Digital Bureaucracy vs. Professional Discretion: The Evolvement of a Digital Logic in Norwegian Municipal Welfare Services for Children and Young People

This article examines digitalization in municipal welfare services for children and young people from the perspectives of municipal directors, frontline managers, and frontline workers. This study proposes a nuanced understanding of emerging digital work and workflows across multiple institutional logics. The authors argue that digitalization transforms professional discretion and institutional logics within Norwegian municipal welfare services for children and young people. Using a collective case study of two municipalities, interviews were conducted with 35 participants, including several levels of managers and frontline workers. The findings demonstrate the impact of digitalization on discretion, professional practice and institutional logics. Digital tools streamline record-keeping and enhance oversight, but they risk oversimplifying complex cases, increasing administrative burdens and constraining frontline workers’ discretion. The findings highlight a critical tension between managerial expectations of standardization and frontline workers’ need for nuanced judgment. The three mechanisms, replacement, blending and segregation, explain how an emergent institutional order “digital logic” interacts with established professional, bureaucratic and community logics. Finally, this study deepens the understanding of the involvement of digital logic when discretion is applied during work processes.