Plat-Firming Welfare: Examining Digital Transformation in Local Care Services

The chapter analyses the platformization of welfare services, thus going beyond business-oriented merchant perspectives that dominate the field of Platform Studies. The authors analyse the peculiarities of organisational design when welfare services adopt new platform architecture, examining how algorithms and artificial intelligence upend previously institutionalised forms of social welfare and the ways platforms alter how individuals interact with the state. The platformization of welfare services leads to solutions that overcome the traditional bureaucracy of local welfare systems and, at the same time, redefines the role of social workers not as simple public administrators of welfare, but according to a logic of process and collaboration never experienced before.