Hybrid bureaucracy: The relationship between digital technologies and institutional arrangements in public welfare agencies

Public agencies are strategically adapting and applying digital technologies to improve their business processes and deliver greater value to society. This development has a profound impact on the agencies' institutional arrangements. While some services that the agencies offer are almost fully automated, others still require a high level of caseworker involvement. The variance in levels of automation and the coexistence of different institutional arrangements within the same agency are interesting and challenging because they contradict predictions made by both scholars and policymakers. Therefore, we present a study of three large Scandinavian public welfare agencies, utilizing document analysis supplemented by interviews with top managers and senior IT and business developers. We apply Bovens and Zouridis' (2002) typology of street-, screen-, and system-level bureaucracies as our main analytical lens, combined with Christensen and Lægreid's (2011) concepts of hybridity and sedimentation, with a socio-technical perspective in the background. We contribute to digital government and public administration research by enhancing theoretical understanding of the relationship between digital technologies, institutional arrangements and organizational trajectories. Specifically, we identify the hybrid bureaucracy as a composite, multifunctional organizational entity that encompasses several institutional arrangements simultaneously and combines aspects of street-, screen-, and system-level bureaucracies while also exhibiting its own distinct characteristics.