More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/

research-article

Cat and Mouse Game: Patching Bureaucratic Work Relations by Patching Technologies

Author:

Rajesh VeeraraghavanAuthors Info & Claims

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 5, Issue CSCW1

Article No.: 186, Pages 1 - 21

https://doi.org/10.1145/3449285

Published: 22 April 2021 Publication History

Abstract

This article uses findings from a field study of the world's largest guaranteed employment scheme (NREGA) in India to understand how digital technology mediates work relations and power dynamics within a bureaucracy. In this initiative, upper-level bureaucrats in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh built a digital network to remove local discretion at the "last mile" of an implementation of NREGA. I show how digital infrastructure affords actors at both the first and last mile opportunities to modify software to control as well as subvert certain practices. This article refers to this dialectic phenomenon as "governance by patching" and defines it as a socio-technical instantiation of a top-down process that focuses on small changes, iterative, and political process for positive change. Governance by patching is, therefore, neither a purely technical process nor an exclusively administrative one. Rather, it refers to the ability to fix unanticipated problems that arise in the implementation of governance programs by altering the socio-technical systems. The struggle for power continues, but on the new digital terrain.

References

[1]

Philip E. Agre. 1994. From high tech to human tech: Empowerment, measurement, and social studies of computing. Computer Supported Coop Work 3, 2 (June 1994), 167--195.

Digital Library

[2]

Ali Alkhatib and Michael Bernstein. 2019. Street-Level Algorithms: A Theory at the Gaps Between Policy and Decisions. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '19), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1--13.

Digital Library

[3]

Nikhil Anand. 2011. Pressure: The politechnics of water supply in Mumbai. CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 26, 4 (November 2011), 542--564.

[4]

Karen S. Baker and Helena Karasti. 2018. Data care and its politics: designing for local collective data management as a neglected thing. In Proceedings of the 15th Participatory Design Conference: Full Papers - Volume 1 (PDC '18), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1--12.

[5]

Solomon Benjamin, Ramkumar Bhuvaneswari, and P. Rajan. 2007. Bhoomi: "E-Governance,' Or, An Anti-Politics Machine Necessary to Globalize Bangalore? CASUM-m Working Paper (2007), 1--53.

[6]

Mark Bovens and Stavros Zouridis. 2002. From Street-Level to System-Level Bureaucracies: How Information and Communication Technology is Transforming Administrative Discretion and Constitutional Control. Public Administration Review 62, 2 (2002), 174--184.

[7]

Eric Brewer, Michael Demmer, Bowei W. Du, Melissa Ho, Matthew Kam, Sergiu Nedevschi, Joyojeet Pal, Rabin Patra, Sonesh Surana, and Kevin Fall. 2005. The case for technology in developing regions. Computer 38, 6 (June 2005), 25--38

Digital Library

[8]

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. 2000. The Social Life of Information (1st edition ed.). Harvard Business Review Press, Boston

[9]

Jenna Burrell. 2009. The Field Site as a Network: A Strategy for Locating Ethnographic Research. Field Methods 21, 2 (May 2009), 181--199.

[10]

Jennifer Bussell. 2012. Corruption and Reform in India: Public Services in the Digital Age. Cambridge University Press, New York, NY.

[11]

Jennifer L. Bussell. 2010. Why Get Technical? Corruption and the Politics of Public Service Reform in the Indian States. Comparative Political Studies 43, 10 (October 2010), 1230--1257.

[12]

Bidisha Chaudhuri. 2019. Paradoxes of Intermediation in Aadhaar: Human Making of a Digital Infrastructure. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 42, 3 (May 2019), 572--587.

[13]

Bidisha Chaudhuri. 2021. Distant, opaque and seamful: seeing the state through the workings of Aadhaar in India. Information Technology for Development 27, 1 (January 2021), 37--49.

[14]

Angèle Christin. 2017. Algorithms in practice: Comparing web journalism and criminal justice. Big Data & Society 4, 2 (December 2017).

[15]

Julie Y. Chu. 2014. When infrastructures attack: The workings of disrepair in China. American Ethnologist 41, 2 (2014), 351--367.

[16]

Danish Dada. 2006. The Failure of E-Government in Developing Countries: A Literature Review. The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries 26, 1 (2006), 1--10.

[17]

Priya Deshingkar, Craig Johnson, and John Farrington. 2005. State transfers to the poor and back: The case of the Food-for-Work program in India. World Development 33, 4 (April 2005), 575--591.

