Ambulating, digital and isolated: The case of Swedish labour inspectors
研究了数字化对瑞典劳动监察员的影响，发现ICT带来的时空灵活性增加了社会孤立，标准化技术削弱了工作自主权，而管理层与监察员对此看法不同。
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.