Changes in the Austrian Penal System: Impact Controlling Along Formal and Informal Structures

In the light of developments of New Public Management and increasing social digitalization, legal and organizational innovations are evolving in the public sector. As a result, impact controlling was introduced in the Austrian penal system in 2018, along with a new software tool for data collection and consolidation called “Cockpit”. The structural changes that process along the implementation and realization of this tool question the traditional model of a bureaucracy in Weber's sense. My dissertation project therefore focuses on the question of how formal and informal structures and actions change along the introduction and development of the impact controlling tool “Cockpit”. Initial empirical findings from qualitative interviews are discussed from the perspective of the concept of social person-oriented service organizations. They provide insights into organizational patterns of interpretation and processes that go hand in hand with the new digitalized and automated forms of data collection and processing. Subsequently, the further empirical steps of the applied interpretative artefact analysis are discussed and the associated hypotheses and possible findings for organizational change are presented. Whether and to what extent digitalization phenomena contribute to the (de)stabilization of bureaucratic organizations, such as those in the penal system, is one of the possible focal points of the lecture.