[18]

Paul N. Edwards, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Steven J. Jackson, and Robin Williams. 2009. Introduction: An Agenda for Infrastructure Studies. Journal of the Association for Information Systems 10, 5 (2009).

[19]

Kathleen M. Eisenhardt and Shona L. Brown. 1999. Patching: Restitching Business Portfolios in Dynamic Markets. Harvard Business Review 77, 3 (1999), 72--82.

[20]

Peter Evans and Patrick Heller. 2015. Human Development, State Transformation, and the Politics of the Developmental State. The Oxford Handbook of Transformations of the State (June 2015), 691--713.

[21]

James Ferguson. 1990. The Anti-Politics Machine: "Development", Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. CUP Archive.

[22]

Megan Finn. 2018. Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters (Illustrated edition ed.). The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[23]

Archon Fung, Mary Graham, and David Weil. 2007. Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency (Illustrated edition ed.). Cambridge University Press, New York.

[24]

Kathryn Furlong. 2014. STS beyond the "modern infrastructure ideal": Extending theory by engaging with infrastructure challenges in the South. Technology in Society 38, (August 2014), 139--147.

[25]

Bjorn-Soren Gigler and Savita Bailur (Eds.). 2014. Closing the Feedback Loop- Can Technology Bridge the Accountability Gap? The World Bank.

[26]

Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. Psychology Press.

[27]

Akhil Gupta. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (2012th edition ed.). Duke University Press Books, Durham.

[28]

Richard Heeks. 2003. Most eGovernment-for-Development Projects Fail: How Can Risks be Reduced?

[29]

Richard Heeks and Savita Bailur. 2007. Analyzing e-government research: Perspectives, philosophies, theories, methods, and practice. Government Information Quarterly 24, 2 (April 2007), 243--265.

[30]

Kregg Hetherington. 2011. Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay. Duke University Press.

[31]

Matthew S. Hull. 2012. Documents and Bureaucracy. Annual Review of Anthropology 41, 1 (2012), 251--267.

[32]

Matthew S. Hull. 2012. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (First edition ed.). University of California Press, Berkeley.

[33]

Jeremy Hunsinger, Lisbeth Klastrup, and Matthew Allen (Eds.). 2009. Toward information infrastructure studies: Ways of knowing in a networked environment. In International Handbook of Internet Research. Springer, Dordrecht; New York, 97--117.

[34]

Clément Imbert and John Papp. 2015. Labor Market Effects of Social Programs: Evidence from India's Employment Guarantee. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 7, 2 (April 2015), 233--263.

[35]

Lilly Irani. 2019. Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India. Princeton University Press.

[36]

Margaret Jack and Steven J. Jackson. 2016. Logistics as Care and Control: An Investigation into the UNICEF Supply Division. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2209--2219.

[37]

Steven J. Jackson, Paul Edwards, Geoffrey Bowker, and Cory Knobel. 2007. Understanding Infrastructure: History, Heuristics and Cyberinfrastructure Policy. First Monday 12.6.

[38]

Sanjay Jain. 2020. From jugaad to jugalbandi: Understanding the changing nature of Indian innovation. Asia Pacific Journal of Management (2020), 1--26.

[39]

Aditya Johri and Janaki Srinivasan. 2014. The role of data in aligning the "unique identity" infrastructure in India. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing (CSCW '14), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 697--709.

Digital Library

[40]

Anuradha Joshi and Peter P. Houtzager. 2012. Widgets or Watchdogs? Conceptual explorations in social accountability. Public Management Review 14, 2 (February 2012), 145--162.

[41]

Reetika Khera (Ed.). 2011. The Battle for Employment Guarantee (Illustrated edition ed.). Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

[42]

Reetika Khera. 2018. The Aadhaar debate: Where are the sociologists? Contributions to Indian Sociology 52, 3 (October 2018), 336--342.

[43]

Renee Kuriyan, Savita Bailur, Bjorn-Soren Gigler, and Kyung Park. 2011. Technologies for Transparency and Accountability: Implications for ICT policy and Implementation. The World Bank, Washington D.C.

[44]

Michael Lipsky. 1980. Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services (1st edition ed.). Russell Sage Foundation, New York.

[45]

Shirin Madon. 2005. Governance lessons from the experience of telecentres in Kerala. European Journal of Information Systems 14, 4 (December 2005), 401--416.

Digital Library

[46]

Diego Maiorano. 2014. The Politics of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act in Andhra Pradesh. World Development 58, C (2014), 95--105.

[47]

Megh Marathe and Priyank Chandra. 2020. Officers Never Type: Examining the Persistence of Paper in e-Governance. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1--13.

