Barren landscape,reduced people: Digital non-place in a public bureaucratic organization

Abstract

Digital administrative systems are ubiquitous in modern bureaucracies, part of the ‘everyday’ that often goes unnoticed and creates the digital undertow. Based on an ethnographic study of a social services office in Sweden, we show how these digital systems can be understood as digital non-places, which appear as fixed and immobile to workers. This appearance masks the inherent precarity and fluidity of space that is often perceived to characterize digital spaces. By analysing the architecture, experience and social practices of a bureaucratic digital space, we show how it creates a barren, fixed world, where others are absent or reduced to ‘documentary persons’. Because the space does not allow for placemaking, in terms of physical transformation or social engagement, workers cannot transform it into a place, which would provide a sense of belonging. It is this lack of belonging, rather than a lack of meaning, that creates the non-place. Moreover, the barrenness and reduction in personhood provided by the digital non-place may nudge workers towards a ‘social production of indifference’ in the exercise of public authority. The study highlights how a place-sensitive approach can illuminate our understanding of modern workspaces, and the effects they may have on workers.

Introduction

Viewing organizations as inherently spatial phenomena highlights the organizing powers of space, as the spaces that organizations occupy shape the patterns of actions available within them (Beyes and Steyaert, 2012; Jörgensen and Holt, 2019). The ‘spatial turn’ in organization studies has alerted us to how the architectural elements and aesthetics of work spaces affect employee activities (Ashkanasy et al., 2014), but also how buildings are reinterpreted, as workers reinvent and transform intended behaviours (Gieryn, 2000, 2002). Space and organization can thus be seen as interlinked and mutually constitutive processes (Wright et al., 2023). The relationship between space and place, and the significance of place for organizational life has gained increasing scholarly attention in recent years (e.g. Berti et al., 2018; Cartel et al., 2022; Dacin et al., 2024; Manca et al., 2025; Purvanova and Mitchell, 2024; Wright et al., 2023). In line with this research, we contend that organizational places are key elements of organizational life, because they provide ‘a sense of belonging and purpose which gives meaning to our lives’ (Nordbäck et al., 2022). As such, places are ongoing accomplishments that evolve organically as a result of collective engagement. Their identity and meaning are always emergent and open to contestation (Cartel et al., 2022; Massey, 2005; Sergot and Saives, 2016; Wright et al., 2023).

Places play a dual role in organizations: they may become sites for dynamic creation and institutional entrepreneurism, but they can also work as silent guardians of institutionalized traditions (Dacin et al., 2024; Staggs et al., 2022). In a post-pandemic world, digital places have become more prevalent and important, as a consequence of hybrid working arrangements which place higher emphasis on the digital parts of the office (Lauring and Jonasson, 2025; Vesala, 2023). Digital places of collaboration and communality are often regarded as sites of fluidity and emergent multiplicities. Viewing them through a topological lens reveals their spatio-temporal and ever-transforming nature (Decuypere et al., 2022; Massey, 2005; Ratner, 2020). Studies show how such digital places become sites for emergent self-organization of volunteer groups (Burke et al., 2023), creative collaboration (Schiemer et al., 2023) or ‘placeless’ globalized work in ‘invisible’ companies (Flecker, 2016), but may also be used to create mobile and unbounded surveillance and control (de Vaujany et al., 2021).

In this paper, we would like to complement and contrast this research stream on digital places as sites of fluidity in organizations (Dacin et al., 2024), with a study of a different type of digital organizational space: the digital administrative systems of public bureaucratic organizations. The ideals pervading public administration and its exercise of public authority are those of accountability, independence, efficiency, and the production of social value and equal service to citizens (Esko and Kuolo, 2023). In higher education, we find these types of bureaucratic digital spaces in the form of platforms for examination, evaluation and grading, forming an integral part of management education (Kjærgaard et al., 2023). The bureaucratic ethos of such systems for public administration depends on the organizational power of files (in that the written record serves as a basis for decision-making), and therefore, a computer architecture which is informed by the affordances of the file will have certain characteristics which sets it apart from digital spaces designed for collaboration (Vismann, 2008). These administrative spaces of the ‘everyday’ often go unnoticed and are also comparatively less studied (see, however, Pollock and Williams, 2008), possibly precisely because of the invisibility afforded by familiarity and perceived mundanity. This may cloak their power and influence, making the study of them all the more pressing (Beverungen et al., 2019).

Based on an ethnographic study of a bureaucratic digital system used in social services in a municipality in Sweden, we re-examine the digital administrative system as a digital space and potential site for placemaking, sensitizing ourselves to its aesthetics and properties, and what it does to workers (Kuismin, 2022). Our focus thus lies on ‘spatial poetics’ and the ‘spirit of the place’ (cf. Beyes and Holt, 2020; Martin, 2002; Strati, 1990). Through this place-sensitive research approach, we aim to understand digital space as experience and as practice (Cartel et al., 2022). The question we seek to answer is: What kind of workspace is created in digital bureaucratic systems? We thereby answer recent calls for studies of space and place in organizations (Cartel et al., 2022; Dacin et al., 2024; Wright et al., 2023) and also for studies of the ‘digital undertow’, the effects of everyday technologies that pervade and often invisibly shape organizations (Orlikowski and Scott, 2023).

We argue that some bureaucratic digital spaces, and perhaps in particular the unadorned digital systems used in public services, should be understood as non-places (Augé, 1995): blank spaces designed for transit which create solitude and similitude rather than individual identity, relations and meaning. Reading these digital spaces through the theoretical lens of the non-place highlights the spatial aspects of these bureaucratic systems and enables us to address the aesthetic qualities of these digital working environments as they immerse workers. The aim of the study is to further our understanding of placemaking and placeness in office work, and the interlinkages between space and place, specifically in digital spaces, thereby contributing to current discussions on place and placemaking in organizations (e.g. Berti et al., 2018; Cartel et al., 2022; Crevani, 2019; Dacin et al., 2024; Nordbäck et al., 2022; Purvanova and Mitchell, 2024; Wright et al., 2023).

