Working Group 1: The Agile State
led by Associate Professor Irina Papazu (irpa@itu.dk)
This working group focuses on the changes taking place in the public sector as it engages in digitalization processes. We focus on digitalization at the state level, understood as the governmental apparatus of political decision-making and the central administration's technical-bureaucratic layers.
We are intrigued by pursuing questions about the mutual construction of digitalization processes and politics, bureaucracy, statehood and private sector influences.
The working group studies implications of the ever-closer relationship between the public and the private sector – not least exemplified by introducing agile methods into the state procedures - and analyzes the consequences for longstanding democratic values, such as trust, transparency, and public deliberation.
We offer empirical and conceptual answers to questions about the effects and implications of these new departures of the digitalized and digitalizing state. Creating knowledge about how digitalization reconfigures the state and vice versa is crucial in the conversation about the future of the welfare state.