Digital Library

[48]

George E. Marcus. 1995. Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24, 1 (1995), 95--117.

[49]

Silvia Masiero. 2015. Redesigning the Indian Food Security System through E-Governance: The Case of Kerala. World Development 67, C (2015), 126--137.

[50]

Silvia Masiero. 2020. Biometric Infrastructures and the Indian Public Distribution System. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 23 (September 2020).

[51]

Nayanika Mathur. 2012. Transparent-Making Documents and the Crisis of Implementation: A Rural Employment Law and Development Bureaucracy in India. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 35, 2 (November 2012), 167--85.

[52]

Timothy Mitchell. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (First edition ed.). University of California Press, Berkeley.

[53]

Eric Monteiro, Neil Pollock, Ole Hanseth, and Robins Williams. 2013. From artefacts to infrastructures. Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) 22, 4--6 (2013), 575--607.

[54]

Eric Monteiro, Neil Pollock, and Robins Williams. 2014. Innovation in information infrastructures: Introduction to the special issue. Journal of the Association for Information Systems 15, 4 (2014).

[55]

Evgeny Morozov. 2014. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (Reprint edition ed.). PublicAffairs, New York, NY.

[56]

Akunuri Murali. 2013. India: Technological Innovation for Effective Management Information Systems. In Public Works as a Safety Net?: Design, Evidence, and Implementation. The World Bank, Washington, D.C., 233--249.

[57]

Karthik Muralidharan, Paul Niehaus, and Sandip Sukhtankar. 2014. Building State Capacity: Evidence from Biometric Smartcards in India. American Economic Review 106, 10 (March 2014), 2895--2929.

[58]

Benjamin A. Olken. 2007. Monitoring Corruption: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia. Journal of Political Economy 115, 2 (April 2007), 200--249.

[59]

Samir Passi and Phoebe Sengers. 2020. Making data science systems work. Big Data & Society 7, 2 (July 2020).

[60]

Tiago Peixoto, Micah L. Sifry, Andrew Jonathon Mellon, and Fredrick Matias Sjoberg. 2017. Civic tech in the global south?: assessing technology for the public good. World Bank and Personal Democracy Press, Washington, D.C.

[61]

Volkmar Pipek and Volker Wulf. 2009. Infrastructuring: Towards an integrated perspective on the design and use of information technology. Journal of the Association for Information Systems 10, 5 (2009), 447--473.

[62]

Lant Pritchett. 2009. Is India a Flailing State?: Detours on the Four Lane Highway to Modernization. Harvard Kennedy School of Government (2009).

[63]

Ashish Rajadhyaksha. 2011. The Last Cultural Mile. The Centre for Internet and Society (2011).

[64]

C.R. Ranjini and Sundeep Sahay. 2007. Computer-based health information systems: projects for computerization or health management? Empirical experiences from India. In Information Communication Technologies and Human Development: Opportunities and Challenges, Mila Gascó, Fran Equiza-López and Manuel Acevedo-Ruiz (eds.). IGI Global, 266--292.

[65]

Ursula Rao. 2019. Biometric IDs and the remaking of the Indian (welfare) state. economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter 21, 1 (2019), 13--21.

[66]

Ursula Rao. 2019. Response to "The Aadhaar debate: Where are the sociologists?' Contributions to Indian Sociology 53, 3 (October 2019), 431--440.

[67]

Daniela K. Rosner and Morgan Ames. 2014. Designing for repair? infrastructures and materialities of breakdown. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing (CSCW '14), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 319--331.

Digital Library

[68]

Sundeep Sahay and Geoff Walsham. 1997. Social Structure and Managerial Agency in India. Organization Studies 18, 3 (1997), 415--444.

[69]

Terje Aksel Sanner, Tiwonge Davis Manda, and Petter Nielsen. 2014. Grafting: Balancing Control and Cultivation in Information Infrastructure Innovation. innovation." Journal of the Association for Information Systems 15, 4 (2014).

[70]

James C. Scott. 1999. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (0 edition ed.). Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

[71]

Megan Sheahan, Yanyan Liu, Christopher B. Barrett, and Sudha Narayanan. 2014. The political economy of MGNREGS spending in Andhra Pradesh: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

[72]

Ranjit Singh. 2019. Histories of infrastructuring. Workshop on Fostering Historical Research. In CSCW & HCI at the 22nd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, Austin, Texas.

[73]

Ranjit Singh. 2019. Give Me a Database and I Will Raise the Nation-State. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 42, 3 (May 2019), 501--518.

