P10 Artificial Intelligence and Public Administration: what is the future of public management and public policies?

Corresponding Chair 

Lorenzo Pratici

University of Parma, Department of Economics and Management, Parma, Italy

lorenzo.pratici@unipr.it

Gianluca Gabrielli

University of Parma, Department of Economics and Management, Parma, Italy

gianluca.gabrielli@unipr.it

Review Group

Lorenzo Pratici, Research fellow. University of Parma, Italy

Gianluca Gabrielli, Research fellow. University of Parma, Italy

Valentina Masci, Ph.D. Student. University of Parma, Italy

Description

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently at the heart of the academic debate. The use of AI in management has been widely studied in the last decade (e.g. Kolbjørnsrud et al., 2016; Raisch and Krakowski, 2021; Ganesh and Kalpana, 2022) and issues such as effectiveness and ethical concerns have been consistently addressed.

However, whether and how AI could be used in public organizations remains to these days almost unexplored. As a matter of fact, studies (e.g. Neumann et al., 2023) highlighted how the implementation of AI in the public sector remains low, particularly if compared to the private sector (Mikalef et al., 2021).

Despite this gap, advances in AI technologies of the last few years have attracted great attention from researchers and practitioners and have opened a broad range of beneficial opportunities for AI usage in the public sector. Just as much as in the private sector, one key question to be addressed these days is: what is the future of public management and how can AI be used as a strategic tool?

The need is to explore how AI can be applied to public administration, public policy and public management to improve public organizations’ performances. However, as we all know, AI carries some intrinsic risks common to all sectors: these risks are a major part of the academic debate and shall be addressed accordingly (Wirtz and Müller, 2019; Baker-Brunnbauer, 2021).

Several types of contribution can be anticipated from this call:

• How can AI create value in the public sector (Wang et al., 2021).
• AI for more digitalized public penitentiaries (Puolakka and Van De Steen, 2021).
• AI and public health.
• Ethical issues associated with the implementation of AI systems in public organizations (Wirtz et al., 2019).
• AI and its use on public sector’s human resources (Chilunjika et al., 2022)
• Use of AI in auditing public organizations.
• Accountability in the use of AI for public administrations (Loi and Spielkamp, 2021).
• AI in decision making processes in public organizations (Trunk et al., 2020).
• AI usage by Street Level Bureaucrats (Wang et al., 2022)
• E-governments (Buffat, 2015)
• Public health challenges and AI (Baclic et al., 2020)
• How AI can help public organizations in coping with Sustainable Development Goals (Yeh et al., 2021)

The panel invites either theoretical, review and empirical papers that deal with the issue of AI in the field of public administration, public policy and public management.

Paper abstracts should include a short description of the topic, the research question(s) and method, and an indication of the research findings or expected findings.

References

• Baclic, O., Tunis, M., Young, K., Doan, C., Swerdfeger, H., & Schonfeld, J. (2020). Artificial intelligence in public health: Challenges and opportunities for public health made possible by advances in natural language processing. Canada Communicable Disease Report, 46(6), 161.
• Baker-Brunnbauer, J. (2021). Management perspective of ethics in artificial intelligence. AI and Ethics, 1(2), 173-181.
• Buffat, A. (2015). Street-level bureaucracy and e-government. Public management review, 17(1), 149-161.
• Chilunjika, A., Intauno, K., & Chilunjika, S. R. (2022). Artificial intelligence and public sector human resource management in South Africa: Opportunities, challenges and prospects. SA Journal of Human Resource Management, 20, 12.
• De Boer, H., Enders, J., & Schimank, U. (2007). On the way towards new public management? The governance of university systems in England, the Netherlands, Austria, and Germany. New forms of governance in research organizations, 137-152.
• Eltweri, A. (2021). The Artificial Intelligence Ethical Implications in Auditing Public Sector. The International EFAL-IT BLOG Information Technology Innovations in Economics, Finance, Accounting and Law, 2(1).
• Ganesh, A. D., & Kalpana, P. (2022). Future of artificial intelligence and its influence on supply chain risk management–A systematic review. Computers & Industrial Engineering, 169, 108206.
• Henman, P. (2020). Improving public services using artificial intelligence: possibilities, pitfalls, governance. Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration, 42(4), 209-221.
• Henman, P. (2020). Improving public services using artificial intelligence: possibilities, pitfalls, governance. Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration, 42(4), 209-221.
• Kolbjørnsrud, V., Amico, R., & Thomas, R. J. (2016). How artificial intelligence will redefine management. Harvard Business Review, 2(1), 3-10.
• Loi, M., & Spielkamp, M. (2021, July). Towards accountability in the use of artificial intelligence for public administrations. In Proceedings of the 2021 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (pp. 757-766).
• Maragno, G., Tangi, L., Gastaldi, L., & Benedetti, M. (2022). AI as an organizational agent to nurture: effectively introducing chatbots in public entities. Public Management Review, 1-31.
• Neumann, O., Guirguis, K., & Steiner, R. (2023). Exploring artificial intelligence adoption in public organizations: a comparative case study. Public Management Review, 1-28.
• Puolakka, P., & Van De Steene, S. (2021). Artificial Intelligence in Prisons in 2030: An exploration on the future of AI in prisons. Advancing Corrections Journal, br, 11, 128-138.
• Raisch, S., & Krakowski, S. (2021). Artificial intelligence and management: The automation–augmentation paradox. Academy of management review, 46(1), 192-210.
• Reis, J., Santo, P. E., & Melão, N. (2019). Impacts of artificial intelligence on public administration: A systematic literature review. In 2019 14th Iberian conference on information systems and technologies (CISTI) (pp. 1-7). IEEE.
• Stroińska, E. (2020). New public management as a tool for changes in public administration. Journal of Intercultural Management, 12(4), 1-28.
• Tangi, L., Janssen, M., Benedetti, M., & Noci, G. (2020). Barriers and drivers of digital transformation in public organizations: Results from a survey in the Netherlands. In Electronic Government: 19th IFIP WG 8.5 International Conference, EGOV 2020, Linköping, Sweden, August 31–September 2, 2020, Proceedings 19 (pp. 42-56). Springer International Publishing.
• Trunk, A., Birkel, H., & Hartmann, E. (2020). On the current state of combining human and artificial intelligence for strategic organizational decision making. Business Research, 13(3), 875-919.
• Wang, C., Teo, T. S., & Janssen, M. (2021). Public and private value creation using artificial intelligence: An empirical study of AI voice robot users in Chinese public sector. International Journal of Information Management, 61, 102401.
• Wang, G., Xie, S., & Li, X. (2022). Artificial intelligence, types of decisions, and street-level bureaucrats: Evidence from a survey experiment. Public Management Review, 1-23.
• Wirtz, B. W., & Müller, W. M. (2019). An integrated artificial intelligence framework for public management. Public Management Review, 21(7), 1076-1100.
• Wirtz, B. W., Weyerer, J. C., & Geyer, C. (2019). Artificial intelligence and the public sector—applications and challenges. International
• Journal of Public Administration, 42(7), 596-615.
• Yeh, S. C., Wu, A. W., Yu, H. C., Wu, H. C., Kuo, Y. P., & Chen, P. X. (2021). Public perception of artificial intelligence and its connections to the sustainable development goals. Sustainability, 13(16), 9165.