About the thesis
This thesis studies an office that conducts audits (or evaluations) of the Norwegian state. It does so by way of ethnographic fieldwork in that office, the Office of the Auditor General, Norway. I have followed several audit teams as they go about their work: Writing together in meetings, interviewing sources to gather audit evidence, taking part in network meetings with auditees, discussing a questionnaire between themselves, picking up a knowledge model from their auditees and see it if they can apply it to their object of audit, negotiating with their auditees exactly what the boundaries of the audit is, polishing their findings in meetings with the communications department, and presenting their audit report to Parliament and to the public, to name a few kinds of work that can be summarised as audit practice.
During the course of the study, the digital entered the picture in two different ways: By following an audit of the digitalisation efforts of Norwegian police, I get a view of how digitalisation is made into an evaluative object by use of an array of audit techniques. I also observed how in the audit, a timeline became an object of negotiation as the auditees wanted to influence where in time the evaluative gaze of the auditors was to land. I also follow the work in the in-house data science lab of the audit office, and this gives me a view of the data politics of the office and how it is connected to a national and geopolitical politics of how to secure the personal data of the nation’s citizens.
The key findings are that evaluative objects are written forth and come into being in audit reports, and that much of this work happens within the text as an in-text conversation; that a knowledge model known as ‘digital transformation’ works as a placeholder that holds political space for action; that a negotiation about where the evaluators should look when auditing amounts to a politics of the timeline; and that the digital nation-work of Norway in part happens in the data practices of the audit office, practices that are deeply integrated with the national conversation about what is an acceptable place to safekeep the data of Norwegian citizens.
Thesis supervisors
Hilde Reinertsen, Former researcher, TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo and Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo.
Tone Walford, Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, University College London.
Commentator
Rachel Douglas-Jones, Associate Professor, Business IT, IT University of Copenhagen.
About Gro Stueland Skorpen
Gro Stueland Skorpen is a Doctoral Research Fellow at TIK. This seminar marks the final evaluation prior to submission of her dissertation.
Her PhD project is an ethnographic exploration of analogue and digital evaluation practice within the Norwegian evaluation community. The project draws on theoretical and methodological resources from science and technology studies, document analysis and ethnography.
The project is part of the research project «Evaluation Optics of the Nation State: The Past, Present and Future of Public Documentation» (EVALUNATION), running from 2021 to 2024 and funded by the Research Council of Norway, with Hilde Reinertsen as primary investigator.
How to participate
The seminar is open to everyone. Please register by sending an email to Lara Kristiansen lbkristi@uio.no by 30 October 2024.
The manuscript is available upon request. Please send the request to Gro Stueland Skorpen g.s.skorpen@tik.uio.no.
Welcome!