn towards flexibility as a new defining feature of the labor pro-cess: flexibility both in terms of flexible systems and machines, but also in terms of a flexible workforce. Instead of assembly-line mass workers, “flexi-waged, flexi-time, hire-and-fire, and outsourced jobs through self- employed or subcontracted skilled labour to the multiskilling of core workers enjoying job rotation, job enrichment and teamwork” (2002, p. 98) now start to become the dominant forms of work. The rise of infor-mation and communication technologies, along with the increasingly international division of labor, has played a core part in these new labor processes: from mass production within relatively centralized factories to decentralized and networked modes of labor spread out across the world. Within this new division of labor, knowledge work and intellectual labor- power also starts to become key components. In this sense, as a mode of macroeconomic growth, post-Fordism does not rely on the same “virtu-ous circle” as Fordism did. Instead, constant innovation and permanent disruption are now seen as the means of economic growth (Jessop 2002; on post-Fordism see also Lipietz 1992).

Seen from a CPE perspective, we can begin to see how the KBE and post-Fordism have emerged as both structural and semiotic responses to the


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crises of Keynesian-Fordism. The KBE has been one master narrative, amongst a number of competing “post-Fordist scenarios in the 1990s” (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 262), that has managed to become partially hege-monic through a variety of political measurements, practices and policies.

competition, competitiveness And competition stAtes

With the gradual retention of the KBE as an economic imaginary and the rise of post-Fordist accumulation regimes, new discourses of competition and competitiveness have also begun to develop (Sum 2009, 2015; Jessop 2015). As Sum (2009) argues, “[the notion of] ‘[c]ompetitiveness’ has long been a concern for policy-makers but its significance has expanded rapidly in the past two decades in a globalized world organized increasingly along neoliberal lines. Media headlines, policy speeches, official documents, consultancy reports and (inter-)national outlooks deploy this buzzword in imagining alternative economic futures” (p. 184). Indeed, discourses on competition and competitiveness are not necessarily new, as these concepts may be dated back for centuries. However, alongside the rise of the KBE, competitiveness and competition have gathered new momentum, promoted through a range of knowledge brands and international institutions (Sum 2009, 2015). Under neoliberal hegemony, a new definition of these terms has started to form: “Since the late 1990s” Sum and Jessop (2013, p. 297) thus argue, “chal-lenges towards the free market paradigm have prompted the reorientation of the mantra of ‘getting prices right’ to one of ‘getting competitiveness right.’”

State Transformations and the Competition State

One of the areas in which these new competitiveness discourses have man-ifested themselves most significantly is within the hegemonic state form promoted across advanced capitalist states. As described above, the break-down of the Keynesian-Fordist political-economic order also signaled a crisis for the KWNS. With the spread of post-Fordist accumulation regimes and the KBE there simultaneously emerged a need for new state forms that were capable of maintaining and supporting these novel forms of capital growth and expansion. One of the responses to this has been the emergence of so-called “Schumpeterian Workfare Post-national Regimes” (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 284; Jessop 2002). This has also been labeled as the coming of competition states (Cerny 1997; Hirsch 1995) or the gradual ascendance of neoliberalism as a hegemonic political-economic project (Harvey 2005; Peck 2010).


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Sum and Jessop (2013, p. 267) argue that the defining feature of the competition state is its efforts to “secure economic growth within its bor-ders […] by promoting the economic and extra-economic conditions that are currently deemed vital for success in economic competition with eco-nomic actors and spaces located in other states.” This new state form started to emerge based on what Jessop calls “a trial-and-error search to make sense of the crises-tendencies of Atlantic Fordism and its mode of regulation” (2002, p. 95; see also Jessop 1993). Adding to these descrip-tions, Jessop (2002, p. 124) furthermore argues that what characterizes these new competition states is not just their eagerness to promote com-petiveness within and across their own borders. In the face of intensified international competiveness and globalization, this new state form also adopts a new self-description: the competition state describes itself as a both leaner, more flexible and proactive entity than the welfare state, and is actively concerned with fostering innovation, entrepreneurship and knowledge-intensive labor. What must be cultivated by the state is an “entrepreneurial climate” (Jessop 2002, p. 127) that can serve as the underlying driver in optimizing and enhancing the nation’s international competitiveness. As part of this new hegemonic state project – and in keeping with the wider political-economic changes discussed above – knowledge starts to be increasingly commodified as a key component in the development of a knowledge-based economy. As a consequence, a profound discursive change starts to take place at the core of the state itself, as previous ideas of “entitlements to lifelong employment [is shifted] to one about obligations to engage in lifelong learning to ensure that workers are employable and flexible” (ibid., p. 133, our emphasis). We can thus see that in many of its substantive features, the competition state reuses, incorporates and co-opts ideological tenants promoted by the KBE. In a panoramic survey on the current literature on competition states, Genschel and Seelkopf (2015, p. 237) have characterized these changes in the following way:

In contrast to earlier state transformations, which were punctuated by wars, revolutions, and violent institutional ruptures, this transition is incremental, undramatic, and peaceful. The basic institutions of the welfare state remain in place but are gradually trimmed, rearranged, and ‘refunctionalize[d]’ (Jessop 2002, p. 258) to serve a new purpose: to make society fit for com-petition. While the mission of the welfare state had been to protect national society form excessive competition by controlling cross-border economic


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transactions, by granting social rights and protection, and by nationalizing key public services, the competition state pursues ‘increased marketization’ (Cerny 1997, p. 259). It liberalizes cross-border movements, re- commodifies labor, and privatizes public services. The welfare state domesticated capital-ism, whereas the competition state vies for capital.

Expanding these descriptions, we can say (following Jessop 2002) that in contrast to the KWNS the competition state is not Keynesian because it builds on a very different set of economic policies. Rather than seeking to mitigate the failures and problems of the market through countercyclical demand management, the competition state is geared towards securing flexibility and entrepreneurialism. It does so through supply-side interven-tions with the aim of securing structural competitiveness. The competition is not (primarily) a welfare state. Contrary to the KWNS – which sought to increase social rights, security and welfare benefits by expanding the public sector – the competition state works through privatization, welfare retrenchment and public sector cuts. This also means the gradual rise of activation, workfare and a subsumption of social policy to economic poli-cies concerned with imposing flexibility on the labor market (see also Peck 1996, 2001; Torfing 1999). Yet, while the competition state seeks to repurpose existing welfare institutions, it does not do so in a completely discontinuous manner. Many of the existing institutions are kept in place, while their aim, goal and discursive mediation are changed (Jessop 2002). The competition state refunctionalizes rather than dismantles: welfare insti-tutions are kept in place, but their functions are rearranged in substantial ways. The competition state is furthermore not primarily a national state according to Jessop (2002) because the national scale is no longer seen as the primary and constitutive feature of community, identity and belonging. While the KWNS was primarily concerned with the national economy, regulated under heavy US hegemony (Peck 1996), the competition state works in a highly globalized environment. This implies a complex set of scalar restructurings (Brenner 2004; Jessop 2002, Chap. 5), displacing responsibilities and national sovereignty to international organizations and supranational states. This also helps explain why the competition state is not primarily a state. Jessop (2002, p. 254) instead characterizes it as regime-like in the sense that there is an “increased importance of non-state mecha-nisms in compensating for market failures and inadequacies in the deliverance of state-sponsored economic and social policies.”


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Taken together, the competition state may thus be seen as “the institu-tional reflection of the global spread of pro-business, ‘neoliberal’ reforms – [premised on] low inflation, fiscal austerity, welfare retrenchment, marketization, deregulation, and privatization. It represents not just one variety of capitalism among others, but the general form of the state asso-ciated with the distinct period of capitalist development unfolding since the economic crises of the 1970s” (Genschel and Seelkopf 2015, p. 240).

The competition state idea is certainly not uncontroversial or without its problems (see e.g. Hay 2004; Genschel and Seelkopf 2015). The description presented above does not necessarily do justice to Jessop’s (2002) fairly fine-grained analysis of this particular type of capitalist state. Once again, we should emphasize that Jessop’s account is very much con-strued in an ideal-typical way: that is to say, he does not claim that these trajectories and trends are present in all capitalist countries, that they are unilaterally or uniformly imposed across scales or that all capitalist states will necessarily converge into one (and only one) type of state. Far from it. Not only does he designate a number of different modalities of the com-petition state – including both neoliberal, neocorporatist, neostatist and neocommunitarian pathways – he also highlights various countertrends and contradictions. What might appear here, then, as a fairly monolithic description of the capitalist state and its particular hegemonic forms, ought to be considered as simplified reductions of complexity. In its function as an ideal-type, the competition state “accentuate[s] certain distinctive fea-tures […] in order to identify what lends it structural coherence […] and […] highlight distinctive development tendencies” (Jessop 2002, p. 255). That being the case, many of the ideas contained in Jessop’s account have in fact been applied to the Danish context under investigation in this book. Political-economists such as Jacob Torfing (1999, 2001) and Ove Kaj Pedersen (2011) have – both directly and indirectly – showcased how the competition state idea may help explain and describe certain structural changes within the Danish state form (see also Jessop et al. 1991).

Pedersen has done so in his widely influential Danish book Konkurrencestaten (“The Competition State”). This work argues that from the 1990s and up until the present day, the Danish welfare state has gradually transformed into a competition state. Relaying many of the arguments presented in the text above, Pedersen argues that the Danish welfare state has been gradually refunctionalized through a number of structural reforms and modernization programs. While this has entailed a


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whole series of complex changes, particularly five areas can be highlighted that distinguish the competition state from the welfare state in a Danish context. (1) The Danish competition state seeks to “actively mobilize its citizenry and businesses to take part in the global competition” (Pedersen 2011, p. 12, our translation), whereas the welfare state sought to protect these against the economic cycles of boom and bust. (2) The competition state places risks and responsibilities onto the individual citizen through technologies of self-leadership and responsibilization whereas the welfare state emphasized common moral education as a collective project. (3) The competition state views “community as connected to work and freedom as identical with the freedom to realize one’s own needs” (ibid., our transla-tion), whereas the welfare state saw community as tied to democracy and freedom as freedom to participate within political processes. (4) The com-petition state seeks to create economic dynamism instead of stability. And (5) the competition state works actively with transnational and interna-tional organizations whereas the welfare state was primarily focused inter-nally on its own national boundaries.

Pedersen’s (2011) analysis can thus be seen as one particular variation of the ideal-typical account provided by Jessop (2002). Shaped by national and institutional path-dependencies, the Danish competition state accentuates certain features and downplays others. The major take-away from Pedersen’s (2011) analysis is that a whole range of profound structural as well as discursive changes have taken place at the heart of the Danish state. These have served to refunctionalize core public sector institutions and instill new forms of marketization, privatization and liberalization.

Taken together, we can begin to see how the notion of the competition state may provide a productive frame for understanding contemporary modalities of capitalist state restructuring. This concept is certainly not perfect or all encompassing, and other notions and analytical outlooks could have been foregrounded as well. However, as one particular way of reducing the enormous complexity of historical state transformations, we nonetheless tend to find that this notion provides a lot of analytical mile-age. When coupled with the rise of post-Fordism and the knowledge- based economy, we begin to have (what we perceive to be) a fairly nuanced image of the immense set of structural and semiotic transformations tak-ing place since the post-war period.


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concluding remArKs

This chapter has covered a substantial amount of ground. Engaging in particular with the work of Ngai-Ling Sum and Bob Jessop, we have sought to carve out a space for thinking through a series of complex restructurings within advanced capitalist states. Drawing on the theoreti-cal and analytical tools available to CPE, this has allowed us to foreground the gradual and extremely multifaceted transition from a Keynesian- Fordist order, established in the aftermath of the Second World War, to a new post-Fordist era, with the knowledge-based economy, competitive-ness discourses, and competition states as hegemonic semiotic-structural components.

Describing this large body of historical developments is an exercise in complexity reduction. Indeed, in trying to systematize the many pathways explored by CPE, we have no doubt been forced to simplify and stream-line certain arguments. That being the case, we nonetheless hope that this has not been an exercise in futility. Indeed, to our mind, sketching these historical developments, with a particular CPE focus on the co- evolutionary mechanisms involved in selecting and retaining certain structural and dis-cursive selectivities, we are in a much better position to situate and contex-tualize the specific features of our case study. Armed with the theoretical concepts explored in Chap. 2, as well the empirical sensibility and histori-cal context provided by this chapter, we can begin to engage with digitali-zation in a very different way than what is often attempted. We can begin to situate this particular area as a both continuous and discontinuous means of capitalist statecraft, simultaneously reproducing and altering existing historical trajectories, trends and developments.

In the following part of the book, we turn to our case study of digita-lization efforts within the Danish state. Beginning from the early 1990s, we will show how Danish policymakers have gradually attempted to cre-ate a hegemonic vision for what this area of governance should entail, how these ideas have been riddled with internal failures, but also how they have gradually translated into particular legal, economic and institu-tional restructurings. We will then, keeping within the CPE approach, showcase the specific institutional changes this has caused alongside the new contradictions and counter-hegemonies these national policy blue-prints have created within local municipal contexts. Doing so will allow us to work our way towards providing a cultural political economy of digitalization in Denmark.


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Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge: Zone Books.

Cerny, P. G. (1997). Paradoxes of the Competition State: The Dynamics of Political Globalization. Government and Opposition, 32(2), 251–274.

Christiansen, N. F., & Petersen, K. (2001). The Dynamics of Social Solidarity: The Danish Welfare State, 1900–2000. Scandinavian Journal of History, 26(3), 177–196.

Dardot, P., & Laval, C. (2013). The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. London: Verso.

Genschel, P., & Seelkopf, L. (2015). The Competition State: The Modern State in a Global Economy. In S. Leibfried et al. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Transformations of the State (pp. 237–252). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hay, C. (2004). Re-Stating Politics, Re-Politicising the State: Neo-liberalism, Economic Imperatives and the Rise of the Competition State. The Political Quarterly, 75, 38–50.

Hirsch, J. (1995). Der nationale Wettbewerbsstaat: Staat, Demokratie und Politik im globalen Kapitalismus. Hamburg: Edition Archiv.

Jessop, B. (1993). Towards a Schumpeterian Workfare State? Preliminary Remarks on Post-Fordist Political Economy. Studies in Political Economy, 40, 7–39.

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and the State. In A. Barry & D. Slater (Eds.), The Technological Economy (pp. 144–165). London: Routledge.

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PART II

Landscapes of Digitalization


CHAPTER 4

Rolling Out Digitalization: Hegemonies, Policies and Governance Failures

Abstract 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 eco-nomic 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 chap-ter seeks to reactivate the contingent foundations of this area of governance, emphasizing its imminently political, rather than technical, character.

