Executive Summary This paper aims to offer some analytical and strategic implications regarding the digital transformation of society and its impact on young people’s lives. The purpose of this paper is to explore the intersection between young people’s lives and the digital transformation of society, incorporating the purpose of enhancing social inclusion. In order to do so, 16 different policies, mainly from the Council of Europe and the European Union were selected and analysed. From the analysis, conducted in a way that the underlying or explicitly interpreted problems in specific policies are made visible, four main themes were derived. The themes focus on understanding the digitalisation through perspectives on technology, explaining the understanding of isolated or integrated attitudes, and bringing forward the broad palette of instruments that are offered through national policies to support readiness for the ongoing digitalisation. Moreover, the example of digital youth work is used to understand transformation of organisations. The themes generated two main implications, also considered as outcomes or syntheses.
The first implication is understood from leadership and governance perspectives. It implies that the understandings of, and support to, the relation between various levels of decision making and participation, described as chains of command, can be one starting point in supporting digital transformation. More specifically, it can be a mapping of and a more profound understanding of chains of command in national, regional and local contexts. This can be helpful in order to know to whom the ‘right type of questions’ should be addressed, or possibly to discover ‘bottle-necks’ that hamper or block digital transformation. To analyse chains of command may also reveal how different levels of decision-making cooperate and the dialogues between them. This may be useful for instance in order to form or align to various national or international strategies or to understand if and how young people can access services or decision-making processes. All with the ambition to develop transformation readiness, resulting in a situation where young people can access the ‘right information at the right time’ and being able to choose when to use technologies or not.
The second implication focus on context-based negotiations of the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). More specifically, and to highlight the importance to contextualise ambitions for digital transformation, it means that a deeper understanding of e.g. ‘small decisions’ in everyday work that ‘really matters’ need more attention. The assumption is based on the fact that the use of ICTs in e.g. various organisations today is a result of step-by-step developments throughout history, due to factors like different needs, knowledge, political, economic and technological structures, trends etc. This can for example raise questions that, if social inclusion is the purpose, engage in discussing how ICTs are used in relation to specific purposes and in what sense they may support the view of social inclusion. Hence, can the use of ICTs alter viewpoints of social inclusion, or can viewpoints of social inclusion alter viewpoints on how ICTs should be used?
The final conclusion of the paper suggests an integrated attitude between the governance and leadership perspective of transformation readiness and the perspective of context-based negotiations that may result in the ‘small decisions’ of everyday work, including the situation where individuals can choose when to use technologies or not, and the purposes of which they are used for. The result of the integration between perspectives can be seen as a constructive meaning or even an alignment between e.g. users and decision makers; policy and practice; or international and local viewpoints, in this paper with the purpose of enhancing social inclusion.