Changing social citizenship through information technology

This article takes a closer look at the implementation of computer-integrated profiling tool by Public Employment Services (PES) in Poland. It was introduced in 2014 in order to categorise the unemployed according to the so-called “employment potential”. The paper focuses on the tool’s influence on social citizenship in the area of active labour policy (ALMP). It shows that profiling has profound consequences for social rights of the unemployed, since it blurs the criteria of distribution of ALMP, excludes large number of the unemployed from access to it and deprive them of a right of appeal. We argue that information technology was the key component of the decomposition of legally defined collective categories in the area of access to ALMP, since it enabled two major changes under a pretence of technical improvement, scientification and standardisation. First of all, the usage of IT made possible the departure from rules of access to services based on target groups and defined by law. Instead, the mechanisms of selection, that aim to assess an individual (rather than define a target groups) are hidden in the algorithm, which was established by unknown experts. In fact, the policy discourse presenting profiling as a progressive, technical and scientific created a smokescreen to hide the change of social rights of the unemployed and justified keeping its operational rules secret. Second of all, introduction of computer-integrated profiling technology was supposed to promote standardisation of the selection processes performed by frontline staff in PES – in order to make it more transparent compared to their discretionary application of legally defined access criteria (for analysis of discretion in Polish PES, see Sztandar-Sztanderska 2016; 2009). Meanwhile, as we will show, the use of IT requires a great deal of discretionary judgements that street-level bureaucrats have to make about people – judgements that are not made against the background of any legal rules and are very much dependent on interaction between a frontline worker and an unemployed person.