Hanne Sara-Maria Höglund Rydén

• Schmidt, Michaela Margarethe; Heggertveit, Ida; Rydén, Hanne Sara-Maria Höglund & Farshchian, Babak A. (2025). Succeeding in Digital Self-service: Knowledge-Sharing in Citizen-Caseworker Interactions. I Hofmann, Sara; Danneels, Lieselot; Dobbe, Roel; Novak, Anna-Sophie; Parycek, Peter; Schwabe, Gerhard; Spitzer, Vera & Ubacht, Jolien (Red.), Electronic Participation- 17th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference, ePart 2025, Krems, Austria, August 31–September 4, 2025, Proceedings. Springer. ISSN 9783032025142. s. 291–305. doi: 10.1007/978-3-032-02515-9_18. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  Successful digitalization requires a deep understanding of the practices surrounding self-service solutions. Such understanding can be developed through direct interaction between citizens and service providers. In this study, we contribute to such understanding by exploring how explicit and tacit knowledge is exchanged during citizen-caseworker interactions. We do so by examining how citizens and caseworkers share knowledge while interacting with a digital self-service application for financial assistance. Although self-service solutions aim to improve service delivery by allowing citizens to serve themselves, we find that they can also create challenges. Citizens need to acquire relevant knowledge and skills, and public employees must often correct application errors and assist citizens during service procedures. Our findings from observations and interviews reveal that both parties hold essential knowledge for the use of self-service solutions. These interactions facilitate bidirectional knowledge-sharing, enhancing citizens’ confidence and helping caseworkers refine their guidance methods. The paper discusses how knowledge-sharing occurs when caseworkers guide and support citizens through the process of digital self-service applications and how these guidance sessions can benefit the development and design of digital self-service solutions in the public sector.

• Heggertveit, Ida & Rydén, Hanne Sara-Maria Höglund (2024). Narratives of Reality: Administrative Burdens and Workarounds in Digital Self-Services, AMCIS 2024 Proceedings. Association for Information Systems (AIS). ISSN 9781958200117. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  This study employs ethnographic methods to explore citizens' experiences applying for welfare services through digital self-services, highlighting the challenges that vulnerable citizens face when dealing with administrative burdens and their various strategies to overcome them. The primary objective is to present citizens' lived experiences of administrative burdens within the context of digital self-services and illustrate the impact of these burdens on their access to fundamental rights and services. Through participatory observations, we uncover citizens' encounters with administrative burdens during self-service applications and their strategies to mitigate these burdens while presenting their experiences of compliance, learning, and psychological costs. We offer recommendations for redesign based on the identified burdens and strategies. Our findings reveal that while self-services may present administrative burdens for vulnerable citizens in difficult life situations, efforts to alleviate these burdens can reduce inequalities and strengthen social fairness.

• Rydén, Hanne Sara-Maria Höglund & Hofmann, Sara (2024). Frontline workers’ role in digital self-service co-production: Channel promoters, digital helpers, or intermediators. eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government. 16(2), s. 1–27. doi: 10.29379/jedem.v16i2.919. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  When public services move online, citizens are expected to serve themselves on digital platforms and enrol in public services through self-service procedures. In this digital encounter, many citizens struggle to live up to the “self” in self-services and seek in-person assistance from public professionals. These professional actors play an essential role in enabling the co-production of self-services for citizens who struggle to be truly self-serving. This article explores the frontline workers’ roles in self-service co-production when interacting with citizens seeking help in the service procedures. Service interactions have been studied in two meeting centres of the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration. We have conducted observations of office interactions in general and at digital self-service stations in particular. Interviews with public officials have complemented these observations. We use intermediation and co-production theory as analytical lenses in our data analysis. The findings show that the role of frontline workers can be both flexible and narrow in nature and that they take on the role of intermediaries when acting as a bridge between the analogue world and the digital domain. We also see that the intermediating role frontline workers take will vary and is influenced by organisational, personal, and external circumstances that can enable or restrain the co-production of self-services.

• Rydén, Hanne Sara-Maria Höglund; Hofmann, Sara; Andrade, Luiz de & Heggertveit, Ida (2024). Mitigating Administrative Burdens: Understanding the Role of Intermediaries in Co-producing Digital Self-services. I Johannessen, Marius Rohde; Csáki, Csaba; Danneels, Lieselot; Hofmann, Sara; Lampoltshammer, Thomas; Parycek, Peter; Schwabe, Gerhard; Tambouris, Efthimios & Ubacht, Jolien (Red.), Electronic Participation 16th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference, ePart 2024, Ghent, Belgium, September 3–5, 2024, Proceedings. Springer. ISSN 9783031708046. s. 31–46. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-70804-6_3. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Lindgren, Ida; Madsen, Christian Østergaard; Rydén, Hanne Sara-Maria Höglund; Heggertveit, Ida; Hofmann, Sara & Sæbø, Øystein (2024). What Public Services are Suitable for Digitalization? - A Classification of Public Service Characteristics. I Janssen, Marijn; Crompvoets, Joep; Gil-Garcia, J. Ramon; Lee, Habin; Lindgren, Ida; Nikiforova, Anastasija & Pereira, Gabriela Viale (Red.), Electronic Government. Springer Nature. ISSN 9783031702747. s. 201–217. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-70274-7_13. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• Hofmann, Sara; Sæbø, Øystein & Rydén, Hanne Sara-Maria Höglund (2024). Implications of Digitalised Welfare Services from a Vulnerable Citizens' Perspective. Nordisk välfärdsforskning | Nordic Welfare Research. 9(2), s. 127–141. doi: 10.18261/nwr.9.2.2. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv
• 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. I Lindgren, Ida; Csaki, Csaba; Kalampokis, Evangelos; Tambouris, Efthimios; Janssen, Marijn; Zuiderwijk, Anneke; Pereira, Gabriela Viale & Virkar, Shefali (Red.), 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. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  The promotion of digital self-services has generated a shift within digital government, which has implications for citizens that depend on welfare services. From the policy perspective, users can benefit from better service access, process efficiency and opportunities for citizens to co-produce their public services. These opportunities are accompanied by increasing responsibilities for citizens that are expected to serve themselves to a higher extent. This article analyses how vulnerable citizens engage in self-services and their co-production of public services that play out in the digital public service setting. Data were gathered through participatory observations at a service office at the Norwegian welfare administration (NAV) when citizens visited the office to apply for public welfare services. The article provides a novel theoretical framework for conceptualizing dynamic actor-co-production, showing how co-production preconditions can be understood in relation to the actors involved in the service procedure. From a citizen-centric perspective, the article explores the roles of the human state actor – frontline workers, technology state actor – self-service stations, and the private actor – citizens – in the co-production. It sheds light on how participation can be understood at different levels of abstraction and describes the impact of actors’ roles, motives, actions, and preconditions in the co-production of welfare services. The findings show that most citizens that visit the office are vulnerable in relation to financial circumstances and struggle to independently co-produce their services in the public self-service setting.

• Rydén, Hanne Sara-Maria Höglund & Andrade, Luiz Henrique Alonso de (2023). The hidden costs of digital self-service: administrative burden, vulnerability and the role of interpersonal aid in Norwegian and Brazilian welfare services. I Getschko, Demi; Lindgren, Ida; Yildiz, Mete; Peixoto, Mario; Barbosa, Flávia Rodrigues & Braga, Cristina (Red.), Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ISSN 9798400707421. s. 473–478. doi: 10.1145/3614321.3614403. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv Vis sammendrag

  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.

Se alle arbeider i NVA

• 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. Fulltekst i vitenarkiv

Se alle arbeider i NVA