In this study, we show how the digital workspace can be understood through three spatial aspects: first, its architecture and other spatial elements, second, the experience of being in it, and third, social encounters (such as they are). We discuss implications of these architectural, aesthetic and social properties of the digital workplace for those who spend time in it, illuminating three key qualities of the studied digital space: fixed, barren and desolate. Our study shows that although workers may attach meaning to this digital space, it remains a non-place as a consequence of qualities that prevent placemaking, and thereby, the development of a sense of belonging. As a result, such digital spaces may contribute to the social production of indifference (Herzfeld, 1992) in the exercise of public authority.

(Digital) spaces, non-places and documentary persons

Space and place in organization

Studies of organizational spatiality in management studies draw largely on theorizations from geography and anthropology (Wright et al., 2023). In this tradition, organizational spaces can be understood as inherently fragile spatio-temporal events, characterized by ‘throwntogetherness’ and emerging through sociomaterial relations (Massey, 2005; Ratner, 2020; Sergot and Saives, 2016). Through this discursive and material enactment, organizational spaces can gain the appearance of stability, and thereby the capacity to enable or constrain social practices and fix the contents of social formations (Herod et al., 2007; Massey, 1984; Simmel, 1908[1997]). However, this stability is illusory, a result of a multiplicity of human and non-human trajectories that have come together at a precise point in time and space (Sergot and Saives, 2016). Stability is thus not an inherent quality of space, it is an achievement, and the result of laboursome work (Crevani, 2019; Ratner, 2020).

In relation to space, place carries a different kind of power: that of a collective, shared sense of meaning that shapes interpretations and conduct (Purvanova and Mitchell, 2024). Place can be understood as the intersection between a spatial location and a meaning structure, communally created from discursive and material elements (Berti et al., 2018; Dacin et al., 2024). The experience of a place – how it feels, is remembered and imagined – creates an attachment, a sense of identity and belonging. Through ‘placemaking’ or ‘placework’, places are physically and socially constructed in spaces, requiring collective engagement in providing and upholding meaning. The result is the transformation of a workspace into a workplace (Cartel et al., 2022; Purvanova and Mitchell, 2024). The sense of purpose of a place, and the appearance of coherence created by the meaning attached to it, gives places power and contributes to their ability to stabilize organizational life (Crevani, 2019). As a result, places can be understood as the invariant context that shapes organizational activities, and which employees must navigate (Dacin et al., 2024).

The politics and power relations of its constructors become inscribed in the architecture of a built space, over time taken for granted and thereby rendered invisible, creating ‘technological somnambulism’ (Winner, 1986), where the habitual engagement creates ‘knowing without knowing’ (Dale, 2005). In terms of technology, this process can be conceptualized as one of domestication, in that workers through everyday life adapt new technology to their needs, and adapt themselves to the requirements of the new technology, as determined by the scripts inscribed in them by their designers (Berker, 2011). By narrowing the room for imagination, thus restricting possible activities, users are ‘nudged’ towards certain ways of working (Husted and Plesner, 2017). High-reliability organizations, such as public authorities, demand precise dispositions of persons, spaces and material, where spatial arrangements serve to uphold order by dictating what may be brought together and what must be kept separate (Knox et al., 2015). The syntax of such digital spaces determines the pathways and routines possible for those who work in them, so that they align with the bureaucratic ideals of the organization (Husted and Plesner, 2017).

The barren non-place

Rather than being representations of physical spaces, digital systems produce and create spaces in themselves (Kellerman, 2016). These spaces are ‘perceptually real’ in how they trigger responses from those who enter them, and are able to provide experiences that are no less intense than those of the physical world (Álvarez and Duarte, 2018; Fayard, 2012; Li et al., 2010). As Gagliardi (2006) suggests, the digital world requires and refines some aesthetic experiences and dulls others in comparison with non-digital reality.

Spatial elements in terms of barriers, passages and distances, areas for information and others for communication, mean that digital spaces have a varied topography akin to that of the real world, and similarly may enable a wide range of activities and experiences. They may for example have the potential for community, connectivity and placemaking (Hafermalz and Riemer, 2020; Risi and Pronzato, 2021; Sharma and Jaggi, 2023), or for surveillance capitalism which serves to replace human monitoring with an algorithmic gaze (see for example McDaid et al., 2023; Newlands, 2021). The topography of digital worlds incorporates both lived spaces, filled with tangible objects and huge variations and measured spaces, abstract and composed of uniform segments, based on the grid of a map (Li et al., 2010). This digital grid spans, controls and shapes the organization (Beyes and Holt, 2020). By becoming the environmental locus in and through which people’s experiences, actions and intentions are drawn together spatially, a space may gain a ‘sense of place’. It is assigned, and spatially orders, a unique gathering of meaning, values and identity (Gieryn, 2000). Thereby, it becomes a genuine, authentic mode of dwelling (Relph, 1976; Seamon, 2013; Trigg, 2017).

