Higher Seminar in Business Studies

Welcome to the Higher Seminar in Business Studies!

At the seminar, Julia Carlsson, PhD in Public Administration and Senior Lecturer at the Department of Business Administration, will present her paper: Making Digital Welfare Work: Conceptualizing Digital Compensatory Work by Frontline Professionals.

The seminar will be held in Swedish.

We look forward to engaging and stimulating discussions on Julia’s text and hope that many of you will be able to attend.

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Making Digital Welfare Work: Conceptualizing Digital Compensatory Work by Frontline Professionals

Digital technologies in welfare organizations frequently generate gaps, ambiguities, and misalignments that require professional intervention. Yet prior research has tended to portray frontline workers mainly as resistant or adaptive actors, leaving under-examined their active contributions to sustaining digital infrastructures. This article introduces the concept of digital compensatory work to capture how professionals describe intervening when digital technologies fall short of their own standards for professional service delivery. Drawing on an exploratory literature review, we identify three forms of such compensatory work: complementing digital technologies, rectifying their shortcomings, and dismissing them when they conflict with professional judgment. By theorizing these practices, the article expands existing understandings of professional discretion in digital welfare services, shifting attention from resistance and adaptation to value-driven interventions that actively uphold service quality. In doing so, it contributes to debates on digital welfare and highlights the essential role of professional agency in sustaining human service organizations under conditions of digital transformation.