Persisting inequalities in the digitalized society: migrant women facing coercive dimensions of everyday digitalization

ABSTRACT Understanding the ubiquitous digitalization of everyday life and associated inequalities presupposes rich conceptualizations of the associated social dynamics. Accordingly, we investigate digital service domestication as a social dimension of people’s lives, building on concepts that center users’ everyday lives and agency. We adopt the perspective of people who find the use of digital services difficult and examine the hurdles they face when attempting access. Our data consists of semi-structured interviews with migrant women (N = 22) living in Finland, where most essential services are digitalized. The study highlights the societal boundedness of the participants’ agency, which we maintain is a key dynamic of inequality. We classify digital services in four categories, interactive communication services; information, media, and entertainment services; private customer services, and public health and social welfare services. The first two are voluntary digital services that did not create insurmountable barriers for the participants, but enabled them to conduct action they valued. By contrast, essential private and public services require mastering more complicated service technologies, a foreign language, and complex contents. Our results highlight how diversity-blind essential digital services produce and reinforce inequalities. Our analysis emphasizes the need for researchers to consider the coercive dimensions of digitalization.


Introduction
In contemporary western societies, almost no one can escape the ubiquitous digitalization of everyday life (Dufva & Dufva, 2019).The research on this social transformation commonly uses some variant of the domestication approach to analyze the process in which digital devices and services find a place in people's everyday lives and modify them.Research questions typically focus on how and why people choose to use digital devices or services in certain ways and for specific purposes (Haddon, 2011(Haddon, , 2017)).However, domestication studies still do not offer an in-depth understanding of what happens when digital services become an inescapable component of all people's everyday lives, regardless of whether this is their preference.When seeking to fill this gap, the research needs to heed the obvious inequalities in digitalized everyday life.
Recent statistics report that 89% of Europeans aged 16-74 years use the internet (Eurostat, 2021).Digital devices increasingly serve as platforms for the use of internet-based applications and e-services (Haddon, 2011, p. 316).Furthermore, people's individual interests and needs change over time, and such changes are occurring in the context of the constantly evolving landscape of digital services (Scheerder et al., 2019).These changes constrain domestication because when users utilize new services, they can only rely on their earlier experiences to a limited extent.A constantly changing digital service landscape has become a dimension of people's everyday lives, and this strains some users more than others.Indeed, people who cannot use digital services fluently are facing an ever-growing number of problems in their everyday lives.The rapid increase of digital services -and especially, service providers' tendency to reduce contact-based service options when digital services are launched -involves not only new opportunities, but also coercion (Buchert & Wrede, 2021;Madsen et al., 2022;Schou & Pors, 2018).Hence, regardless of people's personal willingness and capability, the rapid digitalization of both private and public services is forcing people to find ways of using these services.
Our starting point is the need to improve the understanding of the social dynamics in unequal patterns in the use of digital services.We draw from an interview data focusing on a diverse group of migrant women living in Finland and facing difficulties in using digital services (N = 22).We study how the participants manage the digital service use they face in their everyday lives, considering both the promise and the shortcomings of the domestication approach to research on digitalization.Domestication studies typically examine the process by which digital devices and services become an integral part of people's everyday lives (Haddon, 2011(Haddon, , 2017)).The idea of domestication as a bidirectional process that takes place between people and digital technologies and transforms them both makes it a promising concept for the study of digitalized everyday life.However, as everyday digitalization has become ubiquitous and thus inescapable, domestication research needs to improve its grasp of the social dynamics underpinning inequalities in digital service use without assuming a deterministically progressive process resulting from technological 'advances'.
Our study design builds on three key elements that invert the domestication approach.First, instead of focusing on one distinct digital device or service, we study digital service domestication as a social dimension of people's everyday lives.Second, rather than focusing on motivated and skillful users, we counteract potential bias by adopting the perspective of people who face hurdles when attempting to use them.Third, and most importantly, we maintain that examining everyday domestication requires a better conceptual grasp of the studied users' everyday lives and agency.
Our claim regarding the need to consider agency as socially situated in everyday life is in line with sociological approaches that question the attempts to practice objectivity by remaining external to any position in society and emphasize the need to investigate all phenomena by considering people's particular material and social positioning (Smith, 1987).Heeding sociologist Dorothy Smith's (1987) call for treating everyday life as problematic, we first examine the ways in which multiple relations, forces, and processes external to the participants -including digital technologies -organize, shape, and influence their everyday lives.Our view of the use of digital services as socially situated means acknowledging that the competences individuals possess or can acquire do not alone determine their success or failure when it comes to tackling hurdles they face.Rather, the agency of individuals is conditioned and constrained by social structures and institutional environments, which affect their subjective perceptions regarding their ability to influence their situations (Aaltonen, 2013;Evans, 2002Evans, , 2007)).
In the next section, we first discuss previous research, after which we elaborate on our approach to studying social inequalities in the domestication of digital services.We then present our empirical study of migrant women who have sought support for digital service use from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).In the analysis, we focus on the participants' everyday lives, identifying adherent patterns of digital service use.The discussion then considers both the agency available to the participants and the hurdles that constrain the successful domestication of digital services in the context of migrant women's everyday lives.We conclude by outlining our concerns about the coercive tendencies in digital services that relate to people's basic rights.