Keywords Digitalization • National policies • Path-dependencies • Danish state • Cultural political economy • Hegemony

This chapter provides the first part of our case study of governmental digitalization efforts in Denmark.1 Moving from the theoretical tools and historical trajectories developed in the first part of the book – concerned with articulating CPE as an analytical frame – we now zoom in on how


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digitalization has been employed as a means of governance and policymak-ing in Denmark. More specifically, we are concerned with digitalization efforts in the context of what Henman (2010, p. 8) label as e-service provi-sion and e-management respectively, namely “the use of electronic tech-nologies for the delivery of public services” and “those activities which use digital technologies to allocate resources within government under the terms of existing governmental policy.” Investigating these policy efforts, we will also touch upon questions of “e-democracy” and broader societal visions of digitalization, but these issues do not constitute our main empir-ical focus. Indeed, as will be showcased in this chapter, the separation between these areas turns out to be a historical, rather than conceptual or a priori, distinction. Thus, while digitalization efforts started out in the early 1990s by deliberately linking questions of public sector restructur-ing, service provision, democracy and education into a unified policy frame, it has increasingly come to be separated into different streams. This is, in part, the story we will tell in this chapter.

Our case study falls in two halves. First, we investigate how different governmental actors have attempted to create a hegemonic vision for what digitalization should imply as an area of policymaking. Second, we then explore how these national policy trajectories have influenced and changed local welfare institutions in significant ways in the following chapter. Taken together, we hope that these two trajectories may help explain and fore-ground how digitalization has become an important means of statecraft and institutional restructuring – and why CPE provides a powerful entry- point for understanding these developments.

There are both substantive and more idiosyncratic reasons for choos-ing Denmark as our particular case in this book, the most obvious reason being that it is simply the case we know the best. We have, in collabora-tion and own our own, conducted research on digitalization efforts within the Danish state for a number of years now, focusing variously on questions of policymaking (Schou and Hjelholt 2017a; Hjelholt and Schou 2017a), marginalization (Schou and Hjelholt 2017b), local wel-fare institutions (Hjelholt 2015; Hjelholt and Schou 2017b) and citizen-ship (Hjelholt and Schou 2017b, 2018). The present work can be seen as our attempt to push these studies a bit further, showcasing how some of the arguments we have developed over the years might have some broader applicability and resonance.


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Beyond sheer familiarly, however, there are also more substantive rea-sons for why Denmark might be a good entry-point if we want to under-stand some of the contemporary transformations of advanced capitalist states and public sectors in the face of digitalization. As this chapter will showcase, the Danish government has since the 1990s pushed for a very proactive digital agenda, investing both economic and political capital in promoting the use of digital technologies across the public sector and soci-ety. This has given way to not only the implementation of a large number of digital infrastructures, but also the creation of new legal measurements and institutional changes. In a European perspective, this has meant that Denmark is often lauded as a digital ‘forerunner’, ‘leader’ or ‘example’ to be followed, consistently scoring some of the highest marks on the European Union’s so-called Digital Economy and Society and Index (DESI). As stated in the introduction, we should be wary of these labels and the technological selectivities of measurements like the DESI. However, if any-thing, this does indicates that Denmark is perceived to be at the forefront of digitalization efforts. By looking at this particular case, then, we might get a sense of how digitalization has become a means of policymaking within a nation that is currently articulated as an international leader.

There is a fairly well-developed field of research dedicated to exploring governmental and public sector digitalization in Denmark. Existing scholar-ship has focused on questions of policymaking (Jæger and Löfgren 2010; Henriksen and Damsgaard 2007; Ejersbo and Greve 2014, 2017; Johansson 2004), institutional work and translation (Fedespeil 2015), municipal digi-talization (Pors 2015; Andersen 2008), open data (Henriksen 2015), meta-governance (Jensen and Kähler 2007; Löfgren 2012) as well as providing more general overviews of digitalization efforts in Denmark (Andersen 2007; Henriksen 2017; Jæger and Pors 2017; Andersen et al. 2007). This book adds to and nuances these existing studies by focusing more explicitly on questions of politics, power and political economy. Indeed, advocating for a CPE-informed approach to this area allows us to not only re-connect digitalization to wider structural transformations within the capitalist state form. It also provides an opportunity to scrutinize some of the implicit theoretical and conceptual assumptions contained in large parts of the exist-ing literature. Against purely technological or depoliticized readings, we want to showcase the political ambitions and institutional consequences of digitalization policies as these have developed over time.

ROLLING OUT DIGITALIZATION: HEGEMONIES, POLICIES…

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A Brief Note oN Method

Our entry-point in this specific chapter is on the discursive selectivities involved in crafting a hegemonic vision for what digitalization should include (and exclude) as an area of governance and statecraft. Reiterating the argument presented in Chap. 2, hegemony is best conceived as hege-monies, understood as several overlapping, unstable and tension-filled attempts to sustain particular forms of moral, cultural and political (self-)leadership (Sum and Jessop 2013). Crafting hegemonies is a complex pro-cess that often involves several competing visions, prolonged negotiations and various translations across institutional borders.

This chapter looks at the formation of hegemonies by excavating the different discourses that have been tied to digitalization policymaking over time. Our focus is on the ways in which language has been mobilized in certain normative ways by different governmental agencies, with an emphasis on the particular ideas that have been selected, retained and sedi-mented. To understand these processes, we examine official policy docu-ments and national strategies produced by the Danish state since 1994. Spanning roughly 50 official documents, we have collected an archive that combines a wide assortment of strategies, policies, reports and annual reviews produced by different Danish ministries and governmental offi-cials over time. All of these documents have, to varying degrees, sought to explicate, strategize and legitimize how and why the Danish society and state should be made digital. Our analysis of this corpus of data has fol-lowed a qualitative, interpretive and inductive scheme, most closely related to approaches found in critical policy studies (Fischer and Gottweis 2012; for a CPE perspective, see Sum 2009, 2015). This entails a close textual reading of each document, the construction of extensive notes describing their contents and the establishment of codes informing further analysis. We have thus traced how different ministries have articulated different ideas as to what public sector digitalization should and should not imply, focusing on the particular concepts, words and rationales used over time. We have translated all quotes from Danish to English.

In this context, we should remember that policy documents only tell part of the story: namely the part that has been deemed worthy to act on behalf of the state. It is, in other words, the ‘official’ narrative. This also means that all of the underlying negotiations and political struggles have been erased from the surface at the precise point in which a policy becomes official. As a consequence, the narrative presented in this chapter is not


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intended to outline and excavate the complex set of differential positions, both dominant and dominated, within the Danish state itself. We are not looking for the micro-political power struggles involved in producing these policies. Instead, in a somewhat broader fashion, we look at how the official discourses have changed over time, making ideas that were seen as inher-ently good, productive and worthwhile at one point in time become gradu-ally replaced by others. Additionally, this chapter does not examine the transnational networks implicated in influencing the Danish digitalization agenda. As has been emphasized by existing research (see e.g. Ejersbo and Greve 2014), international actors like the OECD and the European Union have played a key role in shaping the Danish policy agenda. While undoubt-edly important, this is not the story we have set out to tell in this chapter.

CoNstruCtiNg hegeMoNies: WhAt should digitAlizAtioN Be?

The Danish state has relied on various technologies for several centuries. Church books, paper documents, archives and letters, used particularly for censuses and civil registration (Pedersen 2011a), constitute early examples of how the state identified and attempted to measure its population. Land registers (“jordebog”) can be traced back to around 1300 and the first censuses were held from 1787 and onwards (Krogness 2011).

Following the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, so-called punch cards were used to store information about citizens. These are paper cards that were invented in the 1800s and are now generally consid-ered as a proto-computing technology. Punch cards were used to store data on citizens in order to calculate various population statistics, measure taxes and other administrative tasks (Johansson 2004, p. 141). These cards represented the most prominently used technological infrastructure in Denmark for a number of decades. By the 1960s, however, due to both a growth within the size of the public sector and an increase in its organi-zational complexity, the Danish municipalities “reached a level where it was difficult for these manual index card registers to keep up with the ever- increasing demand for data” (Krogness 2011, p. 104). While some munic-ipalities had begun automating and organizing punch cards into larger centrals (so-called hulkortcentraler, “punch card centrals”), they could no longer keep up with the increasingly large amounts of data produced


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across the public sector. As a consequence, punch cards were gradually replaced in the 1960s and 1970s with new electronic systems and archives capable of storing larger quantities of information. As Johansson (2004) notes, this period was characterized by the introduction of a number of “large, standardized and central systems” (ibid., p. 143, our translation), used to manage and administer more information than ever before. The introduction of these databases in the 1960s and 1970s was, as Jæger and Löfgren (2010, p. 257) observe, similar to the development in a number of other (European) countries. Since then, technological developments within the Danish public sector have progressed rapidly: from the intro-duction of computers in the public sector in the 1970s and 1980s to hav-ing digital tools as an integrated part of both civic life and public sector administration in the 1990s and 2000s.

In a political context, the 1990s constitute an especially important time for governmental digitalization, as it is in this period that this area increas-ingly comes into being as a relatively autonomous field of policymaking and governance. It does so against wider political changes within the politi-cal system and state. In 1993, a social-democratic coalition, led by Poul Nyrup Rasmussen (prime minister, 1993–2001) and the Social Democrats (Socialdemokratiet), replaced the former conservative-liberal government headed by Poul Schlüter (1982–1993). As a response to the ideological-political crises of the welfare state (see Chap. 3), Schlüter had initiated a range of significant reform and modernization programs, broadly con-cerned with introducing new forms of marketization, competitiveness, decentralization and free choice into the public sector (Petersen et al. 2013, pp. 123–128). While the new social-democratic coalition discarded some of these political trajectories when they came into office, they continued and sustained many of the core political ambitions proposed by Schlüter and the previous government. In so doing, they played an important part in what has later come to be seen as the transition from a classical welfare state – the Keynesian Welfare National State (Jessop 2002) discussed in the previous chapter– to a new type of competition state (Pedersen 2011b; Torfing 1999; Genschel and Seelkopf 2015).

March 1994, the Danish government created a committee headed by Lone Dybkjær and Søren Christensen, two experienced Danish politicians coming from the Danish Social Liberal Party (Det Radikale Venstre) and the Social Democrats (Socialdemokratiet) respectively. They were tasked with creating an overall concept or framework for Denmark’s entrance into the so-called information society. This framework should, the com-


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mittee’s official mandate declared, contain “a picture of Danish citizens’ possibilities in the coming information society”, “create an overall Danish IT-policy” and “identify special areas for the coming years and point to the need for potential legislative changes” (Forskningsministeriet 1994, p. 3).

The construction of this committee in 1994 should be seen as a response to several overlapping circumstances and political choices. First of all, the committee coincided with the rise of the ‘information society’ as a trans-national imaginary. In 1994, the so-called Bangemann report was pub-lished by the European Union (Gibbs 2001; Goodwin and Spittle 2002). This report put the idea of the information society high on the political agenda across Europe. In doing so, it served to promote the new capabili-ties, potentials and opportunities provided by digital technologies for reforming existing modes of governance. Like a number of comparable countries, such as Sweden and Finland (Hall 2008), Denmark was com-pelled to formulate its own strategy on the information society following these European recommendations. This historical path is important to keep in mind because it influenced the initial framing of the 1994 commit-tee. Like the European Union, this Danish committee – and the secretar-iat and working group it assembled – treated digitalization in a fairly broad way: not only as a tool that might be used to optimize and change admin-istrative practices and service provision, but as an area capable of trans-forming large parts of the Danish society as a whole.

Secondly, the committee provided a response to broader socio- technical changes within society at large. In the early 1990s, a combination of tech-nological innovations and the internationalization of the division of labor had allowed for lower production and manufacturing costs, making digital technologies cheaper and more accessible. The number of Internet users among Danish citizens also increased significantly at this point in time. Although reserved for only a few people in the early 1990s, with 0.1% of the Danish Population being Internet users, by the year 2000, 39.2% had come online (The World Bank 2017). With the rapid growth in the num-ber of Internet users, it became possible to use digital technologies for more than simply refurbishing the “back office” of the public sector. The direct relation between citizens and the state could now be digitalized in new ways (Jæger and Pors 2017).

Third and finally, the committee’s work aligns with institutional changes within the Danish state itself. As a consequence of the national shift within the Danish government in 1993, the responsibility for infor-mation technology and digitalization was handed over to the Ministry of


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Research. Prior to this point, policymaking had been divided into a number of separate domains, such as media, information, and telecom-munication policies (Johansson 2004). The relocation of the responsi-bilities to the Ministry of Research served to merge several distinct policy areas into a more or less unified field. However, it did more than this, as there had in fact been produced digitalization policies before this point. Most significantly, the Ministry of Finance had produced the report Efficient EDP [Electronic Data processing] in the State in 1992 (Finansministeriet 1992). This report was formulated by an ‘EDP-political committee’ and had been tasked with “evaluating the need for a centrally created, state EDP-policy” (Finansministeriet 1992, p. 71). The 1992-report targeted the Danish public sector very directly and pri-marily framed digitalization as a means of making this “expensive” part of the government more efficient by optimizing labor practices and cre-ating more flexible forms of organization. As the 1992-report summa-rizes, the “1990s can be the decade in which information technology (IT) really starts to create new, better and cheaper solutions in the public sector” (ibid., p. 9, original emphasis). When the Ministry of Research was put in charge of producing an overall policy in 1994, this also sig-naled that the Ministry of Finance was no longer responsible for this area. It was a subtle shift in the agential balance of power. For the next several years, the Ministry of Research would continue to be in charge of digitalization policymaking, delegating this task to various committees and working groups over time.

Taken as a whole, the Dybkjær-Christensen-committee thus signified the initial genesis of digitalization polices as a partially autonomous area of statecraft. 1994 marks the point in which digitalization came into being as a more or less unified governmental activity tasked with providing an over-all vision for the Danish society as a whole. The formation of this new area had its initial culmination with the release of the report “Info-society year 2000” (Forskningsministeriet 1994) in 1994. This document, commonly known as the Dybkjær-Christensen report, contained a comprehensive vision for the transformation of the Danish society into an ‘information society.’ In assimilating political ideals circulating widely in Europe at the time, and shifting discussions from technical solutions to broader societal possibilities, it became very popular amongst Danish citizens and had to be reprinted several times (Johansson 2004).


