The social relations of data governance: Who benefits most from the Australian Data Strategy?

Abstract

Data is relied on more than ever; it is increasingly imagined as a strategic asset, a public good, and an apparatus of power. While data is often advocated as a tool of illumination and empowerment for data subjects and citizens, new digital divides are emerging based on the ownership, access, control over data which favour its use among powerful and resourced actors. In a world where data is considered power and akin to oil, data governors effectively wield the power to decide who can benefit in this data regime (and who cannot). Despite these distinct sociological implications, Liu (2022) finds that dominant approaches to data governance are organisation-centric and internally-focused, which comes at the expense of overlooking the external social factors which structure data and governance arrangements. In this thesis, I outline how a sociological approach can be used to deepen the understanding of data governance arrangements, using the case of the Australian Government’s vision for governing their publicly-held non-sensitive data. A sociologically-informed understanding calls attention to the actors and goals which are considered (or excluded) when governing, as these dimensions of governance influence the benefit and value realised from data. I used a Named Entity Recognition and Classification model to identify which stakeholder groups were prevalent and valued in Australian Government’s data strategy documents. I found that the Australian Government’s vision reinforced a regime of data stewardship which benefited more economically powerful and relevant communities as opposed to communities who would arguably benefit more from being included. By departing from dominant organisational approaches, this thesis offers an alternative and more considered approach to how data ought to be governed to account for those included (and excluded) from data regimes. Show more