Närbyråkrater och digitaliseringar: Hur lärares arbete formas av tidsstrukturer

Street-Level Bureaucrats and Digitalisations : How Teachers’ Work Is Shaped by Temporal Structures

This dissertation contributes to street-level and public administration research by showing how digitalisations bring temporal structures for street-level bureaucrats, and what consequences that has. It analyses what digitalisation(s) means, and what consequences it has in public sector street-level work. ‘Digitalisation’ is seen as a solution that aims to resolve various problems in the Swedish public administration. This is especially prominent in the Swedish school system, which therefore serves as the empirical context of the study. Despite the hope for digitalisation to solve problems, the term is unspecific in general public policy, the Swedish school context and in public administration research. To address that uncertainty, this dissertation lets teachers define what digitalisation means. From using this approach, four dimensions has emerged: social media use; Learning Management Systems (LMS, tools for administration, documentation and communication); digital teaching practices (one-on-one, learning programs, remote teaching and digital teaching materials) and digitalisation as management tools at organisational and political level. The empirical analysis shows how these different types of digitalisations impact teachers work in various respects. In street-level research on digitalisation, it is acknowledged that digitalisation shape work in various ways. However, few studies deal with digitalisations’ temporal aspects. Time is generally regarded as a fixed and objective phenomenon in the stream of research that address temporality in street-level work. It is remarkable how little attention temporal aspects have received, despite calls within the broader paradigm of public administration research to consider time to a greater extent. A theory of social acceleration is used to analyse digitalisations from a temporal perspective. A benefit from using such a perspective is that the subjective experience of time is acknowledged. The theoretical analysis shows how digitalisations bring both accelerating and decelerating mechanisms that are connected with processes of alienation and coping for street-level bureaucrats. The border between alienation and coping is however quite blurred and together with an intertwined web of temporal structures, this creates a dissociated situation for street-level bureaucrats.