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Policy Visions from 1994 to 2001

Info-society Year 2000 (Forskningsministeriet 1994) opens in the midst of global transformations. The widespread diffusion of the Internet has, according to this report, caused nothing less than a “global short- circuiting of time, places, people and processes” (Forskningsministeriet 1994, p. 7). Within this new complex of time and space, Denmark is situated “in the middle of a revolution” (ibid.). If employed in the right way, the report argues, “information technology can be a source of economic development, enhanced life quality and better public and private service” (ibid.). It is therefore seen as vital that the Danish government produces “a strategy that can bring Denmark in front through a broad usage of IT” (ibid.). According to this report, “the question is not whether we want to be a part of the infor-mation society or not. […] The question is instead: How do we want to be a part of it?” (Forskningsministeriet 1994, p. 23, original emphasis). Indeed, for policymakers at this point in time, opting out of the information society is perceived as a non-option. Instead, “the global short-circuiting, the explosion of information and the technological development are facts within the international society that we cannot escape” (ibid., our emphasis).

One of the major challenges constructed by policymakers at this point in time is how “traditional” welfare state ideals can be maintained within a transition towards an information society. The task is, policymakers emphasize, to develop an information society that is continuous with the ideational and normative foundations of the existing welfare state. For this to be realized, Info-society year 2000 argues that so-called “Danish values” (Forskningsministeriet 1994, p. 26) must be prioritized and actively pursued. The notion of “Danish values” is used to hold together a number of particular ideas, including “values such as openness, democ-racy and responsibility for everyone in society, so that there will not be a division of Danes into an A- and B-team” (Forskningsministeriet 1994, p. 7). According to this report, then, information technology and digita-lization must be used in order to secure “the free access to information”, “democracy and the individual’s ability to participate”, “personal devel-opment”, “the creation of an open public sector”, “[support for] the weakest [citizens] in society”, and “Danish businesses’ international competitiveness” (Forskningsministeriet 1994, p. 24). The Danish soci-ety is framed as being based on active democratic participation, the con-struction of open and transparent forms of governance, as well as solidarity


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and equality for ‘weak’ citizens. It is in many ways this complex web of normative ideas that is collected within the notion of Danish values. And it is these values that should constitute the foundations for the Danish welfare state’s transformation into an information society according to policymakers at this point in time.

In these early years, policymakers tend to frame digitalization within a wider nationalistic discourse. Throughout the 1994-report, it is argued that many of the core values of Danish society are being put under pres-sure by a number of external dynamics, including the globalization of the economy, market and cultural production. The rise of global forms of communication and transmission of culture are seen as endangering the “national solidarity” of the welfare state. This also means that while Denmark, “as a nation”, cannot simply “quit the international economy” (Forskningsministeriet 1994, p. 23), the market should not be allowed to “steer strategizing” (ibid.). As the report makes clear, “it is interesting, though not decisive for Denmark, to utilize information technologies in the way the many suppliers on the market makes possible” (Forskningsministeriet 1994, p. 24, our emphasis). Indeed, one of the puzzles that policymakers are struggling with at this point in time is how the (imagined) external pressure on the welfare state can be counteracted through new policy interventions. Part of the solution, they argue, is to implement digital technologies in a specifically Danish way.

Within these formative policy visions – which are clearly displayed in the Info-society year 2000 report, but may also be found in a number of similar documents at this point in time – citizens are encouraged to utilize digital technologies to take advantage of the new possibilities provided by the “digital revolution”. However, as Info-society year 2000 makes clear, the use of digital technologies should be a choice, not an obligation (Forskningsministeriet 1994, p. 34). So-called “weak citizens” should be taken care of and helped through both public libraries and the educational system, serving as core elements of the Danish democracy. In this way, the question is how to take advantage of the new possibilities of digital tech-nologies without producing new forms of division and inequality, main-taining solidarity and equality as core values: “all Danes must have access to the use of IT” (ibid., p. 25) and “all children should be equipped to master modern information technologies” (ibid., p. 57).

Overall, then, policymakers are articulating a very particular set of dis-cursive selectivities in the early 1990s. They are trying to create an overall vision for how the Danish welfare society can be transformed into a more


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or less sustainable information society. The core problem, according to policymakers, is how such a transition can happen without endangering pre-existing welfarist logics. In this sense, many of the ideational-political components of the Keynesian Welfare National State (KWNS) can be retraced within this newly created policy area: ideas of solidarity, equality, participatory democracy, and the safeguarding of weak citizens are placed high on the policy agenda. There is often a strongly democratizing and inclusionary set of discourses at play. This does, however, not mean that economic ideas are completely absent from the report. Indeed, not unlike the report Efficient EDP in the State crafted by the Ministry of Finance in 1992, Info-society year 2000 also views information technologies as a means of creating a more flexible and efficient public sector. In health care, for example, the report argues that “better patient services, substantially shorter treatment periods [behandlingsforløb], and savings worth billions, which, among other things, can be used to shorten waiting lists, must be realized by creating a national health care net that can be used to exchange information between doctors, hospitals, pharmacies and health care administrations” (ibid., p. 8). Taken as a whole, this means “IT must open the public sector, make it more transparent and possible to deliver better services” (p. 24). While these ideas do not take center stage in these early years of policymaking, they are nonetheless present. In calling for enhanced efficiency, flexibility and economic savings, they resonate directly with the wider modernization programs that were being launched at the time.

Info-society year 2000 became a genuine public success (Jæger and Löfgren 2010). It helped push digitalization policymaking onto the public and political scene, giving it a “much more central placement in the political arena” (Johansson 2004, p. 155, our translation) than before. Most of its initiatives were, however, never implemented. This is concluded by the sec-ond Dybkjær report, named The Digital Denmark (Forskningsministeriet 1999) in 1999. Picking up on several themes explored in Info-society year 2000, this second report showcases how the discourses present at the begin-ning of the 1990s are very much retained throughout the following years.

According to The Digital Denmark, the main question facing Denmark is how the country “can become a leading IT nation in the network soci-ety, while continuing the best values from the welfare society” (Forskningsministeriet 1999, p. 7). Like previous years, this question has first and foremost been actualized by the increasing globalization of social relations, emerging as a direct consequence of digital and internet-driven technologies. According to policymakers, “the Internet and new commu-


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nication technologies are binding people and businesses all over the world into a global network society” (ibid., p. 8, our emphasis). Here, we can see how The Digital Denmark no longer uses the notion of the information society, but instead speaks of a network society. Even so, many of the core challenges facing policymakers remain basically the same: how can existing normative ideals governing the welfare state be preserved while transition-ing to a network society?

With an even greater emphasis than in previous years, The Digital Denmark highlights that the transformation towards a network society must be based on “a sustainable development within the international society” (ibid., p. 9) using “values as our guiding thread” (ibid.). The question is “how we participate actively in the network society – at the same time as we keep the best values in our welfare society” (ibid., p. 82). The values connected to the welfare society are, to a large extent, similar to those expressed in 1994. Digitalization must give citizens the opportu-nity for “lifelong learning” (ibid., p. 8), protect them against surveillance and privacy invasion, and give “all citizens free access to information and exchange of information, and opportunities to expand citizens’ self- determination” (ibid., p. 9). The “transformation of Denmark into a net-work society must be based on an active, representative democracy, in which there are equal opportunities for all, and where solidarity binds the society together and secures help to those that need it” (ibid.). Condensing these arguments into a single idea, policymakers frame digitalization as a “democratic tool” (ibid., p. 79) that can facilitate “new forms of access and modes of communication between citizens and politicians” (ibid.), whilst “creating openness in the political system and a new closeness between citizens and politicians” (ibid.).

Continuing the discourses established in Info-society year 2000, Danish citizens are still not forced to adopt digital technologies. Indeed, the state should make sure that “citizens who do not have internet access […] have improved opportunities for acquiring information from the public sector” (Forskningsministeriet 1999, p. 72). We can thus see how solidarity, equality and universal welfare are still perceived to be core components of policymaking at this point in time, perhaps even more so than in the beginning of the 1990s. Danish society is seen as being “fundamentally fair with welfare benefits made available to all citizens” (ibid., p. 33), based on “a large degree of harmony and relatively few tensions” (ibid.) and (as a consequence) the “Digital Denmark must be based on a sustainable development” (ibid., p. 32). Whether these somewhat idyllic descriptions


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of the Danish welfare system hold true is to some extent beside the point: what is important to notice is how policymakers use these to imagine and articulate digitalization as a welfarist-democratic project.

Once again, neither economic nor market-like rationales are completely absent from this report. The Digital Denmark actually emphasizes that “Denmark must offer a competitive environment for companies in the net-work society” (ibid., p. 10). Yet, while digitalization is seen as a catalyst for economic efficiency and competitiveness, the market is explicitly kept at a distance: “Because of the tough international competition, we have to have a fast transition [to the network society] to ensure our welfare. But the mar-ket alone should not be allowed to control the development” (Forsknings ministeriet 1999, p. 101, our emphasis). The market should be accommo-dated, but not on its own terms and it should not steer policymaking.

Within this 1999 report, the public sector remains decoupled from the wider discursive project articulated by policymakers. Drawing primarily on economic ideas of efficiency, optimization and flexibility, these still argue that “IT must contribute to the public administration optimizing their organization and work practices in a way that results in measureable ratio-nalization benefits” (ibid., p. 73). Solidarity, equality and enhanced forms of democracy are reserved for domains outside the public sector, as this area is framed much more explicitly in terms of economic logics. However, according to The Digital Denmark, rationalizing the public sector through digitalization has shown itself be “more difficult than initially assumed” (p. 73). While conceived as an almost magical way of remolding the public sector, digitalization has turned out to require more work than expected by policymakers at the outset of the 1990s. Phrased somewhat bluntly, policymaking runs into a series of governance failures and scandals, being unable to coordinate and translate national ideas into municipal initiatives. One example of these public scandals is the IT-system “Amanda”. This database was created with the purpose of matching the demands of the labor market with the competences of unemployed citizens (Johansson 2004). Initiated in 1996, Amanda was projected to cost 268 million Danish kroner and start running in 1998. However, the system was not used until April 2000 and ended up costing more than 412 million Danish kroner (Johansson 2004, p. 161). Moreover, productivity was cut in half when the system was finally implemented, causing large-scale public uproar and protest. As Johansson (2004) notes, it was Amanda that caused the Danish mass media to focus on digitalization and public sector IT as a source of controversy and scandals. And Amanda was not the only project


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to run into both financial, organizational and public problems, as there emerged a number of scandals during the 1990s. This led, as Johansson (2004) notes, to a gradual shift within the political system, as policymakers demanded more control and better governance.

The period from 1994 to around 2001 can thus be seen as the initial consolidation of digitalization as a new regulatory and political instru-ment. Framed around guiding metaphors such as the “information” and “network” society, policymakers are laying out broader societal visions for the construction of a digitalized welfare state. In doing so, they weave together discourses and normative ideas from several different imaginaries and hegemonic projects. Policymakers assimilate and translate ideas of the information society typically associated with the rise of the knowledge- based economy, post-fordist accumulation regimes and new discourses of competitiveness (see Chap. 3). Yet, these ideas are also transposed and inscribed within the specific historical and ideological landscapes of the Danish welfare state. This means that several of the discursive tropes asso-ciated with the KWNS are emphasized and even accentuated by policy-makers. Discourses of competitiveness, neoliberalization and marketization can, however, still be found within the strategies. These are to a large extent confined to the Danish public sector. In this sense, the policy dis-course is decidedly hybrid in nature: it stands at the cross-roads of tradi-tional welfarist ideas crafted in the post-war period and the new discourses of competitiveness that were being gradually instilled throughout the Danish state in the 1980s and 1990s.

Policy Visions from 2002 to 2017

In 2001, there is a shift in the national government in Denmark. A liberal- conservative coalition replaces the former social-democratic. This means that prominent neoliberal voices are appointed as ministers and given a central placement within the state. As Jæger and Löfgren (2010, p. 258, original emphasis) succinctly argue, this implies a shift within the internal organization of the state itself: “Until that year [2001] all issues regarding new ICTs, information society and e-government were formulated by the MRIT [Ministry of Research and Information Technology]. In 2001, the political management of e-government issues was de facto transferred to the Ministry of Finance.”

The institutional-agential story is a bit more complex than this. One of the main challenges facing policymakers at the end of the 1990s was issues


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in terms of coordinating national initiatives (Jæger and Pors 2017). As an example of these national coordination issues, Jæger and Pors recount how the 14 Danish counties had all worked on their own individual electronic patient journal in the late 1990s. This meant that they had developed 14 different solutions with little to no internal synchronization across the coun-try. Adding to this, a number of public scandals started to emerge in the late 1990s as discussed above. Prominent flagship initiatives, often worth exceedingly large amounts of money, started to surpass deadlines, failed to meet their intended productivity goals or got discarded altogether because they never managed to go beyond the developmental stage. Against this backdrop, both politicians and policymakers across the political spectrum seemed to agree that digitalization policymaking had been riddled with too many failures. At the same time, it became increasingly apparent that the broader welfarist ideals tied to digitalization policies were becoming de-coupled from the hegemonic state project pursued by the newly elected government in 2001. With these governance failures and crises conditions, there was a need for new discursive and agential selectivities.

The response to these governance failures came in the guise of a new, networked mode of governance. A so-called Digital Taskforce was established in 2001, consisting of five ministries, Local Government Denmark (the inter-est organization of the Danish municipalities), the association of counties, as well as the municipality of Copenhagen and Frederiksberg. The purpose was to coordinate tasks on a national level in a much more rigorous way than previously. As Jæger and Pors (2017, p. 156) argue, this networked taskforce was (in principle) an equal and leveled collaboration between all of the par-ticipants, though the head of the taskforce was from the Ministry of Finance. This signifies an agential restructuring that would be retained up until 2011 where these selectivities would once again be remade.

The first major result of these internal re-organizations was the national strategy “Towards e-Government: vision and strategy for the public sec-tor” (Den Digitale Taskforce 2002). This strategy moves away from the broader societal and welfarist ideals expressed in the 1990s and early 2000s. Instead of working with either the information or network society as guiding concepts, this strategy specifically targets the Danish public sec-tor and administration: “The vision for e-government is that digital technologies are systematically used to innovate and transform organiza-tions and work processes to improve service quality and efficiency” (Den Digitale Taskforce 2002, p. 5). What this signifies, then, is a political sepa-ration between digitalization as a wider societal project (fusing concerns


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about democracy, participation and public sector restructuring into a single policy area) and digitalization as a more specific political instrument aimed at transforming service delivery and public sector institutions.