In the sites of late modernity, we encounter a type of space that repeats itself, interchangeable and homogeneous: the non-place (Augé, 1995). The archetypical non-place would be an airport, a train station, or a highway, an artificially constructed and homogenized place, formed to a certain end, lacking in the identity and history of anthropological real-world places (Augé, 1995; Buchanan, 1999). In lieu of heritage and community, non-places are inscribed with prescriptive, prohibitive or informative ‘instructions for use’, which serve as guidance for those that are there (Augé, 1995: 96). People interact with texts, which seek to pre-empt unwanted or erroneous behaviour, not with each other. The result is often anxiety rather than reassurance, as these instructions make clear that there are right and wrong ways to use the space (Gregory, 2011). These signs, as well as other elements of the non-place, such as the way in which it is entered (requiring, for example, a ticket in regard to train stations or airports) also serve as a reminder to the user of the contractual nature of their relationship to the non-place or the powers that govern it (Augé, 1995: 101). These semiotic specificities of non-places contribute to their sense of separation from the rest of the world (Devlieger and Strickfaden, 2012).

Since experience of a place is bound up with our ability to dwell there and thereby attach meaning to it, this means that assumed non-places such as hotels or airports may over time become imbued with meaning and belonging for those who stay there (Merriman, 2004; Shortt, 2015). Following Merriman (2004), we therefore regard place and non-place as conceptual polarities, rather than the empirical binarity originally proposed by Augé. It should also be noted that Augé’s polarity of non-places and anthropological places should be regarded as ideal types, as critics have pointed out that such a binary distinction is untenable – experience of a space is embodied and therefore inherently subjective (Trigg, 2017).

The desolation of reduced personhood

The lack of belonging experienced in a non-place is further acerbated by its generic design, which makes it lack specificity and identity – any personalization is transitory and temporal, reverting to the ‘singular fabricated average’ (Gregory, 2011). Others are often encountered as strangers who share the same space but do not seek to be our friends (Tawil-Souri, 2011). This lack of communication creates a sense of isolation and alienation (Devlieger and Strickfaden, 2012). Although non-places are ostensibly sites of transit, nodes for flow and dispersal, in practice they often become the opposite: spaces of stasis, as people are held up, waiting. They become simultaneously spaces of dispersal and of gathering, of in-between-ness where one becomes mobile yet immobilized: a space of transfer where you wait (Tawil-Souri, 2011). As described by Lévinas, non-places may thereby become sites of inertia and non-action, trapping occupants in a state of anticipation (Bosteels, 2003; Lloyd, 2003). Even when you move between them, their genericness can produce a feeling of being stuck (Costas, 2013).

As nodes of transit, non-places reduce people of flesh and blood to travellers, either passing through or waiting in them. This process of atomising produces subjects that are isolated, absent of ties and social obligations (Bulley and Johnson, 2017), and creates a space which diametrically differs from the sites of interpersonal connectivity and community that digital platforms with placemaking affordances enable (Hafermalz and Riemer, 2020; Sharma and Jaggi, 2023). The ‘thin’ personhood of the non-place relates to that of the bureaucratic organizations, which induces a similar type of reduction, as it transforms people to documentary person[s] (Hull, 2012), a particular kind of personhood based solely on the information created through documentation and ‘thin’ ¹ social interaction. Through the process of filling out information about a person on a form, a separation is created between the documentary person and other aspects of personhood. The documentary person is, in this way, formatted by the spaces set by the forms provided for writing information about them. The writer may not understand exactly what is needed, but the form with its set boxes – what Riles (2006) calls ‘self-contextualized entities’ – provides answers in terms of the allotted length of possible inscriptions.

Research context: social services and the case management system

This paper is based on a study of the social services in a Swedish municipality, focusing on their digital administrative system, the Case Management System, and the social workers’ experience when using it. We re-examine this administrative system as a digital space, a space which in this case formed a substantial and significant part of the social workers’ workspace. This study focuses on one specific area of social work, i.e. social assistance benefits. At the social assistance benefits office, clients in need of financial assistance may apply for benefits. The task of the social worker is then to investigate whether the client has the right to such benefits, and what sum they are entitled to. At the office, these tasks are categorized as ‘the exercise of public authority’, guided by its democratic ideals of transparency and equality. In addition, there is the task that the social workers consider ‘actual’ social work: working with the client so that they find another sustainable means of income (such as employment) and no longer need social assistance benefits.

These two core tasks, the exercise of public authority and social work, require that the social worker enters and uses the Case Management System – the digital part of their office. Decisions can only come into effect if they are made in the digital system. Transfers to other units, such as the job centre, must also be made through the system. Therefore, in order to gain assistance in any form from the social services, the client must be entered into the digital office’s records. This cannot be done by the clients themselves, as only social workers are authorized to use the system. Since the intention is that clients move from their initial state of need of assistance to self-sufficiency, the digital office is supposed to be a place of transit for the clients, moving from financial dependence to independence. Despite the best intentions, this transition often takes years, and some clients end up remaining reliant on social assistance benefits until they legally retire.

In Sweden, social work is the legal responsibility of the municipalities. It is governed by Swedish law under the Social Services Act, which is a so-called framework law, that sets out broad principles and guidelines on a particular subject. These types of laws serve as a foundational framework upon which more specific, detailed rules and regulations can be built. In the case of social assistance benefits, these are regulations put forward by the National Board of Health and Welfare, and the municipalities’ own rules and guidelines. Both the framework law and the specific rules and regulations are built into the digital system, making sure that social workers and clients are complying with them. There is still room for social workers’ professional discretionary power, to rely on their experience, and know-how of clients, but the Case Management System, built for the purpose of fairness and predictability, limits it (see also Husted and Plesner, 2017).

Methods

The method of this study was ethnographic: doing participant observation, document studies and formal and informal interviews in a social service office in a Swedish municipality. Ethnographic methods, allowing for the incorporation of visual, material and sensory dimensions, are especially suited for studying atmosphere and place (Cartel et al., 2022; Dacin et al., 2024; Gottschalk and Salvaggio, 2015; Kuismin, 2022; Miele and Gherardi, 2025; Pink, 2009). The empirical work was carried out by the authors over a period of two years. ² During this period, we conducted 80 participant observations, each lasting a full working day or part of a working day (then only attending meetings). During these observations, we took note of what happened at the office, with complete access to all meetings taking place, and the day-to-day work at the office (breaks, conversations, administrative tasks, etc). In addition, 20 individual interviews were conducted with managers and social workers at the office. All in all, the field notes and the transcriptions of the interviews add up to 1697 single spaced A4 pages. To further inform us on the organizational context, documents used in the office (for example, the process map that guided the social workers in their work with the clients, routines, mapping tools, etc) were collected.

