This study examines the phenomenon of “letting young people take on technological roles” within government digital governance practices, illustrating a locally embedded governance narrative in digital platform management. The selection of management staff for digital platforms critically influences governance outcomes. The observed phenomenon of “letting young people take on technological roles” highlights the significance of seniority in the selection of digital governance staff. Employing a “causal-process observation” case study method, this study investigates the recruitment and selection of management staff for the Gas Safety Supervision System within the Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau of District A. The findings reveal that senior officials largely avoid engaging in technical tasks, often citing their age, potential accountability risks, or other minor justifications. Consequently, young officials are entrusted with significant responsibilities across various stages of the system, including system training, data entry, online supervision, and the summary reporting phases. The theoretical logic behind “letting young people take on technological roles” can be explored by integrating constructivist theory with the concept of seniority, drawing on the traceability, immaterial nature, and professional characteristics of digital platforms. This study identifies three intertwined logics: The first is the allocation of responsibility whereby senior officials delegate management of digital platforms to younger staff to transfer the accountability risks that are inherent in the traceability of digital systems. The second is task classification, wherein digital platform management is categorized as a secondary duty for young officials, while senior officials regard themselves as better-suited for core tasks with more visibility and higher rewards. The third is construction of competency, perceiving digital platform management to be a task aligned with the skills of young officials. These three logics, allocation of responsibility, task classification, and construction of competency are complementary rather than mutually exclusive. The allocation of responsibility serves as the primary incentive for assigning technical tasks to younger officials, task classification provides the foundational legitimacy, and the perceived competency differentials constitute the conditions for the phenomenon of “letting young people take on technological roles”. Future research should focus on the complexity of relations among actors, technology, and organizational factors in digital governance, with a focus on the phenomenon of the concomitant “actor-network” in digital governance in order to prevent digital governance from becoming exclusively relegated only to young officials and to balance a reduction of young officials' workload with the fostering of their administrative capabilities.
包涵川 et al. (Mon,) studied this question.