Within this new line of policymaking, digitalization is construed as an important way of making the internal parts of the state more efficient by optimizing existing work processes. Towards e-Government argues that “Denmark […] must be among the nations that utilize the global digital development to create growth and welfare” (ibid., p. 4), while businesses “must utilize digital technologies […] to strengthen their competitiveness in an increasingly global world.” In this new framing, citizens are portrayed as “already active in the digital network society” (ibid.) and they should “have access to digital media and use them in all parts of societal life – from shop-ping on the Internet to new offers within education and culture” (ibid.). While globalization was previously articulated as endangering the core values of the welfare state, it is now cast as a mainly economic process: “In a global-ized world, the nations that can utilize the possibilities of the network society will have the best [economic] position” (Den Digitale Taskforce 2002, p. 6). This also means that the articulation of the market changes considerably. Whereas in previous years, the economy and global market were seen as external dynamics that should not guide strategizing, they are now seen as entities to be accommodated and nurtured. Digitalization should, policy-makers argue, provide the grounds for new forms of growth and competi-tiveness by making way for increased flexibility, efficiency and the continuous optimization of (governmental) labor processes.

These discursive changes impact the way in which the public sector is conceived, though many of the ideas expressed in the 1990s are carried on. With the advent of digital technologies, policymakers claim, it becomes possible to blur the “boundaries between institutions [which have] in many ways functioned as walls” (Den Digitale Taskforce 2002, p. 4) and create a “flexible handling of specific tasks across institutional boundaries” (ibid., p. 8). In this way, ‘flexibility’ is highlighted as a key component of a more efficient public sector. Yet, digital technologies do not simply facilitate the creation of a flexible way of organizing the public sector by delegating tasks to units deemed most capable of solving them. Instead, digitalization should be seen as a continuous process of self-critical scrutiny within the public sector: “public institutions [should] continuously and systematically optimize their efficiency through the reconfiguration of work processes and organization, supported by digital tools” (ibid., p. 12). In this way, constructing the flexible organization is imagined to be an ongoing


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achievement that should be continuously re-enacted by individual govern-mental institutions. Flexibility, change and innovation become generalized conditions, as digitalization must be part of on-going attempts to rethink, recreate and reimagine the public sector in light of global competition.

In the following years, these ideas are retained in a more or less unal-tered way. Along the way, however, there are some important agential changes. Starting out, a number of the problems of coordination and con-trol faced during the 1990s continue to haunt digitalization policies and initiatives. Despite adopting a more networked approach, there are issues with realizing the projected economic savings. This leads to several agential re-adjustments. The State’s IT [Statens IT] is created as an agency under the Ministry of Finance in 2009. This is done to order to centralize the devel-opment, maintenance and support of the digital technologies used within the Danish state, including ministries, agencies and other governmental branches. Adding to this, the Danish Agency for Digitisation is created as a governmental agency directly under the Ministry of Finance in 2011. The Danish Agency for Digitisation takes over the formal responsibilities previ-ously handled by The Digital Taskforce, which was shut down in the wake of the former’s establishment. With this institutional development, the Ministry of Finance is once again put in charge of digitalization policymak-ing. After a long detour, first in the Ministry of Research and then in the networked Digital Taskforce, the Ministry of Finance is given the political mandate that was “taken away” from it in 1993.

These agential selectivities do not, however, signal any profound dis-cursive changes, as most of the discourses created after 2011 have fol-lowed those produced since the early 2000s in substantive aspects. In major national strategies, such as “Strategy for Digital Administration 2004–06” (Regeringen et al. 2004), “Strategy for the Digitalization of the Public Sector 2007–2010” (Regeringen et al. 2007) and the national strategy from 2011 to 2015, called “The Digital Path to Future Welfare” (Regeringen et al. 2011), ideas of efficiency, optimization, the accommo-dation of the market, and competitiveness continue to be dominating logics. In this way, the articulation of digitalization as a means of rewiring the public sector in order to make it more flexible and innovative has largely become sedimented over time. There has been, we might say, a gradual retention and de-politicization of these ideas, as it now appears self- evident that digitalization is primarily a tool for ordering (economic) activities in terms of discourses of competitiveness, flexibility and innova-tion. This also means that the ambivalence found in the 1990s and early


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2000s – manifested as a continuous oscillation between welfarist ideas and new discourses of competitiveness – more or less disappears. Digitalization policies become much more firmly embedded within the wider state proj-ect. In being so, this area comes into view as a key political instrument, useful for transforming public sector institutions and service delivery in profound ways.

Despite the sedimentation of this hegemonic vision from the early 2000s and up until the present day, there are some developments worth noticing. The notion of the “digital society” starts to take over as the guiding frame instead of “digital administration” (used in the early 2000s). This means that digitalization policies once again start to cover wider por-tions of the Danish state and society. What has to be constructed now is not just a digital administration, but a digital society.

Introducing new technological selectivities, in the form of measure-ments and annual reviews, there has since 2009 been produced an annual series of reviews called The Digital Society with the purpose of measuring the impact of digitalization through mainly quantitative metrics (IT- og Telestyrelsen 2009, 2010; Erhvervsstyrelsen 2013). Since 2013, these have been relabeled as Reviews on Denmark’s digital growth (Regeringen 2013). Functioning as a governmental technology, in the Foucauldian sense (Sum and Jessop 2013), these reviews have served to measure and index the progress of digitalization through relatively simple graphs, fig-ures and statistics. They have served to underline how and in what ways digitalization is creating new forms of (economic) value.

The image of the citizen has also evolved over time (see also Schou and Hjelholt 2017a; Hjelholt and Schou 2017a, b). Since the 2000s, a decid-edly different normative image of the citizen emerges than the one articu-lated in the 1990s. Citizens have increasingly been cast as customers seeking to acquire certain goods from the state. The public sector must, policy-makers argue from the early 2000s and onwards, “analyze its own service in collaboration with the users and following their users’ needs” (Den Digitale Taskforce 2002, p. 13), while “representatives from the users should evaluate needs” (ibid.). In the national strategy from 2011 to 2015, citizens are furthermore construed as being already “familiar with digital technologies”, suggesting that they must now “contribute to the public services in new ways” (Regeringen et al. 2011, p. 4). Not only will this accommodate their individual needs, it will also make sure that they can serve themselves “whenever it fits the citizen” (Regeringen et al. 2011, p. 5). This means that everyone is more or less construed as being digital


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by default: “Danish citizens use their computers, mobile phones and the Internet every day” (Regeringen et al. 2011, p. 3).

Breaking with the discourse of the 1990s, digital technologies are no longer seen as a choice, but as an almost ethical obligation. The new stra-tegic term selected for this is mandatory self-service (Regeringen et al. 2011, p. 16). Everyone must be self-serving, self-governing and self- leading. According to policymakers, digitalization is the way to achieve this goal. In this sense, we can see how digitalization starts to be discursively configured as a means of responsibilization: a way of mitigating tasks and responsibilities previously carried by formal institutions onto citizens. The reason for this, the strategies argue, is that citizens do not want to “waste time” (Regeringen et al. 2011, p. 3), as such time could be used “develop-ing the business and creating growth” (ibid., p. 18). Within the official political narratives, being self-serving is connected to normative ideas of living an active life, contributing to the societal economy and being able to fulfill individual wishes: “Most citizens want to live an active life, where they can take care of themselves and they have the freedom to do the things they want. Digital welfare solutions play an important part in real-izing this wish” (Regeringen et al. 2016, p. 28). This means that “digital citizenship” starts to be conceived as the normatively desirable form of citizen-subjectivity. Connected to a whole set of ideas about the proper forms of life, digital citizens are (imagined) to be highly individualized, active and participating individuals who demand more “lean” forms of government so that they may realize their individual freedom and sover-eignty. At the core of the current hegemonic project, then, is not just a set of discourses seeking to regulate how the public sector should adopt digi-tal technologies. There is also a fairly comprehensive set of ideas about how citizens ought to act in order to be considered proper, active and good members of the political community.

Taken together, we can begin to see how the period from 2002 to 2017 represents a shift in the overall policy discourse. Tropes of marketization, indi-vidualization, liberalization and privatization start to be increasingly wide-spread, as digitalization takes on renewed importance as a regulatory instrument capable of transforming public sector intuitions and recreating the relation between citizens and the state. In this way, this area of governance has come to be much more closely aligned with broader political- economic restructurings within the Danish state. At least from an ideational point of view, digitalization has been gradually enrolled within the dominant state project, intended to construct a more competitive, flexible and lean state.


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CoNCludiNg reMArks

With this chapter, we have sought to lay out the historical development of digitalization policies in Denmark from 1994 and up until the present day. Taking discursive selectivities as our entry-point, we have scrutinized the specific ideas and ideals that have been tied to these policymaking efforts over time. In retelling this story, we have also shown the agential selectivi-ties involved in this process, highlighting how different ministries, task-forces and working groups have been enrolled over time. Rather than a simply linear process, crafting a hegemonic vision for what digitalization is and ought to be has involved policy failures, (dis)continuities and ten-sions. The current hegemonies should, in this sense, not be conceived as inevitable or monolithic power blocks, but rather as the contingent out-come of highly complex developments.

The chapter showcases how digitalization policies have shifted consid-erably since the early 1990s, as different discourses have been selected, discarded or retained over time. While in the 1990s, policymakers very much focused on how existing welfare logics, centered on notions of uni-versal rights, solidarity and equality, could be maintained within a coming transition to an information society, these concerns have gradually disap-peared over time. No longer a question of preserving so-called ‘Danish’ (welfare) values, digitalization policies have more and more come to rely on tropes of international competition, flexibility and optimization. Concepts such as ‘solidarity’, ‘equality’, ‘participatory democracy’ and the safeguarding of the ‘weakest citizens’ have been gradually replaced by eco-nomic ‘efficiency’, ‘optimization’, ‘innovation’ and ‘flexibility’. Digital technologies have, from the early 2000s and onwards, been considered mainly as a means of cutting expenditure, heightening competitiveness and securing the continuous optimization of governmental labor pro-cesses. This has simultaneously meant a new set of normative ideas about how citizens ought to act. Being digital has come to be considered the norm, and citizens have increasingly been framed as (self-)responsibilized individuals that must take care of themselves through digital interfaces. Doing so, it would seem, is a prerequisite for creating the kind of flexible, efficient, agile and innovative society that policymakers have come to strive for. Table 4.1 summarizes these changes in a schematic fashion.

These developments resonate with many of the trajectories discussed in Chap. 3. We can begin see how digitalization, as a distinct area of policy-making and governance, has increasingly come to be enrolled within a


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neoliberalized, marketized and competition-oriented vision of society: no longer concerned with digital technologies as welfarist tools of inclusion and democratic participation, digitalization has increasingly become an instruments useful for fostering the kind of innovative, entrepreneurial and flexible public sector required in the “knowledge-based economy.” Governmental digitalization efforts have, from an ideational and political point of view, sought to push these developments on two fronts: on the one hand by calling for the refunctionalization of existing public sector institutions, either by delegating work to technological infrastructures or mandating more efficient, lean and flexible organizational structures. On

Table 4.1 Overview of main developments within Danish digitalization policymaking

Discursive selectivities Agential selectivities

Period Key concepts Core policy visions Primary actors

Governance form

1994–1999 Network society and information society

Solidarity, equality, access to information, local democracy, participation, “Danish” values, rationalization of public sector

Ministry of Research

Centralized policymaking and decentralized implementation

Late 1990s (failures)

Discursive decoupling between hegemonic state project and specific policy area

Failure to coordinate on national level; failure to translate national ideas to local initiatives

2001–2011 Digital administration

Efficiency, optimization, growth, flexibility, competitiveness

Digital Taskforce, Ministry of Finance

Networked mode of governance uniting key actors across the country

2011– Digitalization, digital society

Efficiency, optimization, growth, flexibility, competitiveness, responsibilization, self-service, digital technologies as part of an efficient, self- governing and productive life

Ministry of Finance

Centralized policymaking (Agency of Digitisation), centralized and decentralized development, and functional specialization of policymaking

Source: Compiled by authors


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the other hand through a partial reformulation of how citizens ought to act as members of the political community. As described above, ideas of national solidarity, equality and community have gradually made way for an atomistic image of the citizen as a self-serving, efficient and flexible individual. Not unlike the kinds of subjectivities deemed fit for the post- Fordist accumulation regime, these new types of citizens are seen as (always) active and entrepreneurial beings that do not have time to waste waiting in line at a local governmental office.

In the next chapter, we shall move from this initial discursive entry- point to consider some of the wider implications of these political and ideological changes. More specifically, we shall explore how these ideas have become translated into particular legal, economic and technological measurements before zooming in on citizen service centers as a specific institution that has formed an essential component in the digitalization agenda. Doing so will allow us to showcase the profound institutional changes caused by these national efforts within the frontline of the Danish state. At the same time, we will foreground how new counter-hegemonic projects may be forming against the hegemonic visions crafted by the state itself.

Note

1. The chapter builds on and incorporates arguments previously presented in Schou and Hjelholt (2017a) and Hjelholt and Schou (2017a, b).

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https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2017.1333441

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?end=2016&start=1960&view=chart

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS?end=2016&start=1960&view=chart


CHAPTER 5

Localizing Digitalization: New State Spaces and Local Resistances

Abstract 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 municipali-ties, the chapter showcases how new functions, roles and logics have emerged within these local institutions. It argues that citizen service cen-tres 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 circum-vent 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.

Keywords Citizen service centres • Denmark • State spaces • Institutional changes • Localization

This chapter provides the second part of our case study of digitalization efforts in Denmark.1 Whereas the previous chapter took a discursive entry- point – focusing on the different hegemonic discourses tied to digitaliza-


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tion policies over time, including the often contradictory and bumpy attempts to implement these visions – this chapter looks at the structural- institutional side of things. Broadly construed, the chapter seeks to show-case how these national discursive changes have had a number of local implications. Much more than rhetorical strategies or freely floating ideas, it is our contention that the digital agenda has had important conse-quences for public sector institutions and the relation between the state and its citizens. While the local scale is never determined or exhausted by the national field of policymaking (Jessop 2002; Brenner 2004), digitali-zation has managed to become localized in a number of important ways. This showcases why digitalization is not just a technological fix, but a genuine regulatory and political instrument, capable of restructuring and recreating public sector institutions.

The chapter explores this localization of digitalization in three parts. The first part identifies a set of legal, technological and economic changes prompted by national policy efforts. Most substantially, we will describe how the national turn towards digitalization as a means of economic effi-ciency, self-leadership and competitiveness since the early 2000s has given way to both new legal measurements, the implementation of digital tech-nologies across the public sector, as well as economic reregulation and privatization. Following this, the second part turns to some of the institu-tional changes caused by digitalization. More specifically, we zoom in on so-called “Borgerservicecentre” (translated into citizen service centers) as a specific “state space” that has undergone institutional changes due to the national policy agenda. We explore the new institutional functions, roles and logics found within these local municipal institutions as a way of high-lighting the structural changes involved in making the nation digital.

