Automatically Prepared? How Frontline Workers Cope in the Face of Automation

Public sector digitalisation is often described as a help to frontline workers, who must deal with a high workload, too few resources, and complex professional dilemmas. Digitalisation nevertheless, also creates new challenges that become intertwined with the already existing challenges in street-level bureaucracies. Based on 25 interviews and more than 80 h of observations conducted in the Danish employment services, this study examines how frontline workers make using automatically generated representations of the clients manageable and meaningful. Drawing on coping theory and abductive analysis three distinct digital coping strategies are identified: automatic (simplification); extended (complication); and in situ (flexibility) preparation. The contribution of the study is twofold. First, it expands the current understanding of coping strategies as simplifying or complicating the work of frontline workers with a third flexibility strategy. This strategy shows how frontline workers cope by minimizing time spent on preparation and instead flexibly search out information during meetings with clients, relying on their skills to lithely manoeuvre in both digital and bureaucratic systems. Second, it provides insight into understanding how digital efficiency initiatives in the public sector often end up playing a different role than intended. Finally, I compare and discuss the consequences of these ambiguous digital coping strategies and point to future avenues of research.