Ambulating, digital and isolated: The case of Swedish labour inspectors

Abstract

The focus of this paper is the impact of digitalisation on a public sector organisation: the Swedish Work Environment Agency. Building on internal documents and interviews with labour inspectors and managers, it shows that ICT-enabled temporal and spatial flexibility increased the social isolation among the inspectors and that standardising technology negatively affected their work practice discretion. The interviewed inspectors considered these problems a managerial responsibility to solve. Management, in contrast, considered isolation a passing phenomenon and judged standardisation and replicability through ICT more important than inspectors’ discretion. This study illustrates how new technology in an organisation, although considered necessary, raises questions about how to maintain communities of practice and how to avoid negative effects on the discretion of street-level agents. It contributes to theory by introducing the concepts of Communities of Practice and street-level bureaucracy into the discussion of isolation by digitalisation.