Our participant observations would involve attending meetings, sorting client files in personal offices, and tidying the break room, ensuring that over time, we were seen as a natural part of the office environment. The focus of the study was thus on the office and the social workers, not on client-social worker interaction. No clients were observed. To protect their anonymity, all studied employees have been given pseudonyms. Interviews were conducted and field notes were written in Swedish, and then translated for the purposes of this paper.

In taking field notes, our attention was placed on what was going on in the office, the practices and mood of the workspace. The voices of the social workers were captured as part of the field notes, when encountered during meetings, discussions and small talk, but their experiences were also explored more extensively during the interviews (Clifford, 1990). In the meetings, we would aim to transcribe what was said. The faithfulness of the transcriptions was ensured through the comparison of notes from the two researchers, in meetings that both attended. As a large part of the social workers’ working day was spent in the case management system, fieldnotes included social workers working in the system, as we were able to shadow (Czarniawska, 2008) them, as well as discussions of the case management system in meetings or lunch breaks.

The interviews were semi-structured, and respondents were asked about their working day, their working environment, what aspects of their work they found trying or rewarding, and their work processes. The case management system often became a natural focus point of the interview, as it formed an integral part of their workday. Two of the interviews with social workers were guided tours through the digital office, where we went through passage-points and different rooms in the system, while the interviewee explained, a method mirroring walking interviews in non-digital spaces (Anderson, 2004). To further understand the digital office, we also interviewed key IT personnel in the municipality who had been central in designing and developing the system. They were able to show us a mock-up version of the digital office that they used for training, which we could photograph and use for reference in our analysis. Altogether, the fieldwork made it possible to have our own participatory, embodied, sensory, affective experience of the digital office (Pink, 2009), which paired with the experiences of the social workers as expressed in interviews and during our observations, allows for an investigation of the placeness of the studied space (Gherardi, 2019).

Following this, we conducted a thematic analysis of the field notes, interview transcripts and documentation. We used the analytical method of theorizing (Swedberg, 2014) to bring forward a theoretical understanding. One part of this process was the identification of the case management system as a built environment, an organizational space with its own affordances and ways of working, and this paper is a result of that analytical thinking. As Swedberg (2014) suggests, we made use of analytical observations, then formulated concepts and built these concepts into an analytical framework for understanding and explaining what kind of workspace the digital office is. We were alerted to the aesthetic and spatial elements of the digital office, the experience of the digital office, the affordances and the client work taking place in the digital office, and coded the material in these categories. The coding was done by both researchers independently, to ensure robustness. The coded categories were then re-read and analysed in an iterative process, which resulted in the identification of three analytical frames to capture the working environment provided by the studied space: fixtures, experiences and client-work practices.

Findings: the digital office and its inhabitants

In the following, we present our findings as we enter into the built environment of the digital office, meet its people and explain the impression it makes on those who spend time in it (including us).

The fixtures of the digital office

Like any building, this office solidifies the organization that dwells in it, and the activities of its employees. The digital office has specific characteristics, which restrict the practices possible for its occupants, so that they serve the purpose of the place. Its architectural elements – passages, rooms and entrances – restrict movements. It can be entered through specific access points, but is otherwise sealed off from the physical world. When social workers enter the system, there are numerous digital doors to pass through, each requiring passwords in order to enter. The main reason for this is that one of the key demands put on the digital office when it was constructed was that it should be secure. The client information gathered and stored in the digital office is sensitive, and so it is important that it can be trusted to never end up in the wrong hands or disappear. Social work is an exercise of public authority and to this purpose, the entrance of the system is heavily guarded, as Emma, ³ a social worker told us – ‘Yeah, there are a hundred log-ins, everywhere’.

The digital office is in effect located behind two digital walls: the first wall guards the municipality, the second the digital office. In its entirety, it is located on the municipality servers. In order to enter the digital part of the office, therefore, one needs to have the passwords necessary to make the gates open. The elaborate procedure of log-ins necessary to enter the system also serves as a reminder of the contractual relationship between the social worker and the digital office.

There are also other restrictions put in place to minimize errors, so that certain boxes have to be ticked or filled out, and choices made from roll-down menus, before it is possible to proceed to the next part of the process – making a formal decision, for example. Thus, the gate at the entrance of the system is not the only door – the system is littered with passages and doors that each require a specific action from the worker in order to open and allow entrance to the next part of the building, as Berit, a IT administrator explains: ‘If you’ve ticked all the boxes, then you are able to proceed, but if you haven’t, you get an indication that “No, you’re not done with this part” or that there is already a decision on this matter pending, finish that decision before you can make a new one’. In order to proceed with the client as they want, social workers need to do it in a way which is congruent with the logic and structure of the space. As Gabriel, a social worker, complained: ‘It’s not possible to move forward as you like, even if you know that a certain step is unnecessary’.

