Introduction: Studying Public Bureaucracies under Digital Transformation

Digitalization has changed the face of bureaucracy. This book aims to give an in-depth analysis of how digital transformation enables and challenges public bureaucracies and the values associated with this particular form of organization. This introductory chapter presents an overview of the book’s main findings and presents the theoretical and methodological foundation for the analytical chapters. The theoretical framework is developed through discussions of the characteristics and features associated with the book’s central concepts: public bureaucracy and digital transformation. The research approach is based on an interpretive and practice-based methodology. Data was generated through organizational ethnography in two highly digitalized government agencies in Denmark (the Tax Agency and the Agricultural Agency). Across our analyses, we find that digital technologies both reduce and increase the complexity of the public bureaucracy: Digital technologies enable a smoothly running bureaucratic machine while simultaneously creating snags in this machine. Digital technologies hence play paradoxical role in their interplay with the bureaucracy.