flavio

 

 

The emergence of digital platforms is contributing to thorough transformations in every sector of the economy, as well as other societal domains such as – to name but a few – education, energy, the media and personal services. The rise of platforms initially involved mostly the tourism and transport sectors. More recently, this process has begun to spread into other sectors and welfare is among them. Yet, the impact of platform on the provision of welfare services is relatively unexplored. This paper addressed the problem looking at whether welfare platforms present specific elements in interface design, work organization and user involvement compared to platforms operating in other sectors. Our hypothesis is that the platform is not neutral with respect to goods/service they intermediate. In particular, we aim to show that that the provision of welfare services has specific features that require the construction of organizational models at least in part ad hoc for the sector (Flanagan 2019; Ticona, Mateescu 2018; Dupret 2017).

 

 

The presentation aims to investigate if “welfare platforms” a new and specific type of platform. The spread of web-based platforms is transforming the traditional model of distribution and use of welfare services, both in public and in private sector (occupational welfare / at-firm-level welfare), all this means working on coordinates of access to alternative services compared to traditional ones (Colarusso, Visentin, Lodigiani & Pesenti, 2021) It is necessary, therefore, to further study digital welfare analyse: - the transformation of services to digital; - the use of digital interfaces to facilitate service provider-user relationships - the impacts on the use of digitized services (Coles-Kemp et al., 2020).

 

 

 

The paper aims to address the changes that are happening in welfare systems, from the perspective
of the literature on the topic. Through a textual analysis of abstracts of scholarly articles on the
topic, the goal is to analyze and categorize (through text analysis) how the topic of “digital welfare”
is treated. The abstracts of the articles were selected through Google Scholar, as a reference period
was taken 2020-2021.