Many doors will not be possible to open at all, and so only a small part of the digital office, containing his or her assigned clients, will be accessible to any one social worker. Making any type of change in the digital office is very difficult for the workers, as it is not possible to customize it, neither for individual workers, nor for one office: all alterations have to be ordered by the IT department and will come into effect for the entire municipality, changing the space for everyone. For any change to be made, all 13 social service offices in the municipality, and the IT department, have to agree on it. Understandably, this made such changes rare and long in coming. As a consequence of this lack of possibility for social workers to personalize their digital office, it kept its generic nature rather than being shaped by its occupants. For an office to accomplish a change was such a rare feat that it was seen as a cause for an exceptional celebration:

The whole department at the social assistance benefit office are gathered in the lunch room for the release party of the incorporation of a module developed at the office into the case management system. When everyone is gathered, the Head of Unit makes a speech: ‘Do you understand how big this is? It makes me so happy! I went into [the case management system], and when you search for it, the whole document is there! No imports or nothing, everything was right there! For real, and there are instructions of how to fill them in and everything. Christ, how long did it take – one year, two? So, it is possible to make changes, but it takes a long time. This is a milestone in our digital development!’ She turns to the project group: ‘Lisa, you have worked so hard for this, you and Anna. Well done!’ Lisa continues: ‘We should be really proud that our model has become part of [the case management system], because the whole municipality has to approve it and commit to work with it in order for that to happen. So this is huge!’ [excerpt from field notes]

The ordering principle of the architecture of the digital office is the client case file. In effect, each client has a room, where everything recorded about that client can be found – decisions, notes, plans for change, documents and so on. In order to decide or add an annotation for that client – be it a request for an appointment at the job centre, the payment of benefits for a particular month, or a note that the client behaved aggressively in a meeting – you have to enter that client’s room. When storing information in the digital office, there are also limitations as to what can be entered, since the system is based on pre-labelled boxes that can be filled with text. Some boxes, the IT administrators explained, are constructed so that they can grow infinitely, affording the possibility to write as much as you like, others are set, allowing only for a certain number of characters. Only the IT department can erase notations, following a special application for removal procedure for that note, which rarely is granted.

When the door to the digital room of a client is closed, the system automatically restores its order, placing all items chronologically depending on the date they were entered into the system. This was a cause for some frustration for workers, who would have liked to be able to impose their own order on the items, but this possibility is not afforded by the system.

Thus, all rooms in the digital office are clean and in perfect and identical order. Furthermore, it is not possible to move or do anything in the digital space without leaving traces, as the system records who enters a room, leaves a note or makes a decision. Hence, there is no way of using the digital office incognito – it will always record your presence. As a result of it being impossible to throw things away, and of every action being recorded, the rooms for long-time clients will over time become unworkably cluttered, with years of notes and decisions in chronological order piling up. The client’s room thus becomes an archive which contains everything, but through sheer volume is inaccessible for practical use. ‘There are so many records’, Emma, a social worker, commented as she was walking us through the digital office.

To summarize, the digital office is not a space that its occupants are able to adapt to their liking. Instead, it serves to restrict their movements so that only the intended purpose and practices of the room, to perform social work in concordance with procedural guidelines, is possible.

Experiencing the digital office

These prescribed movements of the digital office are not always self-explanatory. In order to work in the digital office, you have to know your way around, what rooms can be accessed, how to unlock the doors, and what different rooms offer: ‘You have to move between so many different screens’. Nate, a social worker, commented. If there is no-one to show you the way you are likely to get lost or get stuck, as Carin, an IT administrator, explained: ‘There are so many things you need to click, there’s so much you need to know about, recognize, in order to know that if I do this, then I have to do that afterwards’. Thus, when new social workers are hired, part of their introduction is being shown around the digital part of the office, similarly to being shown around the physical office. As the right way to do things in the system is also the only way do to them, and an error would cause you to get stuck or make the wrong decision for a client (with potentially catastrophic personal consequences for them), it has a tendency to instil workers with a sense of uncertainty. One social worker, Ted, who was working with introducing new employees explained that the easiest way to learn how to move around in the digital office is to let them try while sitting beside them. ‘Younger employees’, he said, ‘usually don’t have that much trouble to learn, because they are used to different systems, but they complain that there are many steps needed and many different screens that need to be opened’.

The experienced cumbersomeness of the digital office is also caused by its tendency to stall or freeze. When the digital office freezes, workers have to exit and re-enter it in order to be able to do things in it. Upon re-entrance, their previous work will likely have been lost, and so has to be done all over again. While physical offices will not freeze, there are occasions when workers in effect are evicted from the building or at least their room – for example, if the fire alarm is set off. The difference is of course that the fire alarm is not usually set off every day, or every half hour, while the digital office may well freeze with such frequency on occasion. When the system stalls, similarly to when a door jams in the physical office, actions that can only take place in that next room cannot be performed. One of the interviewed social workers, Maria, explained:

You just have to put up with it somehow – a lot of the time, the system doesn’t work as it should, it stalls, you click on a button and then the next screen doesn’t open up as it should. That really irritates me! *laughs* It really bothers me when the system stalls. . . Sometimes you’re thrown out. Then you have to log in again. And then it goes on like that. If there are problems with the system you might get thrown out again after five minutes, and then it could go on like that for a whole day. Eventually it makes you go crazy.

The aesthetics of this particular digital office are not perceived as attractive by the social workers. As we enter the digital office in the company of Emma, a social worker, we are met by a functional design, which harks back to 1998 when the system was built, much in the same way as an office building built in the 1970s, and never refurbished since, would still display the aesthetics of that time. This is a grey and blue world of square boxes and buttons, which was built only to be functional. As Carin, an IT administrators put it: ‘I don’t think anybody would. . . If you see it, no-one would go ‘Gosh, that really looks nice!’. Instead, the aesthetics mirror the bureaucratic ideals of the organization that created it, where the functionality is primarily focused on ensuring that all social workers use the space in the same way and follow the same decision-making process as befits a bureaucracy, rather than on the aesthetic experience of the workers.

