P17 For Better or Worse? Human-Tech Complementarity in the Public Sector

Panel Members & Contact Details

Anette Hallin, Professor in Business Studies, Organisation and Management at Mälardalen University, Sweden. Email: anette.hallin@mdu.se

Chris Ivory, Professor in Innovation Management at Mälardalen University, Sweden. Email: chris.ivory@mdu.se
 
Laura Piscicelli, Associate Professor in Sustainable Business and Innovation
at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Email:  l.piscicelli@uu.nl 
 
Na Fu, Professor of Responsible Leadership, Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Email:  funa@tcd.ie 
 
Sharon Parker, John Curtin Distinguished Professor, Centre for Transformative Work Design, Curtin University, WA, Perth, Australia. Email:  s.parker@curtin.edu.au

Summary

This panel explores how AI and advanced digital technologies are transforming public sector work at multiple levels, from individual tasks to entire organizations. It seeks empirical and conceptual contributions that examine the human-technology relationship, particularly through interpretive and critical lenses, to better understand the complexities and consequences of AI integration. Topics include work design, trust in AI, governance tensions, and evolving roles and values in public service.

Description

For some time now, it has been argued that a digital transformation of the public sector, particularly with AI, will help address contemporary and future financial, environmental and social challenges, helping maintain or even upgrade public service delivery (Mergel et al., 2023). However, knowledge is limited about what happens to the micro-level practices of public sector work and its organising when AI and other advanced digital technologies are introduced to complement humans. Hence, this panel invites empirical and conceptual contributions that address how the use of such technologies change public sector work at task, professional, team, department and organisational level and how can these processes be understood (Barley, 2020). We invite empirical and conceptual papers that address the extent to which technologies complement humans on these different levels. In particular, we welcome papers that adopt interpretative, constructivist, postmodern and critical perspectives, since there is a need for an in-depth understanding of the complexities of AI-use in public sector work and the new configurations that emerge (Andersson et al., 2022; Mouthaan et al., 2023). 

Papers may address, but are not limited to:

• Tensions in organising and governing of AI-adoption(Haesevoets et al., 2025), and its consequences for worker wellbeing (Klonek & Parker, 2025);
• Impacts of technology on public sector work design (Parker & Grote, 2022);
• Challenges to making public sector AI trustworthy (Berman et al., 2024);
• Discursive and political tensions in public sector work with technologization (Kovalainen, 2021);
• Performative aspects of AI and new constructions of the public worker (Wahl et al., Forthcoming 2026);
• The future of work in public sector work (Hallin et al., 2025), and the future value of public work (Deranty et al., 2023).

Relevance

The theme of this panel is highly relevant in contemporary public management as knowledge about the extent to which AI and other advanced digital technologies actually complement human public sector work in practice is scarce. There is an acute need to understand this, not only on task-level and by focusing on the way individual technologies automate or augment particular tasks, but on the level of how technologies change the work of professionals, teams, departments and organisations, and what the consequences of these changes are for public service delivery and the future of public sector work. With such multi-perspective knowledge, we will not only be able to develop improved strategies for technology procurement, adoption and use of AI and advanced digital technologies, but directly address the ‘wellbeing, innovation and the future of public management’.