Binding the Future: Participatory Algorithmic Configuration and the Narrowing of Discretion

This paper examines how algorithmic control operates when workers participate in configuring the systems that organize their own work. Drawing on a longitudinal case study in a public-sector agency, it shows how teams translated shared priorities into numerical rules within a digital interface. Through this process, collective deliberations were rendered durable and came to structure the sequencing of future work. I develop the concept of technical self-control to capture this form of governance: control that emerges through participatory rule inscription rather than managerial imposition. Even simple and transparent algorithms, configured by workers themselves, narrowed discretion by stabilizing what counted as the appropriate next task. Over time, these locally configured arrangements also enabled managerial recentralization by making work orderings visible and comparable. By focusing on interface-mediated rule setting in a conventional organization, the study shifts attention from opacity to the formalizing effects of participation in algorithmic management.