As we continue moving around in the digital office with Emma, the sensory experience of the digital office emerges. There are certain aspects of the sensory self that are removed upon entering the digital space. The tactile experience is mediated by the keyboard, mouse and screen, although the use and understanding of space is similar. Since the space can only be entered using these mediators, the sensory experiences are limited to what these mediators can convey. Touch is reduced and the bodily experience of the digital office is limited to the sensations of fingers and hands, the clicking, scrolling and typing when moving between portals and passages. Sight becomes the principal tool for moving around when the use of hearing and touch cannot guide you. Smell is non-existent and so is also the taste of, for example, coffee or tea often associated with the office. In this sense, it is a different, more barren world, lacking the sensory sensations of the physical office. The digital office is silent, apart from the occasional warning sound when pushing the wrong button or trying to enter through a passage without finishing all the required steps of the previous room. The only audio are signals of warning when you make mistake – there is no talk, sounds of the coffee-maker turned on, or other noises that form the physical office’s soundscape. The sensory experience of the digital office is mainly built around spatial awareness, a sense of direction and dimensionality that is based on a mediated ability to use sight combined with mediated touch and occasional sounds.

Taken together, the digital office provides a specific sensory and aesthetic experience, characterized primarily by lack – of personalisation, of beauty, of sensations. This sensory deprived space is also a secluded world – in the digital office the social worker is always alone. It is possible, to some extent, to leave messages in the digital office for other workers to find and read later, but there are no affordances for direct interaction, as the digital office does not allow for two social workers to be in the same room at the same time. Although several thousand workers might be in the digital office at the same time, they will never encounter one another.

Client-work practices in the digital office

The tasks of the social worker, as mentioned above, are twofold: the exercise of public authority and social work. Both tasks are guided by templates as part of the digital office. Anna, a social worker, shows us what the interaction with the client in the system when assessing their right to social assistance benefits looks like. It is through this practice of moving through the digital office, filling in boxes and following the path to a decision, that Anna is exercising public authority, and the power of determining whether the client has the right to social assistance:

Anna takes us to the entry screen, where the social workers need to fill in the client’s personal data such as address (if applicable), personal identity number and so forth. She explains that the digital office has barriers to make sure that a client is only registered with one social service office and social worker at a time, and that they have applied to the correct social service office (determined by residence, usually), to make sure there is only one version of each documentary person. Then you need to choose the type of case from a list. Continuing from this screen, there are more boxes that need to be filled out, depending on who is applying, if there are dependants and/or a spouse or partner, and so on.

When moving to the screen where information gathered from the investigation of the client should be entered, basic information about the client is automatically added, but each additional piece of information requires clicking the right button on the screen, which then opens a new screen, with new information requirements. Unless all necessary information has been entered and the client fulfils the requirements of the spaces provided for them, the possibility to proceed to the screen where a decision can be made is locked. Items such as living conditions, family, former applications and household income need to be checked and filled out in the designated spaces and boxes in the system. When everything has been correctly filled out, she is able to go through a passage point which takes her to the decision space.

Once the decision space has been reached, Anna again needs to fill in the reasons why the client is not able to support her/himself and what kind of household it is. She also needs to fill in the legal grounds for the application before making the decision. Anna explains that the following month, if the client has not found other means of income, the process will be repeated, as the client files a new application, and she has to go through the entire procedure she took us through again. [description based on field notes]

Bureaucratic case management systems produce a particular kind of personhood that is based only on the information created through documentation: a documentary person. The fixtures of the digital office ensure that the client is transformed into such a documentary person, and that only as such, they are able to function in the space. As Patrick, a social worker, explains, ‘You get a lot of information about the client when dealing with their applications, when you see what they have difficulties filling in or remembering to add to their application, and through their bank statements. From this you can form a perception of the client’. But, he says, ‘[he] still needs to meet the client in person to get the full sense of who they are’. Patrick’s comment points to the ‘thin personhood’ of the documentary person in the system: in spite of the system being designed to encompass all the needed information to reach a decision, he feels the need to complement it with interaction with the real person, in order to reach a correct decision.

The digital office is a textual environment based on signs and self-textualized entities. The social workers spend most of their workday in this secluded world, where social interactions are restricted to encounters with their clients reduced to documentary persons. As a social worker explained, although social work is supposed to move clients along, the system is in effect a waiting room: ‘change as a constant condition, and the wait hall as our everyday life. That’s how it is, we live in a wait hall’. While waiting for movement towards self-sufficiency, the digital office becomes a place of transit and waiting for these documentary persons (and correspondingly, the actual client stays on social benefits). Although the social worker may occasionally encounter the actual client in meetings and phone calls, their typical and everyday interaction with their clients would be in the form of their documentary counterpart in the digital system.

Discussion: fixed, barren, reduced

As we have seen, the bureaucratic ideals of the organization are manifested in the design and purpose of its digital office. There are substantial implications not only for how social work is done, but also for the digital office as a working environment, and for the possibilities of placemaking practices in it. In the following, we will discuss how the technologically mediated power and politics of the state create a site where the trajectories of workers, clients, state and technology come together to create a spatio-temporal event: the bureaucratic digital office (Beyes and Holt, 2020; Massey, 2005; Sergot and Saives, 2016). We argue that this space has three defining characteristics: it is fixed, barren and reduced, which has implications for its placeness.

Fixed space

This digital office is marked by stability and restrictions rather than openness and fluidity. In this respect, the bureaucratic digital space differs from many other digital spaces, such as the transactional platforms of the gig economy (Newlands, 2021), or social platforms used for community building (Burke et al., 2023; Sharma and Jaggi, 2023) or collaboration (Schiemer et al., 2023). This space has a different purpose – the exercise of public authority. It is the politics and powers of this authority that are inscribed into the structure (Winner, 1986), steering meaning and imagination, and fixating the workings in accordance (Gieryn, 2002; Husted and Plesner, 2017). The result is a working environment that circumscribes work practices in concordance with the bureaucratic ideals that shaped the space.

