prof.mr.drs. A. Pelizza (Annalisa)

Translating Institutions

Digitization of Administrative Data Assets as Redesign of the Modernist State

Over the last twenty years globalization studies have been posing ground-breaking questions about forms of authority and geographies emerging from the disassembling of the nation-state. They have questioned long-standing categories of political thought, like territoriality, authority, sovereignty, mainly along the Local/Global divide (Strange 1996; Hale and Held 2011). Some of the most trans-disciplinary contributions to the field have even shown that this epistemological reordering has come to address other constitutional divides, like the Public/Private one (Sassen 2006). From a different perspective, works in the Science and Technology Studies (STS) domain have stressed that the emergence of a new political order is always deeply entangled with the production of socio-technical formations and cannot be approached without a focus on the material, cultural and normative conditions of technology production (Jasanoff 2004). It is thanks to the engagement with the manufactured milieu that modern political entities redefine the meanings of citizenship, legitimate power, territorial authority, and their constitutional epistemic boundaries. It is evident that a research that aims to investigate forms of authority emerging from the disassembling of the modernist state cannot avoid following the processes through which technology-making interacts with governance-making. By adopting a co-productionist stance which avoids both technological and social determinism (Bijker and Law 1992; Oudshoorn and Pinch 2003), the "Translating Institutions" research is intended to investigate the challenges at stake with the incipient disassembling of the nation-state along the ICT infrastructure vector. On a disciplinary level, with this research I ask whether and how Science and Technology Studies' post-modernist epistemology can undertake a mutually enriching dialogue with political science's insights about novel forms of authority emerging in the global era. It is evident that over the last two decades the digitization of administrative procedures and information flows has deeply affected practices of state-making. However, scarce attention has been paid to the interplay of organizational, political, technological and cultural dimensions of such major change. Scholarship in ICT and government has usually found it hard to avoid deterministic approaches aimed at measuring the impact of ICT on the state. On one hand, studies in political science have focused mainly on the erosion of institutional authority entailed by trans-national networks (Guthrie 2005). On the other hand, the "E-government" framework – concentrated on the role of ICT to foster efficiency and competitiveness – has been underpinned by a technologically determinist approach and New Public Management assumptions (Aurigi 2006). Digitization of administrative information flows has been mainly seen in a mere derivative way as "the process whereby activities and their histories in a social domain are drawn up into digital codes, databases, images and text" (Latham and Sassen 2005: 3). Between these two approaches, apart from early understandings (Brinckmann and Kuhlmann 1990), today there seems to be a lack of inquiry on how institutions - as stable repositories of bureaucratic expertise and methods for legitimizing information - restructure their administrative routines to face digitization imperatives. By introducing the notion of "translation" as framed in Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and semiotics, this research avoids the actual vs. virtual dichotomy inherited from cyberculture (Pelizza 2009) and argues that, far for simply dragging actors and processes into the "virtual" domain, the digitization of information infrastructures in institutional settings is challenging the existing institutional order and triggering emergent actors, divergent information-policy orders and hierarchies, novel subjects of authority and procedures of legitimacy (Oudshoorn 2011). Using a co-productionist stance that stresses how actors get constituted in the interaction, and not a priori, this research assumes that in a process of digitization which entails the redesign of technological infrastructures, the whole actor-network made up of material, technological and legal elements is re-assembled. As a consequence, institutional boundaries along conventional fault lines (National/Local, Public/Private, Technological/Political) are expected to undergo a change (see examples in Latour and Weibel 2005). The main objective of this research is to investigate which novel subjects of authority and geographies of sovereignty are emerging from the re-design of administrative information infrastructures due to the digitization of governmental data assets. The assumption that drives this research is that processes of digitization of public administrations' (PA) information infrastructures are optimal opportunities to observe political reordering at different scales and among heterogeneous sectors. The alleged crisis of the modernist state will thus be described from a wholly original perspective: not by devising macro-trends, but by following processes of digitization of its information infrastructure. By following the redesign of data flows, this research aims to observe on-field how the forces of denationalization, deregulation and digitization intertwine in disassembling nation-state's sovereignty along multiple fault lines: not only between the Local and the National, but also between the Public and the Private, the Technological and the Political. Ultimately, by drawing upon the situated practices described it will try to figure out some macro-trajectories of change and to ask whether recurring elements of an emerging globalized politics can be recognized. To achieve the overall objective of this research, three sets of questions will be addressed, corresponding to as many fault lines along which institutional boundaries have been constituted in Modernity: National/Local, Technological/Political, Public/Private. Instead of postulating actors and boundaries, the research will look at how actors configured by those divides are reinforced or weakened throughout the process of ICT design and adoption.