Doing Ethics Work in Digitalised Welfare: How Discretion and Judgement Are Reconfigured in Everyday Practice

ABSTRACT This article investigates how social workers enact ethical judgement in digitalised welfare organisations. Drawing on the concept of ethics work, it examines how engagements with digital systems involve ongoing processes of identifying, interpreting and responding to ethically salient aspects of practice. The study is based on an organisational ethnography in Swedish social services, combining 45 interviews with social workers and approximately 200 h of shadowing in child and family services and economic assistance units. The analysis focuses on situations where digital systems generate frictions, ambiguities or risks for clients and explores how practitioners discern what is at stake and adjust, supplement or bypass digital routines. The findings show that discretionary responses to digital friction constitute important sites of ethics work. Digitalization introduces new conditions under which ethics work unfolds: ethical concerns are increasingly triggered by system logics embedded in digital systems and practitioners enact responsibility by interpreting system outputs and mitigating unintended consequences for clients. Rather than replacing traditional forms of ethical judgement, digital systems reconfigure when and how ethics work is enacted in everyday welfare practice.