[74]

Ranjit Singh and Steven J. Jackson. 2017. From Margins to Seams: Imbrication, Inclusion, and Torque in the Aadhaar Identification Project. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 4776--4824.

[75]

Robert Soden and Austin Lord. 2018. Mapping Silences, Reconfiguring Loss: Practices of Damage Assessment & Repair in Post-Earthquake Nepal. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 1--21.

Digital Library

[76]

Janaki Srinivasan. 2011. The Political Life of Information:" Information" and the Practice of Governance in India. Doctoral Dissertation. University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley.

[77]

Vivek Srinivasan. Delivering Public Services Effectively: Tamil Nadu and Beyond. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

[78]

Vivek Srinivasan, Rajendran Narayanan, Dipanjan Chakraborty, Rajesh Veeraraghavan, and Vibhore Vardhan. 2018. Are Technology-enabled Cash Transfers Really ?Direct'? Economic and Political Weekly 53, 30 (2018), 58--64.

[79]

Marilyn Strathern. 2000. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (1st edition ed.). Routledge, London New York.

[80]

Kentaro Toyama. 2011. Technology as amplifier in international development. In Proceedings of the 2011 iConference (iConference '11), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 75--82.

Digital Library

[81]

Kentaro Toyama. 2015. Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology (F First Edition ed.). PublicAffairs, New York.

[82]

Rajesh Veeraraghavan. 2013. Dealing with the Digital Panopticon: The Use and Subversion of ICT in an Indian Bureaucracy. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development: Full Papers - Volume 1 (ICTD '13), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 248--255.

Digital Library

[83]

Langdon Winner. 1980. Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus 109, 1 (1980), 121--136.

[84]

World Bank Staff. 2016. World Development Report 2016: Digital Dividends. World Bank Group, Washington, D.C.

Cited By

Tracey PGarcia P(2024)Intermediation: Algorithmic Prioritization in Practice in Homeless ServicesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869518:CSCW2(1-24)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686951
Mcclearn JJensen RTalhouk R(2024)Security Patchworking in Lebanon: Infrastructuring Across Failing InfrastructuresProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373978:CSCW1(1-26)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637397
Karusala NUpadhyay SVeeraraghavan RGajos K(2024)Understanding Contestability on the Margins: Implications for the Design of Algorithmic Decision-making in Public ServicesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3641898(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3641898
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Cat and Mouse Game: Patching Bureaucratic Work Relations by Patching Technologies
1. Applied computing
  1. Law, social and behavioral sciences
    1. Sociology
2. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)

Recommendations

Bringing e-democracy back in: why it matters for future research on e-governance
Special issue: Jane fountain's "building the virtual state"

The author argues that contemporary digital information communication technologies (ICTs) facilitate new forms of e-government-enabled public sector policy making that enshrine some of the important norms and practices of e-democracy. The potential for ...
ICT for governance in combating corruption: the case of public e-procurement in Portugal
ICEGOV '14: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance

Literature has highlighted the potential of information and communication technology (ICT) in building new models of public governance that promote fairness and accountability, which are key requirements in the fight against corruption. In this context, ...
ICT for development and UISC: a step to alleviate poverty in rural areas of Bangladesh
ICEGOV '13: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance

This paper presents a case study on the ICT for development initiative in rural area launched recently by the Government of Bangladesh with UNDP support. The study concerns about how Union Information and Service Centers (UISC), established at the ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Volume 5, Issue CSCW1

CSCW

April 2021

5016 pages

EISSN:2573-0142

DOI:10.1145/3460939

Editor:
Jeff Nichols
Apple Inc., United States

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2021 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 April 2021

Published in PACMHCI Volume 5, Issue CSCW1

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

4
Total Citations
View Citations
218
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)24
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1

Reflects downloads up to 26 Dec 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Tracey PGarcia P(2024)Intermediation: Algorithmic Prioritization in Practice in Homeless ServicesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869518:CSCW2(1-24)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686951
Mcclearn JJensen RTalhouk R(2024)Security Patchworking in Lebanon: Infrastructuring Across Failing InfrastructuresProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373978:CSCW1(1-26)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637397
Karusala NUpadhyay SVeeraraghavan RGajos K(2024)Understanding Contestability on the Margins: Implications for the Design of Algorithmic Decision-making in Public ServicesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3641898(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3641898
Sambasivan NVeeraraghavan R(2022)The Deskilling of Domain Expertise in AI DevelopmentProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517578(1-14)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3491102.3517578

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents