Knowing public services: Cross-sector intermediaries and algorithmic governance in public sector reform
| Date | 01 October 2014 |
| Published date | 01 October 2014 |
| Author | Ben Williamson |
| DOI | 10.1177/0952076714529139 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Public Policy and Administration
2014, Vol. 29(4) 292–312
!The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0952076714529139
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Article
Knowing public services:
Cross-sector
intermediaries and
algorithmic governance in
public sector reform
Ben Williamson
School of Education, University of Stirling, UK
Abstract
Discourses of public sector reform in the UK have been shaped in recent years by the
participation of new kinds of hybrid cross-sector intermediaries such as think tanks,
social enterprises and other third sector organisations. This article provides a docu-
mentary analysis of Demos, the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the
Arts and the Innovation Unit as intermediary organisations in public sector reform,
exploring their promotion of modes of digital governance and their mobilisation of new
software technologies as models for new kinds of governing practices. These intermedi-
ary organisations are generating a model of knowing public services that operates through
collecting and analysing big data, consisting of personal information and behavioural data
on individual service users, in order to co-produce personalised services. Their object-
ive is a new style of political governance based on human–computer interaction and
machine learning techniques in which citizens are to be governed as co-producers of
personalised services interacting with the algorithms of database software.
Keywords
Big data, co-production, governance, intermediaries, personalisation, policy labs, public
service reform, think tanks
Ideas about the reform and governing of public services in the UK have been partly
shaped in recent years by emerging cross-sectoral intermediary organisations.
As detailed later, these include the think tank Demos, the National Endowment
for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) and the not-for-profit
Corresponding author:
Ben Williamson, University of Stirling, Pathfoot Building, Stirling FK9 4LA, UK.
Email: ben.williamson@stir.ac.uk
Innovation Unit. They are seeking to reconfigure public services to meet individual
citizens’ specific personal needs, a process of ‘co-producing’ and ‘personalising’
public services (Meijer, 2012) that requires knowledge and information about ser-
vice users to be ‘collated, monitored and interpreted by service providers, and even
used as the basis for forecasting future needs’ (Grek and Ozga, 2010: 285). The task
of personalising public services envisioned by these organisations involves the use
of sophisticated software and algorithms that can be used to collect and analyse
‘big data’ on service users, consisting of personal information and individual
behavioural data, in order to anticipate or even predict citizens’ future lives, behav-
iours and requirements. Public service users are envisaged by them as co-producers
alongside database software of personalised services. All of this is part of a shift in
the governance of public services to the use of new kinds of ‘governing knowledge’
– knowledge about service users and citizens that is collected from them in order to
govern them more effectively (Fenwick et al., 2014). The development of a new
form of knowing public services, co-produced through personalised modes of gov-
erning and big data technologies, is a major objective of the cross-sectoral inter-
mediaries examined in this article.
The aspiration for a more personalised and knowing public service provision in
the UK public sector is examined below as a prototype of what the political sci-
entists Margetts and Dunleavy (2013) have described as ‘digital-era governance’
which puts ‘human–computer interaction’ at the centre of government. Digital
governance, in their account, embeds ‘electronic delivery at the heart of the gov-
ernment business model’, and includes activities such as ‘digitising interactions with
citizens’; ‘new forms of automation using “zero-touch technologies” that do not
require human intervention’; and partly involves making ‘citizens do more,
developing isocratic administration – or ‘do-it-yourself’ government’ (Margetts
and Dunleavy, 2013: 6). NESTA, Demos and the Innovation Unit have been
imagining and promoting (and in some cases actively prototyping) particular
approaches to digital governance based on human–computer interaction in UK
public services. The article seeks to show how documents produced by these organ-
isations have sought to reimagine citizens as participative DIY (do-it-yourself) co-
producers of ‘personalised’ public services, whose interaction with providers is
imagined to be highly mediated by sophisticated computer technologies with the
capacity to ‘know’ citizens by collecting, collating and calculating data about them
in order to ‘anticipate individuals’ future lives’ (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011: 86).
These organisations envision a reformed public sector for the emerging context
of ‘knowing capitalism’ (Thrift, 2005) in which database software and algorithmic
data processing techniques are mobilised by public, private and third sector organ-
isations alike to gather the knowledge required to govern individuals. Based on
anticipatory software algorithms that are increasingly capable of predicting indi-
viduals’ attributes and behaviours through ‘big data’, sometimes called ‘machine
learning’, ‘data mining’ or ‘predictive analytics’ (Mackenzie, 2013), these knowing
technologies are part of an imagined shift towards more automated, anticipatory
and algorithmic forms of digital governance in the public sector.
Williamson 293
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