Digital Lifestyles Between Solidarity, Discipline and Neoliberalism: On the Historical Transformations of the Danish IT Political Field from 1994 to 2016

Governments have increasingly turned to digital technologies as a means of rebuilding their public sectors, allowing them to heighten efficiency, cut expenditure, and deliver new services to citizens. However, rather than merely a technical upgrading of governmental institutions, digital reforms and IT policymaking are deeply political practices concerned with producing and imposing certain normative and ideological visions of the social world. Denmark is often labelled as a leading nation in terms of implementing digital governance, but the political and normative dimensions of digital reforms within the Danish welfare state are yet to be systematically investigated. This paper provides a historical study of Danish IT policies from 1994 to 2016. Relying on archival research of national policies and drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the state, we explore how the IT political field has emerged through symbolic struggles over time and how these struggles have produced particular forms of “digital lifestyles”. We find that two overall logics have dominated within the Danish IT political field. In 1994-2001, solidarity, equality and local Danish values were highlighting as core components of a digital life, but from 2002, however, economic efficiency, competitiveness and self-governance become the main ideals. In this way, the IT political field has increasingly come to converge with neoliberal discourses concerned with imposing market-like dynamics on the public sector and population. The paper concludes with a reflection on how the concept of digital lifestyles may help us understand these changes, and argues that the current dominant discourse should be challenged

The Case of a Prepaid Danish Cashcard

Payment transactions through the use of physical coins, bank notes or credit cards have for centuries been the standard formats of exchanging value. Recently online and mobile digital payment platforms has entered the stage as contenders to this position and possibly could penetrate societies thoroughly and replace current physical payment standards. This paper portrays how digital payment platforms evolve in socio-­‐technical niches and how various technological platforms aim for institutional attention in their attempt to challenge earlier platforms and standards. The paper applies a co-­‐evolutionary multilevel perspective to model the interplay and processes between technology and institutions wherein digital payment platforms potentially will substitute other payment platforms just like the credit card negated the cheque. We present a framework for understanding the evolution and transitions of payment platforms. We demonstrate the usefulness of the framework in a in-­‐depth single case study of a prepaid cash card. The learning of past experience with digital payment platforms is demonstrated to be the right starting point for investigations into how new solutions might succeed or fail in the future. Thus we finally discuss how possible venues and routes of transitions appear in current evolution of digital payment platform

Using discourse as a strategic resource

This paper investigates how discourse can be mobilized as a strategic resource when introducing a public sector reform program in a local government setting. We explore how actual day-to-day practices, contexts, and processes relate to the shaping and localizing of broad strategic discourses. In particular, we emphasize the practices in which national strategic formulations are legitimized and accepted or abandoned by the actors involved. Building on a case study conducted over a two-year time span, we show how a local actor engages with and promotes a national reform program by evoking a discourse with strategic intentions. First we present how the national reform program is translated into a local government by the evoking of historically produced and context dependent discourses. Next we show that locally produced discourses need to be evoked and re-attached to the national reform program in order to enable new local practices. Our study shows that formal reform programs and strategies are never stable and firm objects; rather, they are constantly enacted and changed as part of discursive practices. Thus individuals enter a discursive space from where to engage strategically with the creation of new local practices