By: Avanti Chajed
In education research there is a concept of the hidden curriculum. While the curriculum contains the things that we intend to teach, the hidden curriculum are the things we end up teaching unintentionally. An example is how making children walk in lines, quietly through the hallway emphasizes obedience, discipline and order that are meant really for factory workers.
Public services are the same, they have a hidden curriculum that comes out in subtle and overt ways. Take digitalization which has been done to streamline services to be more cost-effective and serve more customers. But the message such goals send is that services are merely transactional. Their only goal is to get the job done as efficiently as possible.
This is why WP2 has been looking at the values that should guide public services. The big one has been trust of course. But another one that has emerged and become very important to us is care. We could write a whole blog post on each of these but here I’ll go through both of them together. We talk about work that has been done by our work package as a whole (Avanti, Johanna and Milja) and that we have had collaborators on from various other disciplines.
Trust
We created a framework that presented the many things that potentially contribute to the feeling of trust for migrants in public service encounters. The framework itself looks like this:
It’s fairly complicated because trust is complicated. Many things go into creating trust or breaking it. Our ongoing work is to figure out the implications of this framework in real life and initial findings already hint that navigating the various institutions and their procedures (or administrative burden) and digital literacy are barriers to trust. Another barrier is the expectations providers and institutions have of citizens being self-reliant and independent when using services (or qualities that make an ideal digital citizen).
In data gathered by Milja, service providers balance a goal to teach customers to be self-reliant with building relationships and communicating with customers. They do this by giving customers time, allowing them to have autonomy but also letting them know they can come back if they still need help. These create openings that build trust, even while they try to make the customers independent.
We’re excited to look more at these strategies because our more theoretical work has indicated that technology by itself can be a way of making services less personal and in the process, marginalize migrants and reduce trust. How these providers use technology within encounters and how they foster trust is important so other services can potentially build similar practices into their structure.
Care
Our work on care has taken a much broader view of public services, arguing that services should be thought of as care infrastructures. This means simply that services need to put care at the center of their work.
In our ethnographic and interview data we found examples of this from toys being in the service point for children accompanying their parents to service providers providing specific, individualized attention to customers. Sometimes this attention went above and beyond what we would expect, with one advisor calling a mom at 7 am to help her prep for an interview, or a service advisor at the service point spending 6 hours with a customer.
These providers seemed aware of how services play an important role in helping immigrants belong to Finland. While they emphasize teaching particular digital skills, they still are careful to give individual attention and time to each customer. Ultimately, care is about helping migrants feel seen and heard. This doesn’t need to be in huge ways (though those are nice too!). Even small practices like acknowledging their cultural backgrounds can go a long way.
While our work has so far kept these two concepts separate, we think there is a link between these that we hope to explore. From the framework, care is already connected to trust since it is one of the emotions that are part of care. Our theoretical work on care flips the script so that care is potentially the larger value in which trust is a part. With the people moving around constantly in today’s world, having caring institutions seems like a good way to welcome them and help them find their own place in Finnish society.
Framework created by Uttishta Varanasi
Photos by Milja Parvianen