This paper explores how new regulatory technologies and front-line decision-makers reshape one another. Drawing on a recent qualitative study of caseworker decision-making in the Ontario Works program, it demonstrates the dialectical relationship between new case management software and caseworkers. While new technologies may attempt to deskill and decentre front-line decision-makers, transforming them into data entry clerks, caseworkers learn how to expertly translate and input client data to produce decisions that more closely match their interpretation of clients’ needs and welfare laws. The ways in which workers “manipulate the system” to produce a particular decision, though common knowledge among their colleagues, are black boxed to program managers, auditors, and benefits recipients.
Administrative agencies have long been sites of technological innovation. Today, government officials worldwide are intensifying digitalization efforts to cut costs and to make bureaucratic operations more efficient. This article examines how digitalization initiatives are implemented in administrative settings, using examples from the United Kingdom (Universal Credit), Canada (Ontario’s Social Assistance Management System), and Australia (Online Compliance Initiative, a.k.a. ‘Robodebt’). It draws on qualitative research, government reports, and administrative justice literature to illustrate the dilemmas common to digital government projects. For example, digitalization both hardens and virtualizes the interface between officials and the public, while obscuring the vast amounts of human labour needed to maintain digital government initiatives. To function well, digital systems require deep integration between government databases and software. Yet, the process of digitalization is often piecemeal, continuous, and reproduces dilemmas that arise whenever new technologies are used to solve institutional problems. Consequently, the promised benefits of ‘digital by default’ initiatives are rarely realized. Digitalization accelerates a shift in relations between people and the state that administrative justice scholars must take seriously. First, scholars must reconsider the internal perspective from which administrative justice theories assess an outcome’s acceptability. Digitalization compels the development of new justice models centred on the values of system users within and outside of administrative institutions. Second, scholars must reassess administrative justice theory’s procedural focus. In digitalized settings, ‘administratively just’ decision-making processes may generate substantively unjust outcomes. These challenges must be addressed if administrative justice theories are to remain relevant in an age of algorithmically-driven decision-making.
Many different types of organization provide public services or goods and build public works without being, strictly speaking, part of government. Such entities tend to be seen as more innovative than government proper, both because of their organizational autonomy and because they primarily use private‐law techniques (contracts, mainly) and lay claim to private sector credentials. This article examines the presumed correlation between moves towards greater public‐private hybridity in government and public sector innovation, using illustrative examples from Ontario and British Columbia, Canada. Combining interviews with professional infrastructure deal‐makers, direct observation of public infrastructure workshops, and analyses of the documents that constitute infrastructure deals, we show that the quest to bring virtues and techniques associated with private enterprise to the delivery and governance of public goods and services often leads to a dialectical reversal. At first, bureaucratic rules do give way to the pursuit of more or less sui generis deals. But the entities that initiate deals and partnerships soon come to feel the need to standardize the process, which then leads to the return of standard templates and surprisingly rigid rules.
This article interrogates reasons for decision, a central concept in Canadian public law scholarship. Using spatiotemporal scale as an analytical tool, it shows how unified reasons may be more easily recognized at the scale of judicially reviewable administrative decisions common to public law scholarship, yet elusive at the scale of front-line decision making. It then investigates how a variety of mechanisms, including data entries and notes, function together behind the front lines of social assistance agencies in the province of Ontario. Drawing on qualitative research into caseworkers’ decision-making practices, this article illustrates how the ‘reasons’ for a particular administrative decision may be multiplied and fractured across software programs, emails, and physical case files. Further, it demonstrates how notes are both more and less than reasons. As they perform three internal communicative tasks central to administrative governance – recording evidence, explaining decisions, and justifying potentially contentious outcomes to other administrative insiders – notes facilitate decision-making practices that ensure institutionally acceptable outcomes are reached, even as one note may not fully capture the logic underlying a particular decision. Ultimately, this article aims to motivate theoretically inclined legal scholars to reconsider the concept of reasons for decision in light of the decision-making practices of front-line administrators.
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