Domestication approaches to digitalization
The traditional approach to the domestication process proceeds in two main ways.Most common are studies that examine domestication by using a process structure originating from early domestication studies.This perspective assumes domestication to proceed through four predefined phases -that is, appropriation, objectification, incorporation, and conversion.This approach also considers the spatial and temporal aspects of domestication and attempts to observe how users mobilize technologies as part of their identities (Madsen & Kraemmergaard, 2015;Matassi et al., 2019;Scheerder et al., 2019).Other studies adopting more open approach consider the domestication process in relation to specific social phenomena, such as family members' relationships within a household or across countries (Khvorostianov, 2016;Lipset, 2013;McDonald, 2015).
With the use of qualitative methods, both strands in the traditional approach provide rich descriptions of the ways in which the domestication of digital technology and its associated meanings influence and are influenced by different social phenomena in the everyday lives of participants.They identify different ways in which domestication depends on the users ' interests, values, skills, resources, and circumstances (De Schutter et al., 2015;Lipset, 2013).Regarding technology, research has shown that domestication is facilitated by technical features, such as openness to interpretation and availability of alternatives with respect to function and application.Such features are more common in informal everyday settings than they are in formally organized settings (Bakardjieva, 2005).Moreover, Breit and Salomon's (2015) research on citizens' encounters with digital pension services demonstrates that the nature of the information shared through the service influences the degree of its domestication.Even people with excellent digital skills are unable to domesticate a digital service if they fail to comprehend the provided information or cannot reflect what it means in their individual situation.
Traditionally, domestication research has assumed that the endpoint of the domestication process has the following characteristics: users become familiar with the technology, the technology becomes an integral part of their daily routine, and the meanings and values assigned to the technology stabilize (Berker, 2006).However, Nimrod and Edan's (2021) research on educated urban women's use of intelligent personal assistants identified varying patterns of domestication.Those patterns, which they discussed as broad (high level of integration and experimentation), focused (adoption of one of the device's functions), and restrained (occasional use or no use at all) domestication, suggest that domestication processes and their outcomes may vary significantly.Also other recent studies have suggested that the domestication processes may also result in rejection of the technology (Airola & Rasi, 2020;Scheerder et al., 2019).
While previous domestication studies have emphasized the importance of studying digital technology domestication in the context of users' everyday lives, they have still focused on a single technology and underlined user adjustment over sensitivity to social context (Matassi et al., 2019;Nimrod & Edan, 2021;Sujon et al., 2018).The rare examples of more holistic approaches that have focused on how users employ all technologies within a household (Haddon, 2000) or investigated all internet use (McDonald, 2015;Scheerder et al., 2019).
Moreover, the studies have mainly examined users who are both willing and able to use the studied device or service.Accordingly, the research perhaps unwittingly upholds an ableist bias by omitting the experiences of people who face difficulties when using digital devices and services.Even when researchers have investigated socially disadvantaged user groups, participants have been recruited primarily from people with positive attitudes toward digital devices and services (Airola & Rasi, 2020;Khvorostianov, 2016;Lipset, 2013;Scheerder et al., 2019).
Consequently, when research focuses on people who show interest in and ability to use the studied object and excludes people lacking such qualities, the study design misses the variety of everyday circumstances that may impede and prevent domestication.To our knowledge, the only exception is the study by Madsen and Kraemmergaard (2015).They examined the users of mandatory digital public services and concluded that some citizens will always need traditional service channels because of the lack of digital access or skills or their unique situation, which cannot be anticipated and programed into a web service.

