Digitalising what Matters: Digital Transformation and Shifting Orders of Worth in Public Transport

Abstract Digital transformation does more than change how public organisations work. It transforms what they consider worth pursuing in the first place. This article examines how digitalization reconfigures the values, expertise, and justificatory principles that underpin public services. Drawing on four years of qualitative fieldwork in the Swedish public transport sector, we show that a Public Transport Authority’s shift from procuring off-the-shelf digital solutions to developing in-house digital capabilities involved the recruitment of new professional groups, the adoption of new work methods, and the display of new forms of expertise. As a result, creativity, experimentation, user-centredness, and innovation became principles for evaluating and justifying organisational practices and decisions alongside established public-value principles of efficiency, equality, and collective responsibility. These changes extended beyond organisational boundaries, as new practices and justificatory principles began to circulate and were invoked by various actors across the broader field of public transport. Our conceptual contribution lies in articulating this process as world transgression: a field-level process through which principles of worth associated with one justificatory world enter and gain legitimacy within worlds historically organised around others. Taken together, these results contribute to ongoing debates on digitalization and field-level transformations by showing that the adoption of new technologies and organisational structures comes with the emergence of new modes of thought, such as design thinking, new forms of expertise and, not least, new ways of justifying organisational practices and decisions.