Organisational Change and AI in Public Administration
Keywords:
Artificial Intelligence; Public Administration; Dynamic Capabilities; Public Value.Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly transforming public administration by reshaping decision-making structures, administrative routines, and service delivery systems. While AI promises efficiency, responsiveness, and innovation, it simultaneously generates structural tensions related to accountability, fairness, and democratic legitimacy. This study aims to conceptualise AI adoption in public administration as a capability-driven organisational transformation and to explain how dynamic capabilities mediate the reconfiguration of public value. The research employs a qualitative multiple case study approach based exclusively on secondary data drawn from peer-reviewed publications, policy documents, and documented cases of AI implementation in government. An integrated analytical framework combining public value management, dynamic capabilities theory, and the Technology–Organisation–Environment perspective guides the analysis. Organisational transformation is examined across adoption, implementation, and diffusion stages to identify how sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring processes shape public value outcomes. Systematic thematic coding is used to trace how absorptive capacity and digital maturity condition transformation depth and governance trajectories. The findings indicate that AI adoption restructures organisational authority and routines through capability reconfiguration, and that public value tensions emerge as structural consequences of capability imbalances rather than external ethical dilemmas. The study concludes that sustainable AI governance depends on the institutionalisation of dynamic capabilities that balance service efficiency with democratic and social values. This research contributes to the field by integrating organisational transformation theory with public value management, offering a processual and capability-based explanation of AI-driven change in public administration.
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