Everyday life and agency
This study centers the everyday as a situated context for agency, that is, how people experience their social and material everyday lives (Smith, 1987).Understood in this vein, everyday life is influenced, organized, regulated, and determined not only by locally ordered practices but also by wider institutional, economic, and political powers, processes, and relations, which generate various positions and experiences in people's everyday lives that lie beyond their power of control (Smith, 1987.).Nevertheless, social relations and processes are always in the making and come into being as a condition of people's own activities, confirmed in the process of coordinating their moves with those of others (Smith, 1987, p. 126).
To further elaborate on the agency of people as users of digital services, we draw from Aaltonen's (2013) adaptation of Evans's (2002Evans's ( , p. 2007) concept of bounded agency.According to Aaltonen (2013, p. 377), bounded agency refers to agency that is socially situated vis-à-vis social structures and institutional environments.This approach sees agency as influenced but not determined by past or present structural and institutional circumstances.Furthermore, Aaltonen (2013) emphasizes that boundaries to agency may also result from the ways in which individuals imagine their future opportunities and how they perceive the structures and environments shaping their everyday lives.Accordingly, Aaltonen's definition not only recognizes the situational nature of agency vis-à-vis social positioning but also accounts for the manifold intersecting ways in which agency relates to an individual's past, present, and future; social relations; and wider societal powers and structures.
In the following, we recognize the particularity of participants' lives in the past and present.We especially pay attention to their present material and social positions, as well as the ways in which their everyday lives are organized, shaped, and influenced by multiple relations, forces, and processes external to them (Smith, 1987).Accordingly, we view their agency as bounded along the lines of the concept of bounded agency (Aaltonen, 2013;Evans, 2002Evans, , 2007)).

Interviews with migrant women facing difficulties using digital services
In Finland, 83% of the adult population uses digital services (Kyytsönen et al., 2021, p. 29).However, people who face difficulties using digital services tend to remain largely invisible in surveys.Recent qualitative studies in harder-to-reach populations, such as people with migration histories, have revealed unequal access to and use of digital services.Migrants' barriers to digital public services have been identified as resulting from a lower socioeconomic position, having weak Finnish and Swedish language skills (the national languages) and being unfamiliar with the structure of the welfare services (Buchert et al., 2022;Safarov, 2021).
Our study of migrant women builds on data consisting of 22 semi-structured interviews with migrant women, who were reached through five NGOs that organize services for this target group in the capital city area. 1 In addition to diverse social activities and Finnish language classes, these NGOs arrange digital training workshops and employ advisors who support the use of both traditional and digital public services.The participants sought these services to overcome the difficulties they were facing when using digital services.The NGOs welcome migrant women without admission criteria. 2The interviews included questions about the following topics: (1) participants' life before and after their move to Finland; (2) participation in the activities of the NGOs; (3) language skills; (4) ownership of digital devices; (5) the use of digital devices, the internet, programs, and services; (6) the use of non-digital and digital public health and social welfare services; and (7) perceptions of the ways the public services would need to be developed.
In the first stage of the analysis, the first author coded the data with focus on women's ownership and use of digital devices.The data-driven coding produced observations regarding the many digital services that participants encountered in their everyday lives and we decided to focus the subsequent analysis on digital service use.Since earlier classifications of service categories (van Deursen & van Dijk, 2014) did not suit these data, we decided to construct a new, data-driven categorization.Classification of the interview excerpts dealing with service use produced four categories -namely, interactive communication services; information, media, and entertainment services; private customer services; and public health and social welfare services.The empirical section presents the detailed grounds for each classification.The final analysis of the social dynamics constraining domestication was conducted abductively, moving back and forth between the data and the concepts of domestication, everyday life, and agency.

