Abstract
This title aims at presenting the latest advancements and findings from research on service automation in public sector organizations. The authors of the chapters use a mix of social- and technical approaches to increase our understanding of public service automation. The chapters present and discuss the conceptualization of automation of service in public organizations, empirical examples of automation applications in public organizations, and implementation challenges that can arise from public sector service automation. The overall ambition is to aid and inspire researchers and practitioners to advance their knowledge on service automation in public organizations, as well as to provide a foundation for policy development and future research. In this introductory chapter, we give a brief overview of the included chapters. We then synthesize a set of gaps in the current understanding of service automation in public organizations and provide suggestions for future research. We conclude that there is a continued need to observe and learn from empirical examples and a want for more critical studies on the social- and societal consequences of increased service automation in public organizations.