Automating Red Tape: The Performative vs. Informative Roles of Bureaucratic Documents

Bureaucratic red tape involves communications that are not only informative, but also performative, representing the exercise of bureaucratic authority. Automation efforts, to be effective in reducing red tape, will need to include these authority aspects as design variables. A concept of bureaucratic software is suggested

Actors, actions, and initiative in normative system specification

The logic of norms, called deontic logic, has been used to specify normative constraints for information systems. For example, one can specify in deontic logic the constraints that a book borrowed from a library should be returned within three weeks, and that if it is not returned, the library should send a reminder. Thus, the notion of obligation to perform an action arises naturally in system specification. Intuitively, deontic logic presupposes the concept of anactor who undertakes actions and is responsible for fulfilling obligations. However, the concept of an actor has not been formalized until now in deontic logic. We present a formalization in dynamic logic, which allows us to express the actor who initiates actions or choices. This is then combined with a formalization, presented earlier, of deontic logic in dynamic logic, which allows us to specify obligations, permissions, and prohibitions to perform an action. The addition of actors allows us to expresswho has the responsibility to perform an action. In addition to the application of the concept of an actor in deontic logic, we discuss two other applications of actors. First, we show how to generalize an approach taken up by De Nicola and Hennessy, who eliminate from CCS in favor of internal and external choice. We show that our generalization allows a more accurate specification of system behavior than is possible without it. Second, we show that actors can be used to resolve a long-standing paradox of deontic logic, called the paradox of free-choice permission. Towards the end of the paper, we discuss whether the concept of an actor can be combined with that of an object to formalize the concept of active objects

The Case of Ebola in West Africa - Swedish Healthcare Workers' Experiences of Navigating Global Health Interventions

In this time of global health interventions, preventing borderless diseases, such as Ebola, is a question of implementing global health policies in different cultural contexts. Although these interventions are mediated by international organs, the healthcare workers on the ground are actually those who implement policies. From this starting point, this thesis investigates the extent to which Swedish healthcare workers, when combating the Ebola virus disease in West Africa, take into consideration the local context in their application of global health preventive measures. It does so by exploring healthcare workers’ experiences of navigating global health interventions, while negotiating culture. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants in the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency’s medical mission, which aimed to combat Ebola in Liberia and Sierra Leone. To understand their experiences, Michael Lipsky’s ‘bottom-up’ theory and conceptualization of the street-level bureaucrat inspired this study’s theoretical foundation. Three themes were prevalent in the interview material: Navigating the field and establishing trust, Consolidating objectives and Negotiating culture. This thesis argues that constant flexibility and adjustment to the pre-existing challenges in the field are vital in the adaptation of health policies. Moreover, flexibility is dependent on the information transferred from the field. Without rapid information transferal, bureaucracies and their employees have false perceptions of the field, on which they articulate their objectives for partaking in the health interventions. It is further argued that these actors continuously have an internal negotiation of ‘Self’ in relation to ‘Other’ and the bureaucracy that they work for, while trying to navigate health interventions in a foreign context. In conclusion, the ‘one size fits all’ approach does not work and this mindset (re-)produces a dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’ where a certain way of doing things is seen as predominant

Expert vs. Management Support Systems: Semantic Issues

Expert systems hold great promise for technical application areas such as medical diagnosis or engineering design. They are, we argue, less promising for management applications. The reason is that managers are not experts in the sense of possessing a formal body of knowledge which they apply. The limitations of artificial intelligence approaches in managerial domains is explained in terms of semantic change, motivating attention towards management (decision) support systems

Comparing Formal and Informal Institutions with the Institutional Grammar Tool

Conference Paper"While the role of formal and informal institutions has been long recognized among common-pool resources scholars working under the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IAD), not much attention has been devoted to disentangling the relative influence of each one on social behavior. We explore this issue through the application of the grammar of institutions, semi-structured interviews, and Q-sort methods. The goal of this paper is two-fold. First, the paper seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the interplay between formal and informal institutions on policy compliance. We do so in the context of aquaculture policies in the State of Colorado, USA. Second, this paper seeks to continue to develop Crawford and Ostrom’s grammar of institutions as an analytical tool for systematic institutional analysis. The results from the case study are mixed. We found some respondents reporting strong alignment between informal and the formal institutions but others reporting weak alignment. Additionally, feelings of personal guilt or shame and fear of social disapproval, together, were cited as being more influential in shaping individuals’ decision making regarding compliance with formal institutions than was fear of monetary sanctioning. The paper concludes with a discussion of the unexpected relationships among different syntactic elements of the grammar thereby deepening the understanding of how the grammar of institutions can help in the examination of policy documents and explain human behavior.