The restructuring of these municipal institutions has not been without contradictions or conflict. In the final part of the chapter, we describe how new forms of small-scale resistance and potential counter-hegemonies are emerging within these altered state spaces. Facing new political measure-ments (aimed at heightening efficiency, flexibility and accelerating the expedition of citizens) welfare state professionals often problematize, deconstruct and critique the national hegemonies. Reclaiming social con-cerns that have gradually been written out of the national policies, this emphasizes how new forms of resistance may emerge from within the state itself. Yet, we will also argue that promising as these forms of struggle


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might be, they often end up reproducing the very hegemonies they serve to question and problematize. This highlights the complex, tension-filled and contradictory ways in which hegemonies are negotiated and repro-duced at different scales and temporalities.

A Brief Note oN Method

The chapter seeks to provide qualitative glimpses into the institutional changes caused by national digitalization efforts. To do so, we have con-ducted semi-structured interviews with welfare professionals from citizen service centers within seven different municipalities. The municipalities chosen for this study span different geographical and political-economic settings: from smaller ‘rural’ areas to larger and more diverse ‘urban’ set-tings. We have tried to cover different municipal settings in order to get a wider overview of local changes and institutional logics. Our aim with this study was not to conduct a systematic comparative investigation or exam-ine the complex institutional legacies of each municipality. In a somewhat more open-ended manner, we have approached our qualitative material as a window to some of the broader structural and institutional changes cur-rently taking place within the ground floor of the Danish welfare state. Rather than indicative of the entire public sector, the studied citizen ser-vice centers provide an entry-point amongst many other potential sites.

We conducted the interviews in early 2017 and included both frontline workers (tasked with helping citizens on a day-to-day basis) and daily managers (responsible for both personnel management and strategic deci-sions) in our study. In total, we interviewed 17 welfare professionals. The interviews centered particularly on daily work practices, local institutional arrangements, contact with citizens and use of digital technologies. In cases where the informant had been employed in the same institution for a prolonged period, we also asked how their work practices had changed over time. We wanted to get a sense of the daily experience of working within this particular public sector institution. The interviews were supple-mented with guided tours of each citizen service center as well as informal observations of citizens. We have anonymized all names and places, look-ing particularly at the findings that cut across the different municipalities. We are, in other words, trying to tease out some of the institutional com-monalities found across our data.

LOCALIZING DIGITALIZATION: NEW STATE SPACES AND LOCAL…

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LocALiziNg NAtioNAL PoLicies

Within the literature on policymaking and institutional change, it has become commonplace to note that national policies are never merely imposed within local institutional contexts. Indeed, if national policies are to be implemented within particular local settings, shaped by their own historical path-dependencies and legacies, this requires institutional work, organizational practices and on-going negotiations. Within the specific context of housing policies, Pierre Bourdieu (2005, p. 126) has aptly sum-marized this complex set of relations in the following way:

Just as, at the central level, ‘housing policy’ is the product of a long series of interactions performed under structural constraints, so the regulatory mea-sures constitutive of that policy are themselves reinterpreted and redefined by a further series of interactions between agents who, as a function of their position in objective structures of power defined on the scale of a territorial unit – a region or a département – pursue different or antagonistic strate-gies. This means one cannot conceive of the relationship between the ‘national’ and the ‘local’, the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’ as a relationship between a universal rule and its particular application, between conception and execution.

The very distinction between center and periphery is part of particular political struggles in and of itself, intended to map and connect certain scales and territories with particular structures of power and domination. To take this scalar distinction for granted, as if it was simply a natural char-acteristic of the world, is also to naturalize and mystify these power rela-tions (see also Brenner 2004). What seems to be a merely descriptive difference between the national and the local, the core and the periphery, is in fact politically overdetermined. This argument is, in its most substan-tive aspects, completely compatible with the CPE approach advocated in this book. Like Bourdieu, CPE is also wary of the implicit political struc-tures embedded within particular scalar distinctions (Sum and Jessop 2013; Jessop 2002). And, like Bourdieu, CPE also views the translation, negotia-tion and performative effects of certain hegemonies as intertwined and dependent upon their structural and agential forces. This is what Bourdieu, in the quote above, calls the “interactions between agents who, as a func-tion of their position in objective structures of power defined on the scale of a territorial unit […] pursue different or antagonistic strategies.”


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If we want to understand how the discursive changes outlined in the previous chapter have impacted and influenced local institutional and organizational contexts, we ought to trace their contradictory and com-plex translation across scalar boundaries. This is, in part, the aim of the present chapter: to showcase how national discursive selectivities have translated into structural and agential selectivities, concerned with pro-ducing certain institutional logics.

One of the key problems facing digitalization efforts in Denmark has been a failure or inability to materialize broader political visions into con-crete initiatives and coordinate such strategies across the country. As a structural response to these failures, the organization of this area has shifted over time, as outlined in the previous chapter (see Chap. 4). Jæger and Löfgren (2010) have summarized this as a gradual turn from “a set of soft consensual and self-governing methods […] based on network mode of thinking, to a more subtle mode of command and control in which contracts and incentives is at the centre” (p. 267). This has also meant that while early policymaking efforts were hard to translate into concrete initia-tives, the policies implemented from the late 2000s and forward have actually managed to influence the public sector in profound ways. While these have not been without their own political failures and scandals, they have nonetheless proven quite potent in terms of implementing broader regulatory frameworks.

Before zooming in on citizen service centers as a specific municipal set-ting, we want to briefly sketch out the wider legal, technological, and eco-nomic developments these national efforts have led to. Doing so, we want to suggest that these governmental discourses have not just been rhetorical strategies confined to the realm of meaning-making. Instead, they have underpinned a number of structural changes. Using the language of CPE, we can say that these hegemonies have had certain performative effects making them able to translate into distinct political economic changes.

In a legal perspective, new laws have been put in place that have sought to make digital communication with the public sector mandatory for all citizens. In 2014, the so-called Law on Digital Post (“Lov om Digital Post”) was put into effect. This law mandated that all Danish citizens above 15 years from now on had to communicate with the state (and the public sector) using a digital mailbox called “Digital Post”. Modes of com-munication that up had until this point required paper forms were shifted to digital means of communication. As the first country in the world (and certainly for the first time in Danish history), being able to use digital


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technologies became a necessary normative and structural component of citizenship altogether (Hjelholt and Schou 2017a, b). While Danish citi-zens can still be exempt from using digital self-service solutions, for exam-ple if they do not have access to digital technologies or are otherwise deemed unable to use them, the law still signaled a turn in Danish policy-making. It showcased how being digital had become the legal and ideo-logical norm. As Henriksen (2015) notes, the law was passed in the Danish parliament without a great deal of hesitation or controversy, making this quite significant change pass unnoticed. For all intents and purposes, citi-zenship became digital in a legal sense.

These legal-discursive developments have been underpinned by the imple-mentation of a range of new technologies across the public sector. Within most parts of the public sector – including education, health care, taxation, social services, pensions, and more – a wide variety of digital self- service solu-tions have been implemented. Most of these have been in the form of stan-dardized governmental homepages where citizens can report, manage and administer their own cases. This includes pages like borger.dk [citizen.dk], skat.dk [tax.dk], virk.dk [work.dk] and more. These functions have been implemented together with NemID [EasyID], which is set to be renamed MitID [MyID]. This is a personalized keycard tied to the individual citizen’s social security number. The key contains a number of unique codes that are then matched with a digital interface whenever the individual citizen wishes to log in to a governmental website. Using this physical card, citizens can sign into these governmental systems in a (supposedly) secure way.

The implication of these changes has been that as a general rule, citi-zens are expected to solve their own administrative problems by using digital interfaces and automated processes. In this way, tasks previously carried out by welfare state professionals are increasingly delegated to citi-zens themselves. While for many citizens, this signals an easier entry-point to the state, it also signifies (in a more political register) the gradual responsibilization of the individual citizen herself. Self-service technolo-gies are a means of making citizens do more for themselves, carrying out tasks that were previously handled by the state.

Finally, these changes have also given way to new economic measure-ments. As we showed in the previous chapters, policymakers have tied ideas of efficiency and economic savings to digitalization efforts since the 1990s. This has implied processes of privatization, defunding and


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cutting of costs within the public sector alongside the gradual imple-mentation of digital technologies. Quite often, the projected savings of a given governmental technology – calculated by national agencies based on metrics assuming certain standardized labor processes – have been reaped up front. With the implementation of Digital Post, it was pro-jected that a large amount of Danish kroner would be saved each year, as public institutions would no longer have to send physical letters. Yet, as official investigations have emphasized, these projected savings will most likely not be realized within the suggested timespan (Rigsrevisionen 2016). As a result, budgetary allocations have been substantially influ-enced by the introduction of Digital Post, although the actual use of digital communication between the state and its citizens still has a lot to prove in terms of efficiency and cost reduction. Much of the underlying infrastructure has been gradually privatized. “Nets”, the private provider hosting NemID and the Digital Post infrastructure, i.e. the basic back-bone of all digital citizen- services in Denmark, is “owned by two US based hedge funds and a Danish pension fund, which has a minor share” (Henriksen 2015, p. 146).

Taken together, then, we can see how the discursive changes discussed in the previous chapter have given way to a number of very concrete changes. While we should not see the relation between the national field of policymaking and its local adaptation as one between a universal rule and its particular application, these changes have in many ways served to materialize and bring into the existence the basic ideas promoted by poli-cymakers since the beginning of the 2000s. Based on neoliberal tropes of competition, marketization, activation and responsibilization of citizens, these simultaneously legal, technological and economic developments have served to recast and restructure the relation between the Danish state and its citizens in profound ways. Rolled into one policy-instrument, digitali-zation has simultaneously nurtured the idea of the competitive public sec-tor, the active citizen, and the downsizing of government. In this sense, we can begin to see how mandatory digitalization, self-service solutions and economic reregulation (defunding and privatization) serve to fulfill strategic aims broadly resonating with the restructuring of the welfare state in terms of the competition state. It is in many ways this exact combination of changes that has served as a potent mechanism for institu-tional change within local welfare institutions.


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citizeN service ceNters As restructured stAte sPAces

We now turn to citizen service centers, exploring the institutional changes caused by national policy efforts. As a local welfare institution, citizen service centers started to spread across Danish municipalities in 1995 (Pors 2015a, p. 624). While initially named slightly different things in dif-ferent municipalities, citizen service centers may be conceived as a rela-tively coherent institutional unit according to Pors (2015a, b). From 2005, citizen service centers were made the official entrance-point to the Danish public sector, taking care of light casework, administrative guid-ance, handling of official documents and similar tasks. As this section will describe, this institution has been reformed in quite noteworthy ways due to the digitalization efforts pursued by national policymakers. Many of the tasks previously handled within this state space have gradually been trans-ferred to citizens themselves who now have to administer these tasks online through digital platforms. Based on the interviews we have con-ducted with both frontline workers and managers, the following sections will describe these new institutional logics, including their contradictory and sometimes conflicting structural imperatives. How do frontline work-ers help citizens? What institutional logics emerge in these state spaces? And how have the roles and responsibilities changed within this local municipal setting due to national digitalization efforts?

The entry-point point for this investigation is not so much on the par-ticular discourses articulated and constructed by these welfare state profes-sionals, but on the structural and institutional selectivities. We focus on the daily practices involved in handling citizens and navigating reforms premised on digitalization. One way of thinking through this is to con-ceive of these citizen service centers as particular state spaces (Brenner 2004). We take this notion from the work of Neil Brenner (2004) who has developed and extended the work of Jessop (see also Jones 1997). He has done so in order to emphasize how “state spatiality is never permanently fixed but, like all other aspects of the state form, represents an emergent, strategically selective, and politically contested process” (2004, p. 89, origi-nal emphasis). Thinking through citizen service centers as particular state spaces, in the narrow institutional sense of the term, allows us to fore-ground the different competing discursive, agential, technological and structural selectivities co-inhabiting and co-creating this institution. Indeed, rather than being enclosed institutional vacuums, we conceive of these citizen service centers as created through multiple, fragmented and


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contradictory logics, including, but not limited to, a combination of national policies, regional and municipal path-dependencies, external con-sultancies, local institutional legacies, managerial initiatives and individual subjectivities. Citizen service centers are, in this sense, best conceived as hybrid state spaces that condensates and connects a multiplicity of differ-ent logics into a relatively coherent institutional state geography. At the very least, by thinking citizen service centers in these terms, we might become more aware of the lack of any a priori unity and the on-going work going into mitigating such lack.

New Institutional Functions and Roles

One of the major changes within citizen services has been within the insti-tutional functions and roles found in these centers. As we highlighted above, citizen service centers have moved from mainly solving administra-tive problems for citizens to helping citizens use the “proper” digital self- service solutions. This means that citizen service centers are no longer the place where citizens go to have their administrative issues, problems or requests for the public sector more broadly solved. It is, instead, the place they go if they cannot use the specific digital solutions allocated to a cer-tain task.

A daily manager of a municipal citizen service center encapsulated these institutional changes in the following way. Asked how this institution had changed during the last ten years, the manager answered:

Radically. It can be answered that easily. […] Before, in Borgerservice, we only stood and took tasks more or less on demand from the citizen. We were the specialists. And then gradually as the digital Denmark also got changed, amongst other things through the mandatory self-service waves, well, then the role of a Borgerservice employee also took on a whole new character. Now, you had to be more on the general level, you had to be a tutor, a guide, a teacher […]. Instead of standing – now this is perhaps a bit too neatly explained but – instead of being somewhat nerdy and very specialized in terms of a few specific areas, there is no room for this today. We have been reduced over a number of years and we have to use everyone for every task.

Across our interviews, this is very much the experience we find in the different municipalities. It is a story of how frontline workers – who used to handle relatively specialized areas of administration – now have to guide and coach citizens across the different digital self-service solutions


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employed by the public sector. Indeed, because many of the tasks that used to be carried out by these workers have now been relocated to online platforms, their core task is increasingly to help citizens become digital. They have to actualize the citizen’s inner potential for being digital, as the goal is to make citizens help themselves and make them into (what one of the interviewed frontline workers called) “their own caseworker.”

