14.11. Doctoral Dissertation Defence: Santtu Räisänen

Santtu Räisänen. Photo: Liisa Takala

Santtu Räisänen, MSc and researcher in the REPAIR project, will publicly defend his doctoral dissertation titled "The Façade of Governmental Innovation – or, How Certain Efforts to Administer Citizens’ Lives with Artificial Intelligence Failed to Fail, and What That Says About Emptiness in the Bureaucratic Culture of Innovation" at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki on Friday 14 November at 13:00 at Porthania, Room PIII, (Yliopistonkatu 3).

Professor David Ribes (University of Washington) will serve as the opponent, and Professor Minna Ruckenstein will act as the custos.

The dissertation is available electronically via Helda.

Abstract

The notion of innovation has become a diffuse cultural dominant, appearing ubiquitously in various societal discourses as an economic imperative, social panacea, and a demand across nearly all domains of social life — including public administrations. A whole industry of policy and management intermediaries — prominently the OECD Observatory of Public Innovation, the Bloomberg Network for Public Innovators, Deloitte, and The UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, among others — has formed with the aim of fostering a culture of innovation within public administrations, one where civil servants embody not the Weberian impartial executors of policy, but more the Schumpeterian entrepreneurs of creative destruction. Concurrently, welfare states across the globe have started to turn towards data technologies to reform the way beneficiaries are surveilled, classified, and activated, risks are managed, and services are produced. This datafication of the welfare state is technologically bolstering existing politics of welfare retrenchment and citizen regulation while also generating qualitatively new kinds of techno-politics.

The shift in bureaucratic ideals and the emerging techno-political aspirations of datafication form an interesting conjunction of cultural and technological flows, presenting new challenges for the social scientist. In cultural studies, scholars have explored how new ideals of administration undermine the traditional values of bureaucracy. In Critical Algorithm Studies, researchers have revealed how power is refigured and politics materialised in the implementation of data technologies. Furthermore, in Science and Technology Studies, scholars have begun to critically examine the notion of innovation itself, asking what it does, what it is made of, and whether it is the solution or the problem.

This PhD dissertation engages with these questions. It is a critical study of innovation culture in public administration as a matter of implementation and as it pertains to the datafying welfare state. This research begins by relinquishing analytic notions of innovation as the production of new solutions and shifting towards an emic perspective, asking: what is bureaucratic innovation composed of? I approach innovation as a material-semiotic achievement, as something that is accomplished as a weave of relational, material, and semiotic practices. Drawing from literature, I argue that innovation in administration is a transgression that puts at stake incumbent values of bureaucracy and welfare citizenship. Then, drawing on my empirical research, I analyse governmental innovation as primarily empty. Across three peer-reviewed articles, I qualitatively analyse various imaginal, complicit, affective, aesthetic, and performative practices of artifice by which an appearance of government innovation is sustained despite vaporous results.

This dissertation is based on an extended polymorphic engagement with a six-year project of governmental AI innovation in the Finnish Ministry of Finance. Through eclectic materials such as documents, performances, technical artefacts, and participant interviews, I develop a situated and empirically grounded perspective on innovation. In my work, I focus on gaps, invisibilities, and obfuscations: the disparities between documented and experienced realities and the various forms of kludging, mending, assembling, and performing that go into sustaining the vacuity in between. I show that while the work of public innovators is problematic in many ways—not least in its transgression of the values of bureaucracy, its imposition of ill-conceived technofixes, and its reconfiguration of notions of welfare-citizenship—criticising or contesting their work within the administration is difficult. Instead of critically engaging with issues and their potential solutions, innovation culture circulates as a diffuse but empty sensibility sustained through various broad-based and complicit practices of maintaining appearances. Ultimately, I argue that the moral affront at the core of this empty innovationism is not its failure to effect change, but precisely its systematic failure to fail well.

This dissertation contributes to academic discourses on the changing values of bureaucracy, the contemporary hegemony of innovation, and questions of implementation in the datafying welfare state, by making visible the invisible work of sustaining innovation. Moreover, it aims to contribute to a lucidity that enables the contestation of innovation as a cultural dominant and the possibility of a more auspicious orientation: rather than a blinkered rush for creative destruction, an ascetic deliberateness of failing well and carefully.