These bureaucratic ideals – equality before the law, impartiality, protection of integrity and transparency – permeate the design and structure of the space. In order to provide equality and impartiality, the digital office is designed to provide a fixed and limited set of affordances, thereby ensuring that all clients go through the same process, regardless of the individual preferences of the worker assigned to their case. The will to protect integrity leads to demands for security, manifested in the multiple and well-guarded digital gates that have to be opened before the client rooms can be entered. In order to attain transparency, movements are tracked and all notations stored, with no possibility for workers to hide or erase what they have done in the digital office. In this way, the digital office provides affordances for control and surveillance of public servant work that the physical office does not. Similarly to transactional, capitalist platforms (de Vaujany et al., 2021; Newlands, 2021), administrative digital systems in public offices technologically mediate the crux of their organizational processes and thereby allow for organizations to relegate management tasks to algorithms. These digital spaces reduce worker autonomy to willing compliance with, in this case, bureaucratic norms of efficiency and predictability. In contrast to the algorithmic surveillance of transactional, capitalist platforms, the digital space for public authority studied here lacks the managerial affordances of fine-meshed monitoring of the efficiency or actions of individual workers which is at the core of transactional platforms, as this information is not captured by the system in a way that can be analysed. The surveillance afforded by the administrative system is not of the worker, but of the client and the work done with them.

This bureaucratic space also becomes imbued with the morality of the state, as social workers, clients, the state and the administrative system are thrown together, materially engage with each other, and through the formed relations stabilize the workspace (Massey, 2005; Sergot and Saives, 2016). As a result, the digital space appears as more fixed, immutable, and silent than the physical office, and imbues workers with a sense of uncertainty whether their actions in this space are correct. This challenges assumptions that digital spaces provide more affordances for change and renewal than physical (Dacin et al., 2024), and echoes studies that show that constrictive qualities are not a consequence of digital or physical form, but rather of the properties of a specific space (Husted and Plesner, 2017).

These relations between actors and institutions become inscribed in the architecture of the digital office, and the workers’ acquired familiarity with the system eventually makes them ‘know without knowing’, in effect becoming the technological somnambulists Winner (1986) describes. Social workers adapt themselves to the requirements of the technology, and the scripts inscribed in it. The daily routine of social work is adapted to incorporate the requirements of the digital office, and this domestication means that social work takes the form prescribed by the digital space it takes place in, and that all routines must be adapted to the demands of its technology (Berker, 2011). It is a mostly one-sided adaptation as the immobility of the space for the workers means that they cannot without great effort adapt the space to their needs. Because of domestication, the exercise of power by the state integrated in the digital office largely becomes unnoticeable to the workers, as the practices prescribed by the building become the only possible way to behave in it.

In being subordinated to this digital space, workers are infused with a bureaucratic ethos as a result of the habits induced by the organizational power of files (Beverungen et al., 2019; Vismann, 2008). A consequence of the resulting rigidness of the space is that it has little allowance for the collective engagement in placemaking practices, neither physical transformation nor social interaction (Cartel et al., 2022; Purvanova and Mitchell, 2024), which could transform it into a place. In contrast to the sociable, homely offices described in Purvanova and Mitchell’s (2024) study, this workspace resists being infused with place, and remains a generic, impersonal non-place.

Barren landscapes

Turning now to ‘spatial poetics’ (Beyes and Holt, 2020), what is the spirit of this space? The digital office, in its barrenness, offers a stark contrast to many other digital landscapes, such as the environments designed for remote work or as immersive simulations of reality (Dincelli and Yayla, 2022; Risi and Pronzato, 2021). The digital non-place is a hyper orderly space, with a specific aesthetic: barren, no smells, limited colours (grey and blue). It reminds us of the stereotype of the bureaucratic physical office, but taken to the extreme, and defined by absence (Bosteels, 2003). It becomes a measured space, based on a grid and composed of uniform segments, its digital nature allowing for more uniformity than the physical world would (Beyes and Holt, 2020; Li et al., 2010). While the physical office over time has acquired adornments and embellishments – such as photos, plants, the smell of coffee or the sound of laughter from the break room – the digital office remains aesthetically very much the same as when it was first constructed.

A defining characteristic of a non-place is lack, resulting in a blank and barren experience. In the case of a digital non-place, this property becomes even more pronounced, as a result of access being possible only through the medium of the computer, which limits the sensory experience to eyes, ears and fingers. Furthermore, the digital office offers no playground for personalization, neither for the community as a whole nor for the individual. Rather, its uniform segments ensure that the ‘singular fabricated average’ (Gregory, 2011) is preserved. Again, it remains the quintessential non-place.

Like other non-places, this digital office is a space ostensibly built for transit, part of the infrastructure of the welfare state. Clients are entered into the digital space by the social workers, and are expected to transfer through it to employment or other public agencies. However, similarly to the Qalandia checkpoints studied by Tawil-Souri (2011), what was built for transit in practice becomes a ‘wait hall’. The temporal aspect of space (de Vaujany et al., 2021; Massey, 2005) here becomes significant – when non-places become sites of inertia where people are kept waiting, the experience of them evolves. Over time, the social workers assign meaning to the digital office and the documentary persons that populate it (cf. Lloyd, 2003; Ratner, 2020; Tawil-Souri, 2011). It is in this light that we can understand the celebration of an addition to the digital office that we observed in our field study, as it highlights the significance and meaning this non-place has for the workers. However, significance and meaning does not equal belonging and place, if the meaning created is one of placeless impersonality and genericness (Costas, 2013).