This change has implied that frontline workers now have to help citi-zens together with the citizen. They have to collaborate in solving any particular problem. The way they do this is often by standing or sitting together with the citizen in front of a computer. The citizen will then have to log in to a particular digital self-service solution, while the frontline worker has to guide, inspire and motivate the citizen to navigate the inter-face. As we will touch upon below, this has also had implications for the spatial constitution of these centers. While frontline workers used to oper-ate behind administrative desks, they now have to circulate within open computer environment where citizens can freely use available computers. Municipalities often label this new institutional role as a citizen guide: a professional role that guides, inspires and coaches citizens, rather than being a detached administrative problem-solver.

Pors (2015a, p. 634) has called this an intimization of the relation between citizens and frontline workers. Workers have to relate to citizens on a personal and intimate level. They have to grasp the citizen as an indi-vidualized being that requires tailor-made guidance. This shifts the focus in the encounter between the frontline worker and the citizen: whereas the main object of these encounters used to be on certain administrative and legal problems, it is now the citizen herself that is the problem. It is the citizen – rather than a discrete task or request – that has to be solved by being turned into a digital being. The institutional-structural transition from solving problems for citizens to collaborating, guiding and coaching is often articulated as entailing a very different kind of bodily and physical proximity. “It [helping citizens] demands a different way of relating to the citizen. It boils down to whether you have understood what they come in with and what they want help with” one frontline worker explained, “I have some colleagues… They don’t like it. Because you have to be okay with being closer [to the citizen].” Within a number of our interviews, particularly managers told us how this had caused problems for frontline workers. One manager said that “We had some employees that were not happy about this more direct contact. They hated, for example, that they had to sit on a chair together with the citizen over in our computer


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environment. Because, well, their personal boundaries were being crossed. They needed […] the space, and the physical desk between them. […] We have used some external coaches to go in and articulate this change… that you have to be a different employee than 8 or 10 years ago. Because the workers often felt guilty. They didn’t feel like they delivered a good enough service. And it wasn’t actually citizens that were disappointed, it was the workers themselves.”

As a consequence of the national turn towards mandatory self-service, the institutions formerly obliged to handle requests and administrative duties thus become transformed. This implies changes to the professional role of frontline workers. These are no longer specialized caseworkers, but instead have to act as guides and teachers who have to make citizens digi-tal. In this sense, citizen service centers become the place were non-digital citizens are transformed and remade through seemingly innocent tech-nologies of subjectification. In the soft-spoken language of guidance, help and tutoring, we find new practices intended to actualize citizens’ inner digital potentialities and recast their subjectivity in terms of the norms defined through political means. As an institution, citizen service centers have to handle all the citizens who cannot fit into the official political expectations rolled-out on a national scale. These local institutions now become home to all those who have trouble following along with these national hegemonies.

New Spatialities

The new institutional functions and roles outlined above also imply that the spatial composition and structure of citizen service centers have been recreated in different ways. As stated above, the turn from specialized problem solving to guidance, help and coaching has been underpinned by a physical transformation of the room itself. Administrative desks have been partially replaced or supplemented by open computer environments where citizens can use digital self-service solutions if they want. In these new environment, frontline workers have to circulate among citizens, helping them become digital by motivating them to use online govern-mental services. This is often done by standing next to the citizen pointing out where to click and how to navigate. These changes in the material composition of the space reflect the new functions of citizen service cen-ters directly: whereas these used to handle discrete problems (given by the citizen to the frontline worker), they now have to “transform” citizens


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within open environments. “If you go through the center,” a manager thus told, “you will see these small islands, where citizens can walk around and do whatever they like with the computer. And then, our personnel circulate, look over their shoulder, ask ‘Do you need help?’ and guide them in the self-service solutions.”

Within this restructured state space, it is not just the objects, furniture and room that have changed: it is also the particular group of citizens using the space. As touched on above, citizen service centers have to deal with the citizens who are unable to use digital self-service solutions. While this institution used to solve problems for the entire population, it is now increasingly home to those who are for one reason or another unable to use the official digital technologies. According to the interviewed workers, the group of citizens using this space now consists mainly of a combina-tion of elderly, (dis)abled, sick, unemployed, homeless, poor, sick, and otherwise disenfranchised citizens. In this way, we might say that citizen service centers become the institutional space were the residual “left-over” citizens start to gather: the place where those unable to follow the official narratives are given over to the help and discretion of welfare personnel.

Elsewhere, we have proposed to call this particular group – reassem-bling already precarious parts of the class structure into a new collective entity – for the digital outcasts (Schou and Hjelholt 2017; see also Chap. 6 in this book). Without wanting to dive into this issue here, let us simply note that this group of citizens is in many ways already (though not exclu-sively) at the fringes of the welfare state. By adding a digital layer, forcing these to use new interfaces to serve themselves, we are seeing the emer-gence of new mechanisms that reproduce existing class dynamics. They lock already stigmatized and marginalized citizens into new frameworks of exclusion. In a certain sense, citizen service centers become the state spaces where these mechanisms become most apparent, as it is here that the exclusionary effects of coercive digitalization start to appear. One of the frontline workers we spoke to encapsulated these changes in the fol-lowing way:

Interviewer: Did it used to be other types of problems you helped with?

Frontline worker: Yes, I would say so, because everybody came here. It wasn’t possible to do it digitally, ten years ago. So it was everybody that came down here. No matter what class you belonged to. […]

Interviewer: What about today then?


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Frontline worker: Well today, it is… Everybody comes for passports and their driver’s license. And the rest of the person group we have here are those that need help. Else they would not be here. […] The people we have now, it is the heavy ones that take a lot of time.

Citizen service centers used to be located as part of the local town hall. However, in some municipalities these centers have been relocated (or even outsourced) to public libraries. These now have to handle the tasks pursued by citizen service centers, including guiding citizens through the different self-service solutions. Some of the contradictions and complexi-ties of these state spaces become even more apparent when they are inserted into the pre-existing institutional context of public libraries. Indeed, as a manager told us, one of the major problems in handling both citizen services and the local library at the same time is that these two institutions are based on fundamentally different spatial and political log-ics. While the aim of citizen services is, this manager explained, to not make citizens return (because this indicates that they can now use the digi-tal solutions themselves), the aim of the public library is precisely to make citizens return, engage in communal activities and cultural offers.

In this way, new hybrid state spaces start to emerge in which “one cor-ner” is dedicated to traditional welfarist logics concerned with universal access to culture and instilling democratic values (the library), while the “other corner” has to softly transform citizens into active, responsibilized digital subjects, capable of solving their own problems (citizen services). One frontline worker told us how these competing logics became very clear when for example a kindergarten was visiting the library during the daytime – singing songs and eating their lunch – while a homeless person was being guided at the same time in another part of the library. What becomes evident in these encounters are some of the new tensions between traditional democratic values and the new political imperatives connected to the building of the competition state.

New Temporalities

A final recurrent theme across our interviews concerns questions of tem-porality and time. Amongst the interviewed workers, there was a broad feeling or experience of accelerating everyday temporalities. Working in the frontline of the welfare state, it is as if work practices are continuously


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speeding up and changing. “In a digital world”, one of the frontline work-ers we interviewed reflected, “nothing is stationary.” This experience of generalized and even accelerated change can be found across our different interviews.

Another frontline workers we talked to told us several times through-out the interview that “digitalization had gone too fast.” Indeed, this was an experience shared amongst a number of the workers. Broadly con-strued, it was a feeling that the implementation of new digital technolo-gies across the public sector had happened at a too rapid pace. This meant, several informants told us, that many citizens had been caught off guard, as they suddenly had to interact and communicate with the public sector in fundamentally new ways. Instead of gradually easing these new means in, the transition had been too quick and forced.

In many cases, frontline workers felt that the implementation had also been too fast for them. In a fairly short time span, these workers had to fundamentally restructure and relearn their daily work practices and rou-tines. They furthermore had to learn how to handle, guide and be an expert within new digital solutions they were not familiar with themselves.

These narratives of acceleration and new temporal logics can be found in a number of connected experiences. Most prominently, perhaps, many of the workers we interviewed felt that citizen service centers had not only been through a process of radical change, but that this would continue in the future. “It changes all the time”, one frontline worker told us, “And it does so all the time. There are constantly new things you need to do. Just take NemID [EasyID]. You have to constantly be updated about the digi-tal. But, in a sense, this has always been the case, also with legal matters. But now, it is just different.”

In many ways, this quote encapsulates an experience we encountered across the interviews, namely that as an institution, citizen services work within an environment of constant, generalized change. Stability has become the exception, as work practices and organizational forms are con-tinuously reworked and updated. In this new institutional space, it is not just the future that is changing, but also the future’s future (Andersen and Pors 2016). Things are changing and these changed things will also be changing in the future.

What is important to notice in this regard is how the experience and articulation of generalized organizational change is often underpinned by a sense of individual commitment. Indeed, amongst many of the peo-ple we interviewed, there was often a sense that keeping updated on the


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newest knowledge and information was a personal duty or obligation. This meant that organizational change became a question of personal change: to keep up with the continuously changing institutional demands, the individual employee was made responsible for acquiring the right information and keeping updated. Internalizing the temporal logics of the institutional space, the experience of constantly changing demands and practices was turned into an individual matter.

These changes within the temporal structures of this state space also manifest themselves within the direct interaction between frontline work-ers and citizens. As citizens now have to be coached, guided and helped to help themselves, the individual encounter often takes more time. Simply put, teaching citizens how to help themselves takes longer than solving their requests. “You could say” a frontline worker reflected, “that the peo-ple you help with all that [digital] […] it is a bigger round. You could say that before, people just came and delivered some kind of scheme, and you would look to see if it was right or wrong. But the people you have to take care of today, they take a lot more time.”

These prolonged encounters are not without their internal tensions. Indeed, as argued in Chap. 4, one of the major reasons for implementing digital solutions has been to save time in order to make the public sector more efficient. Quite often, this political and economic wish to reduce and accelerate time collides with the realities of the local welfare encounter. The residual categories of coercive digitalization simply take up more time, because they require more help. This often leaves frontline workers feeling like they lack time to properly help citizens, and (in some cases) these now have to continuously shift between helping several different citizens at once. In this way, the national vision is problematized by the local practices, leaving frontline workers to navigate internally contradic-tory and inconsumable institutional logics.

couNter-hegeMoNies ANd struggLes froM BeLow

Up until this point, we have shown how citizen service centers, as particu-lar welfare institutions shaped by both national and local path- dependencies, have undergone a number of changes due to digitalization efforts. In cru-cial aspects, this institution has been reconfigured and restructured in terms of its purpose, shape and function. Its core institutional logics have been recreated in order to mitigate and compensate for the residual cate-gories and subjectivities caused by national policymakers. As a state space,


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it has been refunctionalized to accommodate the new demands imposed by national policymaking.

This reconfigured state space does, however, not simply include new institutional logics. There also emerge new types of resistance and counter- hegemonies in the form of practices and discourses that problematize, challenge and deconstruct the very logics of the national policy efforts. Indeed, within our interviews, there would often be different attempts to question the narratives provided by national policymakers.

Among frontline workers, these nascent counter-hegemonies took the form of a deep-seated concern for the exclusionary and social conse-quences of mandatory digitalization. Frontline workers, often driven by a genuine ethics of care, voiced a concern for how digitalization efforts might alienate and distance already precarious parts of the citizenry. One frontline worker for example said that:

My work has changed a lot actually because I have to help those who are not digital. And it is actually really difficult for them. So this is, in a sense, my heart, if you can say it like that. It is important for me that we help them. They have not chosen to be digital. […] And they will come to a complete standstill sometimes. They simply cannot do it.

Later in the interview, this same frontline worker said: “it is really important for me that we also focus on the non-digital, because otherwise we keep talking about some group that knows it all, and then the others who don’t. And I don’t like that.” Similar sentiments can be found across our interviews. There is often a sense, especially among frontline workers, that citizens who are already in a precarious situation have been pushed even further out due to digitalization. Indeed, one frontline worker said that many of the citizens they encounter “are very emotionally touched by this, because they feel like second-class citizens.”

To mitigate these reactions and help citizens, frontline workers told us of different more informal practices. These might include giving individ-ual citizens their phone number, so they could call and ask for help in future cases, or getting deeply involved in specific cases by contacting dif-ferent branches of the public sector and helping citizens that were other-wise stuck in the system. These kinds of work practices are not necessarily part of the official portfolio of tasks. Instead, they are used to circumvent the deficiencies of the system in informal ways.


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These concerns are, however, not limited to frontline workers in daily contact with citizens. Within the managerial layer of these local institu-tions, we also find new forms of resistance. In one of the municipalities, we interviewed both a daily manager for a local citizen service center as well as a senior advisor, employed in the municipality’s local data and ana-lytics department. As part of this interview, they each questioned what they perceived to be the increasingly sedimented “discourse of efficiency” constructed by national policymakers and especially the Ministry of Finance. The Ministry had, they each argued, become increasingly out of touch with the everyday realities and situations they often experienced first-hand.

This disconnect was articulated by these employees as a feeling of being caught between internally competing and incompatible logics: on the one hand, they argued, a political logic concerned with promoting innovation, institutional development and citizen involvement. And, on the other hand, a local, professional logic concerned with helping citizens in the best way possible under increasingly tight budgetary restraints. While national policymakers, according to these leaders, mainly promoted the first logic, the second was very much tied to their everyday encounters with citizens.

Going forward, these leading employees both feared that the services delivered by municipal citizen service centers might become completely privatized. If this were to happen, they resonated in collaboration, the already growing inequalities between citizens might become even deeper and more pronounced:

Senior advisor: I think we are going to see the same competition as we have seen in other areas. Someone is going to “go private” with this. And offer citizen services like a service you can buy. […] You see this within health care. […] And it is going to happen within citizen services as well.

Manager: And then you will have the A and B team again.Senior advisor: It will only get worse. […] Because then there will be

some who can manage and navigate this, because they have lawyers, know it all, and know what their rights and duties and opportunities are. And then there are those who come here.


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Particularly the manager was very vocal about these rising inequalities, arguing that in the end, many of the changes branded under the label of ‘digitalization’ were in fact not technical at all. These were, this manager argued, political changes, with important implications for societal and social integration:

Manager: I think that the A and B team – in the sense of “What is the public sector? What are my rights and duties as a citi-zen? What is my educational level?” – this is much more important than digitalization as such. In that way, I think we are really going towards an A and B-team society, politically speaking.

Senior advisor: Yes, it is more about how you have done in life than what you can do digitally.

Manager: Yes – do you feel like one of those who profits from the societal contract or do you feel like the groups who have been excluded and cheated by the others, without being able to say who these “others” are?