The migrant women and their everyday lives
The analysis showed that as migrant women, the participants occupied socially and materially vulnerable positions in the society (cf.Smith, 1987).In terms of age, they were 25-66 years old.Several participants had no or limited formal education and had only worked as domestic workers or childminders or stayed at home with their children prior to moving to Finland, whereas the participants with vocational or higher education had typically held clerical jobs.All participants had migrated to Finland as adults, but their reasons for moving varied, ranging from family reasons to seeking asylum or refugee status.They had lived in Finland for 8 years on average (range, 1-29 years).All participants had family members and friends in their country of birth and often in other countries as well.The women spoke eight different first languages, of which all but one were non-European.Arabic, Persian, and Somali were spoken by several women, five other languages only by one woman each.Fewer than half the women had skills in English, and only half a dozen had more than elementary English skills.
Despite variations in education and work and migration histories, the participants experienced similar disadvantages in their everyday lives in Finland.Their lack of proficiency in the Finnish language emerged as the central difficulty influencing various aspects of their lives.The participants had only encountered the Finnish language as adults and learning it proficiently appeared to be an unattainable goal for most of them.
Even though the women had participated actively in many Finnish language courses aimed at various target groups, including asylum seekers, unemployed jobseekers with migration backgrounds, slow learners, and women staying at home with children, their language learning was slowed down by various intersecting difficulties, many of which were rooted in their lives in their countries of origin.One woman mentioned having learned the alphabet, and another stated that she had learned Finnish well enough to begin studies at an adult elementary school.Several participants mentioned having severe health problems that currently hampered studying Finnish.Nearly all the women mentioned finding it much easier to listen and speak Finnish than to read and write the language.Those of the participants who managed some interaction in Finnish spoke the language mainly in everyday encounters with familiar people, such as their neighbors and teachers, or their children's healthcare nurses, daycare personnel, and friends.
The participants were of working age, but apart from one woman, they were not working.They stayed at home with their children, attended adult elementary school or vocational education, or were registered as jobseekers with an obligation to participate in employment and Finnish language courses.Based on their positions vis-à-vis the state, the participants are likely to be entitled to some combination of various benefit types, such as student financial aid, income support, unemployment benefits, housing benefits, maternity allowance, child home care allowance, and child benefit.Several women who had severe health problems may also have been entitled to sickness allowance, disability pension, and reimbursement of medical care expenses.Moreover, the participants with poor health could benefit from the services of public health care centers and sometimes those of specialized health care.Women of fertile age need various health services for themselves, and if they are mothers, for their children.Hence, in their everyday lives, the participants depended on institutional powers beyond their control, originating in educational institutions, employment offices, the social security system, and the healthcare system (Smith, 1987).
Around half the participants had already used a mobile or smartphone in their former home country, some of them also computer and office software in their studies or at work.However, many participants had only encountered digital technologies after moving to Finland, where the use of digital devices and services was required in studies, in communication with children's schools and health services, or when applying for benefits.At the time of the interview, some participants had just started learning digital service use after being prompted by officials to do so.Two participants had received a new digital device -a smartphone or tablet -only recently with the help of a social worker.One was still waiting for an appointment with an NGO advisor to assist her in starting to use her device, which was still packed in a sealed carton.
Presently, all participants owned a smartphone, which was typically the only digital device they had access to and the skills to use.Several mentioned laptops, old desktop computers, or tablets in their household, but because of lack of skills, the presence of devices did not equate to the use of the devices.Only a few participants had access to other devices and were proficient enough to use them independently.Even though the participants had access to considerably fewer devices than families in Finland do in general (89% of families in Finland have access to a computer and 53% to a tablet; Statistics Finland, 2021), their digital service use was not primarily inhibited by lack of devices.Neither did it originate from lack of motivation or initiative, as all the participants had actively attended digital training workshops and/or had been seeking digital service use support regularly from an NGO.

