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The paper aims to add knowledge on the status of the welfare technology field. Politicians in mature economies expect welfare technologies – especially digital technologies – to contribute to bridging the gap between an increasing number of elderly and a shrinking work force. Theoretically, the paper deals with welfare technologies in a digital infrastructure perspective.

A multilevel and comparative study was conducted to understand the interplay of high-level policies and implementation projects and highlight key issues through comparative analysis of different national approaches. Japan and Norway were the chosen countries because they are both in the forefront in the use of welfare technologies.

Findings reveal similarities between the two countries, which are echoed in many other countries: although government expectations are high, the field of welfare technology is still in its infancy and only rather simple solutions (such as safety alarms) are widely used. Key differences in innovation strategies for welfare technology in the two countries are highlighted, where Japan seem to be aiming for a vertical integration through large corporations’ solutions, whereas Norway aims for a more open innovation arena through standardization.

From a practical point of view, the two countries have something to learn from each other, but, in particular, both countries are recommended – together with other similar countries – a more platform-oriented approach. Theoretically, it is shown that a successful implementation of welfare technologies should adopt a digital infrastructure approach and exploit the generative mechanisms of this approach.

Technologies of measurement and self-monitoring of health data have become part of a metric everyday life in Denmark. As part of a change in Nordic Welfare society, Danish citizens are increasingly experiencing a digitisation of welfare services. This chapter explores the rationales behind the eGovernment strategy of Digital Welfare 2016–2020 in regard to health and discusses how this strategy encourages self-measurement and self-improvement through discourses of improvement at both state and citizen levels. By illustrating how performativity is embedded in current conceptions of health, this chapter emphasises how strategies of digitisation lean on a bio-citizenship where individuals with poor health capacities become dependent, not on a supporting welfare system, but paradoxically on their own self-management skills in order to receive health services. Based on the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD) analysis, this chapter scrutinises central documents on the strategy of digital welfare. Our exploration provides a critical insight into the current digitisation of health care by illustrating how new virtues of citizenship are demanded in the digital era in relation to digital health, and furthermore represents a current challenge for Danish welfare in the schism between technology as empowering and a technocratic form of governance.

Ramsey‐Boiteaux pricing to services offering limited deferability subject to reliability constraints with a specific application to postal services has been investigated by the first of the above authors in. The general results derived in his paper involve welfare‐optimal pricing for a monopolist faced with stochastic demands which impact both demand and cost. These stochastic demands are modeled by probability distributions with fixed parameters. In this paper we extend this approach to the case where the model parameters are not known with certainty. This uncertainty is dealt with by representing the distribution parameters as fuzzy sets in which the membership of a particular value in the fuzzy set represents the degree of belief associated with this parameter value. This approach requires the solution of a system of nonlinear equations for each possible combination of parameter values, and the result is a fuzzy solution vector. This solution vector is then defuzzified to obtain a specific solution to the problem. As in, we illustrate our approach with an application of welfare‐optimal pricing in the context of postal services. Section I reviews relevant literature and discusses the nature of postal services. The problem statement together with general results are presented in Section II, and applied to a postal service problem in Section III. These results are further illustrated via numerical example in section IV. Conclusions are presented in Section V.

Public-private innovation (PPI) is often claimed to contribute to societal welfare, to bring positive effects to the public sector and to open new markets to private firms. Engaging in public-private relationships for innovation is, however, also recognised as challenging and problematic. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the managerial and strategic challenges faced by private firms when engaging in public-private relationships for innovation.

This qualitative study presents ten firms’ engagement in public-private relationships. Half of them are experienced in innovation in public-private relationship, the other half are engaging in public-private relationships for the first time. Cross-case analysis brings insight into how these different types of firms strategize for handling relationships with public partners.

Contrary to non-experienced firms, experienced firms deliberately build a long-term strategy for engaging in PPI in expectation of outcome from more than a single project. They not only engage in building an understanding of the public using setting, but also seek to bridge with the public developing and producing setting to a greater extent than less experienced firms. The experienced firms utilise relationships with actors in the wider public network as a device and an asset for overcoming challenges and for reaping benefits from their engagement.

The study outlines the characteristics of strategizing among the most experienced firms and their special ability to embrace the complexity of the public sector network while working simultaneously on developing innovation for specific public counterparts.

This chapter focuses on an innovative effort in the Italian context in which a complex web of partnerships was created as the foundation of an alternative model of health care. More specifically, the start-up of a health-care organization – Welfare Italia Servizi (WIS) – is analyzed and discussed with respect to its sustainability.

The process of organizing a sustainable health care is analyzed through the theoretical lenses of multi-stakeholders management and partnership perspectives.

