Technology, Individuality and Public Policy (ESRC Public Services Programme and OII Public Service Workshop Series)

About

About the series

This workshop series aims to look at developments across policy sectors such as transport, health, education and criminal justice and in countries where they are most advanced, such as Singapore. It also aims to explore the extent to which personalisation effects can be generalised across the ‘tools’ of government policy, as argued by Hood and Margetts in The Tools of Government in the Digital Age (Palgrave, 2007).

The workshop is part of a series which has been running for several years, and comprises a small informal group of faculty and graduate students interested in the analysis of public policy, public services and executive government. It aims to work wherever possible on the basis of pre-circulated short papers, with short presentations followed immediately by discussion.

Background

The Internet and other information technology developments in principle facilitate new ways of ‘personalising’ policies and services for specific groups of individuals, from scanning, tracking and identity systems to health care treatments that build on the ability to classify individuals into subpopulations that differ in their susceptibility to particular disease or in their response to specific treatments.

Some such developments are ‘personalizing’ and ‘depersonalizing’ at the same time, as in the case of face-to-face contacts being replaced by other forms of interaction. They lend themselves to numerous possible applications, from enhancing markets and choice at the expense of traditional arrangements, for instance in doctor-patient relationships, to more targeted applications of government policy and security surveillance. The aim of this lunchtime workshop is to explore the implications of this development for public policy in the coming decades.

This workshop is intended to bring in participants from several disciplines that are relevant to understanding the interaction of the internet, cultural change and other technological developments on government and public services. Some of the questions we hope to ask include:

• Is technological development leading to a ‘demodernization’ of public policy in some sense, with more person-specific detection and treatment procedures?

• Does personalization in one form (for example differentiation of individuals according to particular characteristics) inevitably mean depersonalization in some other sense, such as ‘whole person treatment’?

• Will personalization lead to rising inequity in public policy outcomes?