The migrant women's digital service domestication: four service categories
Our data-driven classification of all services that participants mentioned in the interviews resulted in the four service categories presented below.The services in the first two categories can be characterized as being voluntary and low threshold, meaning that access is easy, the basic services are free and allow diverse usages.The portals tend to be produced by multinational companies that mainly profit from advertising.Much higher thresholds are observed with the two latter categories, which include services involving mandatory and formal transactions, either with private companies or with public entities.

Interactive communication services
In the category of interactive communication services, we included digital services that offer users the possibility to actively create and receive content via text, photos, audio, or video, with one or several people.Such services mentioned by the participants covered social media applications Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube; messaging and calling applications WhatsApp, Messenger, Imo, Viber and email; and video conferencing services Google Meet, Teams, and Zoom.
All interviewed women except one used some or several of the services classified to this category to conduct action they valued: to share personal content with family members, relatives, and friends, particularly those who live in their former home country and in other countries.Earlier research has emphasized that direct digital access to their distant social networks has a significant meaning for people with migration backgrounds (Anderson & Daniel, 2020;Khvorostianov, 2016).
Considering the women's past opportunities (Aaltonen, 2013) regarding education, language learning, and obtaining digital skills, the use of these communication-oriented services appeared user-friendly in three important ways.First, although many of the participants had needed assistance in creating an account, they were currently able to use the services independently.The services included here require only a limited number of functions for basic use and allow alternative usages (Bakardjieva, 2005), in addition to which the service logics are intuitive and built on repetition.Second, since the services are multinational and have numerous language options, the participants can operate them in their preferred language(s).Third, receiving and creating personal content for exchanges with known, emotionally close others using a common language does not require knowledge or understanding beyond the participants' control.
Some of the participants who were comfortable with using a particular communication service in familiar contexts reported that they struggled with using it with less familiar people, in Finnish, and in more formal or specific contexts.This applied to the use of social media discussion groups for parents of children in the same class or daycare group, online activities arranged by the NGOs, and Finnish language courses, vocational education and labor market training that were conducted exclusively in an online format during the Covid-19 pandemic.In other words, the skills required for using one interactive communication service in one context were not necessarily transferrable to other contexts.Despite such difficulties, the threshold for participating could remain low because participants did not necessarily need to provide much content to follow what others were posting.This equals the difference between 'active' and 'passive' use of social media recognized also for example by Anderson and Daniel (2020).In addition, the women had received support for service use from the other group members and the organizers.

Information, media, and entertainment services
Digital services classified within this category are among the most popular worldwide including search engines, machine translation tools, media, and entertainment services.The use of these services is voluntary and based on users' individual interests.Although the participants were comfortable with this category of services, they did not appear to be 'internet savvy'.They primarily used mainstream services with easy-to-use service technology, which simply requires a user to open an internet browser, search for the right page, and 'click' the required options.In addition, the use of these services was only easy for the participants when they were using free content.The services often offer more extensive versions to paying customers.The hurdles that obligatory registration, digital authentication, and financial transactions caused for the participants are discussed in greater detail in connection with the next category.
The participants often mentioned using the Google search engine and Google Translate.Being a migrant played an important role in participants' use of these resources.From a domestication perspective, in terms of searching, most did not appear to face hurdles when using Google for international information searches made in their first language or some other language in which they were proficient.Some participants also used Google locally, typically to search for structured information, such as opening hours or an address of a service, which does not necessarily require proficient Finnish language skills.At the same time, because of limited skills in the Finnish language, the participants tended to depend on Google Translate in their daily lives to translate written and spoken words.
News sites and podcasts were commonly mentioned as easy-access resources.Here, migration history played an important role in the participants' choice of content.Regardless of how long the participants had lived in Finland, they commonly used their most proficient language to search for information, follow the news, listen to music, and watch videos and movies from their former home country and other parts of the world.
The only purely Finnish digital services mentioned by some women were Finnish news sites, the journey planner of the Helsinki Region Transport, and the e-services of the public library.The journey planner and public library services include English as a language option.Only the women with more advanced Finnish or English language skills could make a fuller use of these national or local resources, but most of the women were still able to use them to some extent because the key content is structured, and the services are easy to access.