The possibility of developing dense knowledge about the WIS’s case has stemmed from our collaboration with the organization board with regard to a research process intended to monitor the organizational start-up and its sustainability challenges.

The case provides new insights into the dynamic nature of building multi-stakeholder partnership in a complex environment; the developmental life-cycle challenge of multi-stakeholder partnership, and the meaning of sustainability. The case suggests a tapestry of issues such as how sustainability may be “paradoxical,” dynamic, led by different and sometimes conflicting logics, and changeable over time like a growing tree in an intricate forest.

The case can stimulate learning and discussions both within the community of practitioners and the community of academics with respect to which promising conditions could help address the challenge of starting-up a sustainable organization in the health-care field.

The purpose of this paper was to assess the economic impact of investment in different animal welfare–enhancing flooring solutions in Swedish dairy farming.

The authors developed a bio-economic model and used stochastic partial budgeting approach to simulate the economic consequences of enhancing solid and slatted concrete floors with soft rubber covering.

The findings highlight that keeping herds on solid and slatted concrete floor surfaces with soft rubber coverings is a profitable solution, compared with keeping herds on solid and slatted concrete floors without a soft covering. The profit per cow when kept on a solid concrete floor with soft rubber covering increased by 13%–16% depending on the breed.

Promoting farm investments such as improvement in flooring solution, which have both economic and animal welfare incentives, is a potential way of promoting sustainable dairy production. Farmers may make investments in improved floors, resulting in enhanced animal welfare and economic outcomes necessary for sustaining dairy production.

This literature review indicated that the economic impact of investment in specific types of floor improvement solutions, investment costs and financial outcomes have received little attention. This study provides insights needed for a more informed decision-making process when selecting optimal flooring solutions for new and renovated barns that improve both animal welfare and ease the burden on farmers and public financial support.

The Indonesian healthcare system has been reformed in tune with economic and political changes. The reform was pursued by encouraging growing reliance on individual contributions. Consolidating citizens' support has become increasingly important for the long-term sustainability of the programme. This study explores individual views and experiences in negotiating solutions for health security under the situation where pre-industrial modes of informal network remain intact, while private healthcare continues to be in demand by population segments targeted by the system.

Individual attitudes toward the current healthcare system were explored using online interviews (N = 75) in the cities of Jakarta and Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The qualitative exploratory approach resorted to personal views on the importance of the state, family and market in health risk management. Perceptions on who should be responsible for healthcare, and the political legitimacy of the welfare-state approach to healthcare were also observed. A thematic coding strategy was used for the data analysis.

Those interviewed value and support the formal system (either state and market), yet place reliance on informal support (family and relatives). Intertwining views of religious teaching, filial piety, moral obligation were the most common reasons for individuals to support such dual welfare systems. The findings reflect the common attitudes toward welfare in the context of changing realities of individualised society at the early stage.

This article represents a valuable contribution at the empirical level because it provides an assessment of individuals' attitudes toward Indonesia's recent health arrangements. Such individuals are those belonging to the targeted population of the contributory system. This study also offers an alternative framework for understanding the nature of the healthcare regime generated from the perspectives of individuals.

The paper aims to investigate how accounting techniques, when embedded within data-driven public-sector management systems, mask and intensify the neoliberal ideological commitments of powerful state and corporate actors. The authors explore the role of accounting in the operationalisation of “instrumentarian power” (Zuboff, 2019) – a new form of power that mobilises ubiquitous digital instrumentation to ensure that algorithmic architectures can tune, herd and modify behaviour.

The authors employ a qualitative archival analysis of publicly available data related to the automation of welfare-policing systems to explore the role of accounting in advancing instrumentarian power.

In exploring the automation of Australia's welfare debt recovery system (Robodebt), this paper examines a new algorithmic accountability that has emerged at the interface of government, technology and accounting. The authors show that accounting supports both the rise of instrumentarian power and the intensification of neoliberal ideals when buried within algorithms. In focusing on Robodebt, the authors show how the algorithmic reconfiguration of accountability within the welfare system intensified the inequalities that welfare recipients experienced. Furthermore, the authors show that, despite its apparent failure, it worked to modify welfare recipients' behaviour to align with the neoliberal ideals of “self-management” and “individual responsibility”.

This paper addresses Agostino, Saliterer and Steccolini's (2021) call to investigate the relationship between accounting, digital innovations and the lived experience of vulnerable people. To anchor this, the authors show how algorithms work to mask the accounting assumptions that underpin them and assert that this, in turn, recasts accountability relationships. When accounting is embedded in algorithms, the ideological potency of calculations can be obscured, and when applied within technologies that affect vulnerable people, they can intensify already substantial inequalities.