‘Meaningless work’: How the datafication of health reconfigures knowledge about work and erodes professional judgement

Abstract

How do digital tools for datafication interact with contemporary ideas about what counts as knowledge about work? Based on a study of the thoroughly digitalized and data-intensive Danish healthcare sector, we argue that as digital datafication creates new forms of inspection and control, it also reconfigures perceptions of work throughout the healthcare system, and thereby potentially erodes goal orientation and the room for professional judgement. Although policy papers justify the accumulation of data with the aim of making decisions more evidence-based and rational, we now hear clinical staff and data analysts complaining about a ‘yoke of Kafkaesque idiocy’ and ‘meaningless’ data practices. When is something seen as ‘meaningless work’? Through which dynamics does such work emerge? And what are the implications of such work?