Modernizing the State in France: Digitalization, Simplification, and Usability Concerns in Mundane Administrative Work

Marie Alauzen is a PhD candidate in STS at the Centre de sociologie de l’innovation in Mines ParisTech. Her work focuses on the relationships between the making of the State and the construction of technologies. Her dissertation analyses ethnographically the devices that connect some French modernization programs, the making of administrative objects and users, and the production of various forms of governmentality. In this work, coordinated automation and digitalization appear as a trial for the State. In November 2017, she joined the QUAD project (Quantification, Administrative Capacity and Democracy) as a Junior Research Fellow and started an investigation on French administrative management in hospitals. She also contributes to Scriptopolis, a blog dedicated to an ordinary Anthropology of Writing.