Taken together, these descriptions begin to give voice to a set of expe-riences that are often silenced within the national policy narratives. Within these, we find what might best be described as nascent forms of resistance and counter-hegemonies. These local encounters contain dis-courses and ideas that problematize and to some extent deconstruct the very logics embedded within the national hegemonies. They not only bring to the front the often implicit set of normative ideas contained in these national discourses, but also question their viability and implica-tions. In this sense, they serve to dislocate and destabilize the founda-tions of these national initiatives: instead of efficiency, productivity and the responsibilization of citizens, these local welfare professionals articu-late a growing concern for disenfranchised citizens, for rising inequalities and the potential consequences of increasing privatization and competi-tiveness within the public sector. In a certain sense, these narratives serve to bring back some of the core ideational values tied to the classic welfare state. These are ideas of social cohesion through equality, care and uni-versal welfarist solutions.

What these arguments seem to underline is how political ideas that have otherwise been written out of and erased from the national agenda over time might still be retained within the local, ground level of the welfare


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state. This brings out the multi-scalar and multi-temporal dimensions of hegemonies and counter-hegemonies. We can see how ideas that have been discarded over time within the national policy world may still be present within local municipal practices. As we argued in Chap. 4, con-cerns for social equality, access, participation and the safeguarding of weak citizens were especially prevalent in the 1990s amongst Danish digitaliza-tion policymakers. However, due to both discursive and agential shifts, these concerns have been downplayed and gradually erased over time. Yet, what we find within our interviews is precisely this kind of concern for dis-enfranchised citizens. Amongst these frontline workers, there is often a gen-uine care and concern for the social consequences of mandatory digitalization. In this way, there seems to be a disconnect between these workers’ profes-sional “habitus, hexis, personal identity” (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 282), constructed over time through a care for the well-being of citizens, and the official policy narratives, concerned first and foremost with economic ratio-nalities drawn from the discursive quiver of the competition state.

To our mind, these local forms of resistance provide a potent testimony to why hegemonies are never monolithic entities. They are instead filled with contradictions, tensions, and counter-hegemonies. By moving from the sphere of national policymakers and the dominant discourses pro-duced in the upper echelons of the Ministry of Finance, we might begin to unearth and restore these immanent resistances emerging from within the state itself.

Yet, these counter-hegemonies are also filled with their own para-doxes. Indeed, the interviewed welfare professionals, as frontline deliver-ers of national policy visions, both serve to actualize national ideas, while in the very process of doing so deconstruct, circumvent and problematize these. This paradoxical situation, mixing obedience and critique, can be illustrated by reference to the manager and senior advisor quoted above. While they were both critical of the “discourse of efficiency” promoted by national policymakers, they nonetheless stated that the municipality had completely taken over the national agenda as their local agenda. Moreover, the municipality had very proactively implemented a number of the measurements contained in the national models, even in cases where this gave “no surplus value at all” as the special advisor formulated it. This showcases how new forms of critique are not in simple opposi-tion to national hegemonies. Indeed, in many cases, these co-exist and sustain each other in strange and unexpected combinations. This high-lights how, as we also quoted earlier, “hegemony is not a cohesive,


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unilateral, monovalent relationship of leaders and led; it is riddled with tensions, contradictions, and depends on the ‘suturing’ of difference that is always vulnerable to pulling apart and ruptures” (Sum and Jessop 2013, p. 223). Indeed, hegemonies and counter-hegemonies seem to be folded into each other within the hybrid state spaces of citizen service centers.

These nascent forms of counter-hegemonies – which are deeply impli-cated in the contradictory reproduction of national hegemonies – are important parts of the overall picture. Not least, because they help us move from an overly monolithic description of digitalization towards a more complex, messy and conflictual image of the practices involved in these processes. Yet, while the counter-hegemonies foregrounded in this section might point the way for seemingly more welfarist forms of policy implementation, we should be aware of the particular set of power rela-tions they are embedded in. Frontline workers do not have the same capacities as do elite policymakers for formulating national goals, ambi-tions and initiatives. Construals and construction are not the same thing, as emphasized by CPE, as all voices might be equal, but some are more equal than others (Sum and Jessop 2013).

coNcLudiNg reMArks

This chapter has examined how the ideational-discursive developments described in the previous chapter have materialized into a number of con-crete changes within the Danish state. Moving beyond our initial discur-sive entry-point, we have tried to tease out the wider structural and institutional changes caused by national policy efforts, keeping in mind that national ideas are never merely transposed into local institutions, but always negotiated, filtered and enacted through particular institutional path-dependencies. Taking this approach, we first showed how the gradual rollout of digitalization as a new policy instrument has given way to new legal, technological and economic measurements. Most substantially, Danish citizens have been more or less mandated by law to communicate with the public sector through digital means, and this development has been supported through the implementation of a wide variety of digital self-service solutions. This means that the citizen herself must now handle a number of the tasks that were previously handled by administrative per-sonnel as specialized labor. With this development, however, not only come new possibilities for engaging with the public sector in easier and more convenient ways. What is simultaneously imported is a new political logic


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concerned with responsibilizing citizens and turning them into active digi-tal individuals. This has simultaneously meant profound institutional changes within public sector institutions, as defunding and privatization (fueled in large part by the performative effects of digitalization) have necessitated on-going changes.

We then zoomed in on one particular local municipal institution that has undergone a quite profound set of changes due to national policy pathways: namely citizen service centers (Borgerservice). We showed how new institutional roles, functions and competences have been created as a consequence of national digitalization efforts, and we highlighted the novel spatio-temporal logics governing this state space, included the new tensions that emerges within it. This led us to a description of the new forms of resistance and counter-hegemonies developing within these local municipal contexts as a response to the national policy agenda pursued by the Ministry of Finance.

Taken together, these different parts of the puzzle start to form a rela-tively coherent picture. This is not – at least not first and foremost – an image of digitalization as a quick technological fix, useful for upgrading and rewiring existing welfare institutions. As we shall dwell on in the following concluding chapter, it is instead an image that is riddled with tensions, works on a number of different scales, and is causing a wide variety of insti-tutional changes and struggles. It is a deeply historical set of processes that have been set in motion over time in order to implement, sustain and fur-ther extend wider restructurings of the welfare state. And, we might add before ending this portion of the book, it is a profoundly political image, concerned with normalizing and depoliticizing certain images of the good society, the proper forms of statehood and the organization of life itself.

Note

1. This chapter incorporates arguments presented in Hjelholt and Schou (2017b). These pieces have been reworked and rewritten for this chapter.

refereNces

Andersen, N. Å., & Pors, J. (2016). Public Management in Transition: The Orchestration of Potentiality. Bristol: Policy Press.

Bourdieu, P. (2005). The Social Structures of the Economy. Cambridge: Polity Press.Brenner, N. (2004). New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of

Statehood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


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Henriksen, H. Z. (2015). Scrutinizing Open Government Data to Understand Patterns in eGovernment Uptake. In E. Tambouris, M. Janssen, H. Scholl, M. A. Wimmer, K. Tarabanis, M. Gascó, B. Klievink, I. Lindgren, & P. Parycek (Eds.), International Federation for Information Processing (pp. 144–155). Cham: Springer.


Hjelholt, M., & Schou, J. (2017b). Den digitale borger. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag.

Jæger, B., & Löfgren, K. (2010). The History of the Future: Changes in Danish E-Government Strategies 1994–2010. Information Polity, 15(4), 253–269.

Jessop, B. (2002). The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity Press.Jones, M. (1997). Spatial Selectivity of the State? The Regulationist Enigma and

Local Struggles over Economic Governance. Environment and Planning A, 29, 831–864.

Pors, A. (2015a). Digital forvaltning i det borgernære bureaukrati. Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift, 117, 617–643.

Pors, A. (2015b). Becoming Digital: Passages to Service in the Digitized Bureaucracy. Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 4(2), 177–192.

Rigsrevisionen. (2016). Beretning til Statsrevisorerne om besparelsespotentialet ved obligatorisk Digital Post på ca. 1 mia. kr. om året.

Schou, J., & Hjelholt, M. (2017). The Digital Outcasts: Producing Marginality in the Digital Welfare State. Working Paper for 15th ESPANet Annual Conference 2017: New Horizons of European Social Policy: Risks, Opportunities and Challenge: Lisbon.



PART III

Towards a Cultural Political Economy of Digitalization


CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

Abstract This concluding chapter summarizes the main arguments presented in this book, reflects on their theoretical as well as empirical implications and carves out some potential paths of future research. Recounting the main arguments presented throughout the book, the chapter specifies its contribution to the study of governmental digitaliza-tion. The chapter argues that while this book has explored a particular geographical setting, its findings may provide a broader, critical interven-tion within the political and academic landscape. Closing off, the chapter highlights a number of areas for future inquiry. Armed with cultural politi-cal economy, the book paves the way for studies concerned with how class politics and social exclusion are being redefined through governmental digitalization.

Keywords Digitalization • State transformations • Cultural political economy • Class • Digital outcasts

The purpose of this book has been twofold. First, to argue for a theoretical reorientation to the study of governmental digitalization informed by key insights from the post-disciplinary terrain of cultural political economy (CPE). Within the confines of this small book, we have suggested that in order to understand, explain and critically dissect the implications of this


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new area of policymaking, we would do good to adopt theoretical tools and analytics that are able to work on both a micro level, concerned with the implementation and negotiation of particular policies, and with an eye to broader structural mechanisms, tendencies and trajectories. CPE allows us to do just that, while posing a series of questions that are often left unspoken. Second, to provide an empirical study of digitalization efforts in Denmark employing CPE concepts and ideas in action. Using the ana-lytical toolkit presented in the first part of the book, we have showcased what a CPE-driven analysis of digitalization might look like, including the kinds of results, problematizations and generative outputs it may yield. Taken together, these two parts may help to showcase the potentials and possibilities that a cultural political economy of digitalization may afford going forward. Before pushing this research agenda a bit further in this concluding chapter – reflecting on this book’s implications and potential pathways for future research – we want to briefly reiterate the most sub-stantial arguments presented in the previous chapters.

In the first part of the book, we provided a brief presentation of some of the main themes, concepts and arguments developed by CPE (Chap. 2). In an effort to contextualize the second part of the book and showcase the rich explanatory potential offered by this research program, we then retraced some of the empirical arguments found within existing CPE research. In particular, we zoomed in on the complex state restructurings taking place from the after-math of the Second World War and up until the present day (Chap. 3).

In these two chapters, we argued that CPE carefully manages to inte-grate important arguments and concepts from a number of diverse sources, including the works of Marx, Gramsci and Foucault (Sum and Jessop 2013). We described how it does so by performing a certain set of twists and turns within an internally consistent critical-realist and strategic- relational frame of reference. Armed with these key insights and concepts from CPE, we proposed a fundamentally different approach to govern-mental digitalization. We suggested that taking a CPE approach to this area of governance requires us to leave essentialized conceptions of what it is and does. We cannot simply assume that digital technologies are inher-ently capable of delivering more efficient and flexible forms of govern-ment. Instead, recognizing the both path-dependent and path-shaping moments implied in the selection and retention of certain ways of doing digitalization, we ought to dissect the processes that goes into the making of this area. This also means locating digitalization, as a particular area of governance, against wider structural changes within the capitalist state and


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capitalism itself. Chapter 3 painted a backdrop for this, outlining in broad strokes the transition from the Keynesian Welfare National State to con-temporary post-Fordist accumulation regimes, underpinned by discourses of competitiveness and the rise of diverse competition states. Doing so might allow us to break the historical and contextual vacuum that govern-mental digitalization has all too often been caught in.

Taking these trajectories, questions and problems as our lead, Part II provided a case study of digitalization efforts in Denmark. We focused on how digitalization has become a new means of policy-making and state-craft in this country, particularly in the context of public sector institutions and welfare service delivery. In Chap. 4, we showed the different dis-courses that have been tied to national digitalization strategies in Denmark over time. Investigating the complex relation between different agential and discursive selectivities, the chapter highlighted how ideas of ‘sustain-ability’, ‘equality’, ‘access to information’, ‘participatory democracy’ and ‘solidarity’, especially prominent in the early 1990s, were gradually replaced with notions of ‘flexibility’, ‘efficiency’, ‘optimization’, ‘competi-tiveness’, ‘growth’ and ‘digital self-leadership’ within the official policy narrative. We argued that digitalization had gradually come to be aligned with the hegemonic state project pursued from the beginning of the 1990s. In being so, this area of governance has come to be increasingly framed within the political grammar usually associated with the competi-tion state and the rise of neoliberalism.

This story was, however, simultaneously one about governance failures, problems and contradictions. Indeed, as a specific site of governance, we showed how digitalization had implied a trail-and-error process consisting of the articulation and recreation of multiple and internally contradictory hegemonies. Making “digitalization work” has involved a large amount of administrative and political labor. In this sense, what digitalization has become today is only one out of many possible alternatives: it is the out-come of a complex evolutionary process in which different discourses have been crafted, discarded and partially retained over time.

Moving from this national policy scale to local institutional sites made the story even more complex. In Chap. 5, we highlighted how the transla-tion between these national policies and local municipal contexts had been mediated through various legal, economic and technological means. We showed how this had paved the way for new institutional and structural logics within municipal citizen service centers. In crucial aspects, the insti-tutional logics governing these centers had been restructured and recreated

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as a consequence of national digitalization efforts. Yet, rather than a story of direct policy transfer, it was instead one of complex, contradictory and even partially counter-hegemonic struggles.

Digitalization anD State tranSformation: implicationS anD limitationS

With these findings, this book adds to our current understanding of how advanced capitalist states have been restructured and refunctionalized since the 1990s. Based on the empirical pathways advanced in our study, we want to argue that digitalization (as a partially new means of governance and policymaking) has been deeply implicated in the structural changes taking place since the gradual breakdown of the Keynesian-Fordist world order in the 1970s and 1980s. At least in a Danish context, digitalization has slowly, but surely, been enrolled and mobilized as part of a broader state project aimed at transforming and restructuring the welfare state into a competition state. Relying increasingly on neoliberal tropes of entrepre-neurialism, continuous disruptive innovation, flexibility, growth and com-petitiveness, digitalization has served to both reinforce and further consolidate these already existing master narratives and hegemonic visions.

Yet, we want to push this argument even further by suggesting that digitalization does not just reproduce these existing rationalities. Instead, this area of statecraft also extends, reworks and rearticulates these in important ways. As we have shown in the specific context of the Danish state, national policy initiatives have implied significant changes to the relation between the state and its citizens. Through a combination of legal, discursive and technological means, Danish citizens have increas-ingly been expected to use and understand digital means of communica-tion. To be considered a proper citizen – in the deeply normative sense of this term – increasingly implies being able to utilize digital technologies in order to communicate and interact with the state.

