Aligning Law and Action: a conceptual and computational inquiry

Everyone experiences, at a certain point in life, that what the law states, how public services implement the law and how people actually behave are three different matters which are only loosely aligned. Evidently, they do have some ground in common. How can we operationally define this ground? In a context of increasing expectations concerning the quality and agility of public services, this thesis approaches this question focusing specifically on public administrations. These organizations provide a good test bench for the investigation: the semi-formalization of regulations is an advantage for modeling purposes. Their mandates are defined by the sources of law, but they have partial control over the regulatory system as well. Their implementations count as implementations of law, as they translate what is defined at policy level into operational terms. As participants in the social system, they accumulate informal knowledge of failures, such as cases of non-compliance, and of misalignment of current services with user requirements. Thus, internal and external views of an administrative organization are scattered along three domains: representations of law, representations of implementations of law, and representations of behaviour. Misalignments between these three realms identify existing frictions. And it is in these frictions that social participants find reasons for behavioural and normative change. By integrating explanatory and requirement models (e.g. scenarios, business processes, use cases) with normative concepts (e.g. fundamental legal concepts), this research targets a computational applicative niche in current technologies for organizational design, specifically addressing and leveraging the knowledge of legal experts and administrators