Reduced people

In contrast to many other digital spaces, this digital office represents an extreme example of the sense of isolation inherent in non-places. It is a space which allows only for a sensorially reduced version of a person to enter, which contributes to the sense of disassociation and separation from the rest of the world which characterizes non-places (Buchanan, 1999; Costas, 2013; Devlieger and Strickfaden, 2012). The lack of affordances for social interaction in the digital office makes it a particular non-place in that it is even more homogenized and strictly mediated by signs, text and images than the airports, train stations and highways described by Augé (1995). While some digital spaces provide parallel universes created for community, connectivity and placemaking, this administrative digital space appears as a non-place. As such, it creates solitude and similitude rather than belonging and sociability.

In spite of the homogenized environment of this digital space, its alienation and isolation, it eventually becomes familiar and meaningful to workers. This meaningfulness is not because the non-place lacks blankness, as suggested by Merriman (2004) in his critique of Augé, but because dwelling in it over time provides experiences and identity which gives it meaning (Trigg, 2017). Arguably, what signifies a non-place and makes it fixed and barren to its dwellers is less its lack of meaning than the lack of ability for its dwellers to transform it or to socialize, which would enable them to transform it to a place and gain a sense of belonging.

It is not only the workers who are unable to encounter or interact with each other in this space, but also the clients they work with, who are only present in the form of documentary persons. A large part of the work performed in the digital office is a process of atomizing (Bulley and Johnson, 2017), constructing these documentary persons from flesh and blood clients, and learning how to do this in concordance with bureaucratic ideals. It is a reduced kind of personhood, present only in the bureaucracy, for the purpose of determining social benefits. Compared to virtual doppelgängers (Bailenson and Segovia, 2010) in spaces built for connection and community, the documentary person presents a much more reduced version of personhood.

In practice, workers will encounter these documentary versions of their clients more often than their physical counterparts, which in turn might have consequences for how the clients are perceived. Social interaction, restricted to these sensory deprived documentary persons, becomes ‘thin’ and separated from other aspects of the client’s personhood (Hull, 2012). The mediation between people and their surroundings is done by prescriptive text, signs and images, not by social interaction, and so the social workers and their clients gather in solitude.

Conclusions

The inconspicuously mundane and ‘everyday’ often becomes the invisible, making us blind to how it influences organizational life. The commonplace, bureaucratic case management system where social workers spend large parts of their working day and which in effect governs their work studied here is a good example of this (Beverungen et al., 2019; Orlikowski and Scott, 2023; Vandeventer et al., 2024). The administrative system constitutes a digital space, created for the purpose of the exertion of public authority. As this study shows, it creates an experience of restriction and fixedness, which illustrates that digital spaces should not be assumed to inherently provide a sense of openness, fluidity and innovation (cf. Husted and Plesner, 2017).

The place-sensitive approach of this study, paying attention to atmospheric, aesthetic and affective aspects of an administrative digital systems, reveals that such a digital space can be understood as a non-place. If Augé’s concept of non-place has been challenged as regards to the physical world (Merriman, 2004), we thus argue for its usefulness in understanding digital spaces. Perhaps these digital spaces are truer representatives of Augé’s notion of non-place than airports and highways. As studies have shown (Tawil-Souri, 2011; Trigg, 2017), non-places may over time accumulate identity and history for those that spend time there, providing opportunities for heterogenization and personalization: a placeness that over time can turn them into anthropological places in Augé’s terms. As a consequence of its immutability and sense of separation from the rest of the world, an administrative digital space, however, can remain a non-place – regardless of how much time is spent in it. Dwelling-time and the assignment of meaning, we would argue, are not enough to transform a non-place into a place.

Our study allows us to explore the reason for this: it is because the space is constructed for the purpose of exercising public authority in accordance with the bureaucratic logic of equal treatment and transparency, and as such, is denoted by generic formulaicity rather than affordances for placemaking (Berti et al., 2018; Purvanova and Mitchell, 2024). Built for a purpose and imbued with the ethos of public authority, it is designed to disallow reimagination. The experienced lack of heterogeneity and possibilities of transformation and personalisation, social connection and adaptability render workers unable to create a sense of place and belonging. Social interaction is restricted to documentary persons (Hull, 2012), built around a bureaucratic logic of classification and reduction of personhood into categories and numbers. This lack of sociability contributes to a felt absence of belonging, as it prevents the collective engagement whereby places can organically evolve (Cartel et al., 2022; Purvanova and Mitchell, 2024). Studying non-places thus allows us to further our understanding of organizational placemaking, and what is required to make an organizational place possible, specifically the key role of belonging (and what it requires).

The organizational consequences of the absence of placemaking possibilities also become visible. What we are left with in the digital non-place is a fixed digital architecture with an atmosphere of barrenness that is impossible to personalize, occupied by reduced people. The rigidness of such a space means that technological somnambulism and domestication become the designated way of working in it. Since public service workers, such as the social workers in this study, often spend most of their working day in this digital non-place, which accentuates the bureaucratic nature of work in public authority and neglects the full complexity of personhood, we put forward that such administrative systems may nudge workers towards the social production of indifference (Herzfeld, 1992). ‘Symbols of hope may always become instruments of despair’, Herzfeld (1992: 6) writes on bureaucracy, and in this study, we show how digital spaces, implemented in the hope of efficiency and equality, may through their spatial and aesthetic qualities inadvertently function as instruments of indifference and dehumanization. The non-place, with its lack of affordances for placemaking practices, risks contributing to the creation of a bureaucratic somnambulist. A worker who moves automatically through not only the digital space, but also their work, producing a bureaucratic execution of public authority which is blind to what it is doing. Whether, and to what extent, this effect of the digital non-place is offset by in-person interactions in the physical workplace would be the topic of further research.