What emerges from this is a new image of how digital technologies, digital citizenship and digital governance are being added to the itinerary of advanced capitalist states. These genuinely novel forms of statecraft – made up of a complex ensemble of policy visions, regulatory changes, institutional developments, and much more – serve to extent and rework existing state projects. Competitiveness, and the fostering of flexibility, innovation and entrepreneurialism, starts to become premised on digital


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competences and skills. The state expects its citizenry to be digital, as being digital is increasingly considered the unquestionable, desirable and necessary form of citizen-subjectivity.

In this precise sense, digitalization carves out new modes of governmen-tal intervention and public sector change. Wrapped in the current lingo of advanced neoliberalism, this new political instrument has served to simul-taneously downsize governmental institutions, through a combination of automation and budgetary reallocations, and turn citizens into their own caseworkers through technologies of responsibilization and self- leadership. Digitalizing the competition states redraws and rearticulates the boundary between the state and its citizens. It refurbishes the division of labor between governmental employees and citizen-subjects. In the digitalized state, each citizen is his or hers own administrator, caseworker and bureau-crat. There is more to this than simply activation or workfare (Peck 2001b; Jessop 2002). And it is not just a question of the persistent trope of indi-vidual responsibilization either (Wacquant 2009). These changes do include elements of both, but there are more to them. To our mind, these changes signify the gradual blurring of the boundaries between the state and its citi-zens, as (seemingly) all parts of the population are transformed into their own governmental agents tasked with solving their own problems and requests. Through unpaid labor, carrying out work that were previously handled by governmental employees, citizens now have to do what the state used to do. And those who cannot fulfill these new expectations are relegated to the discretion and softly spoken discipline of state professionals in local municipal centers. To our mind, these changes are indicative of wider structural reconfigurations of the (future) capitalist state form.

Taking CPE’s self-reflexive turn seriously, we ought to ask ourselves: what are the limits to these findings? And, more substantially, how far can they be extended and generalized? One of the questions we have been asked repeatedly at academic conferences and workshops when presenting the contents of this book is to what extent this Danish case study might have wider implications. As one observant colleague directly asked us: “Is it not just your Danish case that is a bit weird and extreme?” Looking across Europe, we might be tempted to conclude so. While a number of comparable countries, like Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands, have pursued partially similar policymaking trajectories, none of these countries seem to have gone quite as far as Denmark. The increasingly mandatory and coercive legalization of digital technologies does (to a certain extent)

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seem unique. Premising citizenship, if not de jure then de facto, on digital capabilities remains specific to Denmark to the best of our knowledge.

Yet, while of all this may be true, the case study presented here might still hold some wider implications. We should definitely not attempt to simply generalize from this specific study, as if our results had some transnational and trans-historical applicability. They do not. What these findings might foreground and highlight are some of the nascent trajectories or pathways currently explored by policymakers as viable solutions. Indeed, as men-tioned towards the beginning of this book, Denmark is often labelled as a digital forerunner. The country is being branded as an example to be fol-lowed. In this way, there are good reasons to believe that other policymakers might begin to follow suit. Thus, Denmark might be a weird case, but pre-cisely in its weirdness it tells us something about the political trajectories and policymaking visions that are possible. The case seems to anticipate, if not necessitate, a range of potential developments in other countries.

The second question we are often asked is whether and to what extent there has emerged any kind of resistance or public outcries to these changes. To this question, we have often felt compelled to answer that despite a fairly large portion of public scandals, with infrastructures costing millions and millions of tax-payers’ money, and despite the relatively aggressive policy vision pursued by state officials, resistance has been relatively sparse. Or, at the very least, without any clear voice. There may be a number of reasons for this, one being that digitalization is often considered a fairly niche sub-ject with little to no resonance within the wider citizenry. Another reason might be that for many citizens, the digital solutions provided by the public sector have to a certain extent proven more efficient and easier to use than previous ones. It would be far too simplistic to simply read these processes as inherently negative, alienating and repressive. And as this book has attempted to showcase, small-scale counter- hegemonies are beginning to form within the state itself. But as we have also shown, such resistances are often implicated in the reproduction of the very logics they seek to chal-lenge. So these matters are, indeed, complex and it remains to be seen whether a re-politicization might be possible.

In the opening chapter of this book, we borrowed a phrase from Jamie Peck (2001a), formulated more than 15 years ago, to explain some of our rationales for writing the present work. Using his words, we argued that we wanted to “tease out the wider implications of complex changes in the practical and ideological strategies, organizational and normative struc-tures, and political-economic and sociological situation of the state under conditions of accelerated neoliberal restructuring” (p. 446). Nearing the


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end of this work, we might return full circle. Not to repeat this statement once again or to evaluate how far we have come in our ambition to tease out these changes. Instead, using the words of Jamie Peck anno 2017, we might say that this work is “a story without closure” (p. 203). Indeed, not unlike Peck’s recent work in Offshore, there also seems to be “no final stage, no settled geography, and no moment of equilibrium in the con-tinuously restructuring world” (ibid.) of governmental digitalization.

puShing on anD reclaiming claSS: the Digital outcaStS

In the face of these continuously unfolding processes – both unpredictable, variegated and enormously complex – the present book should be con-ceived as only one sign-post in what we perceive to be a much wider research program. Indeed, the terrain for pushing the presented findings even fur-ther, advancing the CPE agenda in new and exciting ways, seems wide open. To our mind, especially one area of future research stands out. It concerns some of the core structural mechanisms within capitalism and advanced capitalist states, namely questions of class, domination and inequality.

If digital citizenship, digital governance and digitalization are, indeed, becoming potent means of statecraft and public sector change within advanced capitalist states, then we ought to inquire into the ways in which these political tools reproduce, extend and create structures of exclusion, marginalization and stigmatization. What kinds of subjectivities become (even more) dominated within the transition towards digitalized societies and states? To what extent do digital technologies work along already existing lines of social stratification? And are we witnessing a new means of class domination by ‘other means’? Yet another tool to ‘punish the poor’ (Wacquant 2009) for failing to constitute the reserve army of labor for capitalism? When we start to look at digitalization through a CPE lens, these are the question we can begin to ask. These are the questions that we should begin to ask.

The existing research dealing with the so-called digital divide(s) and associated concepts has given little to no attention to questions of digi-tal exclusion in the context of the capitalist state. There might be his-torical reasons for this, seeing that the turn towards mandatory digital citizenship (premising access to the state on digital technologies) is a recent process that is still in the making. To our mind, however, there

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are also structural reasons for this. If we want to account for the new forms of domination and marginalization that emerges in the context of governmental digitalization, we have to bring in questions of class, cap-ital and hegemony. All too often, these concepts have been banished from the mainstream academic literature for reasons that have been more political than scientific.

In the last number of years, we have begun to work on some of these questions ourselves, exploring how the political changes discussed in this book have led to new forms of class domination and marginalization. We are very much still in the early phases of understanding the precise struc-tural mechanisms involved in these novel means of class politics. However, some of our tentative empirical findings do seem to suggest that the coercive implementation of digital technologies is leading to new forms of exclusion and marginalization. Functioning through a combination of the legal, discursive and technological mechanisms dis-cussed in Chaps. 4 and 5, we are beginning to see how already precarious and disenfranchised parts of the class hierarchy are being locked into new forms of exclusion. Indeed, reproducing pre-existing class mecha-nisms, governmental digitalization seems to reinforce and reinvigorate the punishment of the nether regions of the material and symbolic class structure. Homeless, sick, (dis)abled, long-time unemployed, poor pen-sioners, drug addicts and unskilled laborers thus seem to be reconfigured into a new group of excluded others.

In a tentative manner, we have proposed to conceptualize this new group as the ‘digital outcasts’ (Schou and Hjelholt 2017; Hjelholt and Schou 2018; Hjelholt 2015). This is a group that reassembles the bottom of the class structure into an emergent semi-collective entity whose mem-bers all seem to share one trait: namely that they cannot follow the rapidly accelerating structures of an increasingly digitalized competition state. Not unlike the mechanisms laid out in this book, we are once again dealing with a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity: the digital outcasts both repro-duce, on the one hand, deeply sedimented class relations, but the precise mechanisms and consequences of these exclusionary mechanisms also, on the other hand, involve new patterns, technologies and instruments. In the years to come, we hope to focus our energy on providing a cultural political economy of the digital outcasts, further dissecting the profound changes taking place at the very core of advanced capitalist states.


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referenceS

Hjelholt, M. (2015). The Digital Outcasts: Advanced Margins in Digital Societies. In P. Kommers & P. Isaías (Eds.), Proceedings of the 13th International Conference E-Society (pp. 239–243). Madeira: International Association for Development of the Information Society.

Hjelholt, M., & Schou, J. (2018). The Digital Divide and Citizen Classifications: The Inscription of Citizens into the State. In M. Ragnedda & G. Muschert (Eds.), Theorizing Digital Divides (pp. 173–185). London: Routledge.

Jessop, B. (2002). The Future of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity Press.Peck, J. (2001a). Neoliberalizing States: Thin Policies/Hard Outcomes. Progress

in Human Geography, 25(3), 445–455.Peck, J. (2001b). Workfare States. London: Guilford Press.Peck, J. (2017). Offshore: Exploring the Worlds of Global Outsourcing. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.Schou, J., & Hjelholt, M. (2017). The Digital Outcasts: Producing Marginality in

the Digital Welfare State. Working Paper Presented at the 15th ESPANet Annual Conference 2017: New Horizons of European Social Policy: Risks, Opportunities and Challenge: Lisbon.


Wacquant, L. (2009). Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press.

CONCLUSION

119© The Author(s) 2018J. Schou, M. Hjelholt, Digitalization and Public Sector Transformations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76291-3

Index

AAccenture, 1, 2Atlantic Fordism, 40, 41

crises, 44

BBourdieu, Pierre, 88Brenner, Neil, 45, 92

CCapitalism, 6

improbable reproduction, 28Capitalist state, 12, 40Christensen, Søren

Info-society year 2000, 64Citizen service centers, 92

acceleration, 97computer environments, 95public libraries, 97resistance, 100as state space, 92

Competitioncompetitiveness discourses, 40

Competition state, 7, 49, 53, 64, 77, 111

defining features, 50refunctionalize, 51self-description, 50tensions and conflicts, 97workfare, 51

Competitiveness, 49Computerization, 9Critical discourse analysis, 24Critical policy studies, 62Critical realism, 24, 25Cultural political economy, 5, 39, 109

complexity, 25complexity reduction, 5, 26complexity turn, 26construals, 27construals and construction, 104crisis, 45cultural turn, 5, 22, 25discursive selectivities, 32, 62, 78

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76291-3

120 INDEX

Cultural political economy (cont.)entry-points, 23epistemology, 29–31gendered selectivities, 33grand theory, 24ontology, 22post-disciplinary, 24recovery discourses, 41, 46scale, 88selectivities, 32self-reflexive turn, 24semiosis, 22–24, 26–28spatial selectivities, 33structuration, 23, 26–28, 32

Culture, 25

DDanish Agency for Digitisation, 75Denmark, 3

censuses, 63citizen service centers, 14citizenship, 76Danish Agency for Digitisation, 75digital agenda, 7, 61The Digital Denmark, 69digital forerunner, 61Digital Post, 91digital society, 76The Digital Taskforce, 73, 75land registers, 63Law on Digital Post, 89Ministry of Finance, 3, 66, 75,

101, 105Ministry of Research, 66NemID, 90, 91, 98privatization, 90punch card centrals

(hulkortcentraler), 63punch cards, 63Reviews on Denmark’s digital

growth, 76

The State’s IT, 75welfare state, 43

Digital citizenship, 77mandatory component, 90self-service, 77

Digital era governance, 9, 10Digitalization, 34

cultural political economic approach, 34

definition, 8governance failures, 89hegemonic project, 10legal perspective, 89localization, 86political instrument, 7political project, 40

Digital outcasts, 96, 116The Digital Taskforce, 75Dybkjær, Lone

The Digital Denmark, 69Info-society year 2000, 64

EEconomic imaginary, 46, 47Economy, 29E-government, 9Entrepreneurialism, 47, 51Epistemology, see Cultural political

economyEssex School of Discourse Analysis, 30European Union, 12, 47

Bangemann report, 65Digital Economy and Society Index,

6, 61Digital Single Market, 3information society, 3

FFinland, 65Ford, Henry, 42

121 INDEX

Fordismaccumulation regime, 42flawed Fordism, 44Fordism without Ford, 44Fordist-Keynesian compromise, 40pattern of societalization, 42

Foucault, Michel, 31govermentality, 24

Fountain, Jane, 9digitally mediated institutions, 9

GGramsci, Antonio, 31

HHegemony, 27, 31

counter-hegemonies, 30, 31, 86, 104hegemonies, 30, 62

IInformation society

Denmark, 66transnational imaginary, 65

International division of labor, 48Irvine School, 9Italy

Open Government Data, 12

JJessop, Bob, 5, 22, 30, 54

Keynesian Welfare National State, 40, 42, 64, 69, 111

Schumpeterian Workfare Post- national Regimes, 49

strategic-relational approach, 24, 25Towards a Cultural Political

Economy, 24

KKeynesianism, 43Knowledge-based economy, 14, 41,

46, 47digitalization, 79informational labor, 47

LLaclau, Ernesto, 27, 30

MMargetts, Helen, 9Marketization, 48, 64Marxism, 24, 28, 30

Marxianize, 31Mouffe, Chantal, 30

NNeoliberalism, 13, 49

hegemonic project, 41neoliberalization, 14, 48

OOECD, 3, 47

PPeck, Jamie, 8, 11, 114Pedersen, Ove Kaj, 52

Konkurrencestaten, 52Political economy, 23Post-disciplinary, see Cultural political

economyPost-Fordism, 7, 40, 48,

54, 111flexibility, 48

Poulantzas, Nicos, 24

122 INDEX

RRasmussen, Poul Nyrup, 64Regulation Approach, 24

SScale, 88

the national and the local, 88Schlüter, Poul, 64Selectivities, see Cultural political

economySelf-service, 90, 95Sociodigitization, see DigitalizationSpatio-temporal fixes, 28State spaces, 86, 92Statecraft, 4Sum, Ngai-Ling, 5, 22, 49, 54

Towards a Cultural Political Economy, 24

Sweden, 65ICT policies, 12

TTechnological fix,

22, 23digitalization, 34

Temporalitycitizen service

centers, 97Torfing, Jacob, 52

WWeber, Max, 22Welfare state, 40, 43

crisis, 45, 49Denmark, 43national economy, 43national orientation, 43sovereign, 44

World Bank, 47World Economic

Forum, 1, 2

digitalization and public sector transformations

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