Hanne Sara-Maria Höglund Rydén

Doctoral Research Fellow

Department of Information Systems

Email: hanne.s.h.ryden@uia.no
Phone: +47 38141397
Mobile phone: +46737841042

Office H1067 (Universitetsveien 25, 4630 Kristiansand, Norway)

Projects

No ongoing projects

Research groups

CeDiT: Centre for digital transformation

Areas of responsibility

My background is in social work, management, and organizational development. I am interested in organizational change and how the digital transformation effects public organizations and the perception of citizens interactoing with public sector services. In my master thesis I looked into how the digitial transformation within social service played out in the municipality of Trelleborg in Sweden and how the development of digital public sector services from a multi level governance perspective.

I have a master in Social work and Organizational development from Malmö University and later a master in Public administration from the University of Gothenburg .

Research

I am holding a PhD-position in a Scandinavian project focusing on “What public services should be digitalized?”. The project is a collaboration between researchers from Norway, Denmark, and Sweden in the context of digital public sector and what services is suitable for digitalization.

My research interest within the project is on the digital citizenship and how the interaction between citizens and public sector changes alongside the digital transformation within public sector. I will focus on the perspectives of citizens to understand the needs, values and logics present in the interaction mediated through different channels. Understanding the perception of citizens considering digital, non-digital and hybrid interactions will provide a foundation to further look towards what public sector is suitable for digital channels from a citizen perspective.

Public sector has the last decades developed towards more open and horizontal governance structure. The digital transformation can be seen as a further development in this direction as it provides new ways of interacting with public sector independent of time and space. The question is what implication this development will have on institutions, professions, and citizens and how it changes roles, responsibilities in the service conduction?

Short biography

I have worked within the public sector in Sweden with service administration, consulting as well as with organizational development in building bridges between departments and design new procedures at a horizontal dimension within the organization. I have later been working within private sector to expand and develop the service provided to public sector organizations. As an extension of public sector services the business provided housing and support to homeless families in the municipality of Malmö. Later on I did my internship at Ernst & Young within the audit of public sector as well as a consultant regarding developing internal procedures.

Rydén, Hanne Sara-Maria Höglund & de Andrade, Luiz Henrique Alonso (2023). The hidden costs of digital self-service: administrative burden, vulnerability and the role of interpersonal aid in Norwegian and Brazilian welfare services. In Getschko, Demi; Lindgren, Ida; Yildiz, Mete; Peixoto, Mario; Barbosa, Flávia Rodrigues & Braga, Cristina (Ed.), Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ISSN 979-8-4007-0742-1. p. 473–478. doi: https:/doi.org/10.1145/3614321.3614403. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
It is a global trend to transform our contemporary societies through the development and adoption of new information technology which spans across social structures and challenges established institutions. The promises of economic efficiency make it almost imperative to digitally transform public services, and as a result, self-service has increasingly become adopted within the public sector. Digital self-services have been promoted as the panacea for improving public services’ responsiveness while reducing governments’ expenditures, ultimately lowering general taxpayers’ burdens when dealing with public administration. However, the cost for citizens in relation to the loss of service once provided in person is relatively unexplored. In this article, we resort to the theory of administrative burden to understand ways in which digital self-service solutions externalize costs to the citizens in need of public welfare services by imposing new types of burdens in distinct welfare state settings, namely in the Brazilian and Norwegian contexts. We perform unstructured, theory-informed content analysis on observations and interview data from welfare service office settings in both countries. Preliminary findings show how digital self-service in welfare policies sets the stage for interpersonal aid or intermediaries, which are given different names and are understood in different ways according to the countries’ institutional environments. The article problematizes digital self-service from an economic distributive justice stance and shows how such challenges are dealt with in two different welfare contexts, highlighting ethical issues in cases where digital self-services risk further marginalizing vulnerable groups of citizens.
Rydén, Hanne Sara-Maria Höglund; Hofmann, Sara & Verne, Guri Birgitte (2023). The self-serving citizen as a co-producer in the digital public service delivery. In Lindgren, Ida; Csaki, Csaba; Kalampokis, Evangelos; Tambouris, Efthimios; Janssen, Marijn; Zuiderwijk, Anneke; Viale Pereira, Gabriela & Virkar, Shefali (Ed.), Electronic Government 22nd IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference, EGOV 2023, Budapest, Hungary, September 5–7, 2023, Proceedings. Springer. ISSN 9783031411380. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-41138-0_4.

View all works in Cristin

Rydén, Hanne Sara-Maria Höglund; Hofmann, Sara & Verne, Guri Birgitte (2023). The self-serving citizen as a co-producer in the digital public service delivery.