Private customer services
Another category includes all private-sector commercial services that participants described using in a customer role.Service technologies of these commercial services are more complex than those of the service categories discussed above in that accessing them requires more competencies because of obligatory registration, digital authentication 3 , and requirement to complete financial transactions (Breit & Salomon, 2015).The primary types of private customer services that participants mentioned using were online banking and shopping.
Locating a commercial application or an internet site is rather simple, but the use of the service tends to be more complicated, because it requires registration and use of both digital identification and authentication.Moreover, the service portals are layered, meaning that the user must be able to identify relevant links to different pages or parts of the website and navigate back and forth across the service to complete the actions required for the services.Online banking involves formal, often complex, content that requires the ability to distinguish relevant from irrelevant information (Breit & Salomon, 2015).
Accordingly, although all the participants needed regular access to online banking, only a minority of them managed to use these services independently.Those who were independent in this respect were women who had held clerical jobs, used digital technologies, and already been proficient in English to some extent before moving to Finland.Some of these women had also acquired a certain level of working skills in Finnish.
Most participants required assistance with online banking.They needed somebody to act as a proxy either by supporting them in using the service or accessing it on their behalf.A few participants explicitly stated that they could not use online banking services independently.Others only reported that they had online banking credentials, but their educational background and limited skills in using digital technology and the Finnish language suggest that they are unlikely to be able to use these services independently.None of the participants mentioned using banks transnationally as observed, for example, in Wolff's (2019) study on migrants.
Regarding online shopping services, only two women described using them.Others often mentioned finding paying for a purchase online too demanding.Since online banking credentials are used for digital authentication in numerous services, participants frequently faced the hurdle of not being able to use their credentials independently.This also applied to digital public services, as signing into government portals requires using banking credentials in Finland.The problematic nature of that practice has been recently discussed by Kemppainen et al. (2023).

Public health and social welfare services
This last category includes governmental digital health and social welfare services related to the realization of citizens' legislation-based social rights.Unlike the services included in the categories discussed above, in practice, public services are policy instruments through which structures and processes of the state enter citizens' everyday lives (Smith, 1987).Since the digitalization of the public sector has involved reductions in contact-based service options, people are forced to find ways of accessing services digitally.The participants identified two services as central for their everyday life -namely, the portal of the Social Insurance Institution of Finland (most social benefits) and the national MyKanta portal, which covers all health records and electronic prescriptions.
Since the participants were outside the labor market, and several of them were mothers with young children, they depended on social security for at least part of the household income and often for housing as well.They also needed health care for themselves and their children.Women who have migrated tend to have limited local networks, which may increase their dependence on the support that public services can provide (cf.Smith, 1987).Nevertheless, when attempting to access such support digitally, the participants faced hurdles that specifically related to their social position as structurally disadvantaged migrants.
We identified three types of hurdles including the demanding nature of the service technology, the need to use the Finnish language, and the institutional logics of the services.First, like online banking, public services require effective digital skills.Access always requires digital authentication, simultaneous use of other programs, and proficiency in navigating vertically and in depth.To access social benefits, for example, the claimants are expected to use online banking credentials, attach documents, import information from other resources, and so on.The second hurdle arises from the digital service infrastructure, which expects users to be proficient in either Finnish or Swedish.When available, English versions tend to be incomplete and unhelpful for users with only elementary English skills.
The third hurdle appeared insurmountable for our participants.The content in digital public services is both linguistically complex and presupposes Finland-specific knowledge.Structurally disadvantaged migrants are faced with the often hopeless challenge of adopting the general law-based information regarding the complex services and adapting it into their own situations (Breit & Salomon, 2015;Thomas & Parayil, 2008).Having little or no formal education, lacking proper access to language courses in Finnish and being outside of the labor market constitute intersecting hurdles for the participants, making them dependent on others to access necessary services.The sources of support ranged from the women's husbands, children, and friends to neighbors and NGO advisors.

Structural hurdles to domestication
Our study focused on migrant women who found using digital services difficult.We examined domestication, or lack thereof, in the participants' everyday use of digital services.Based on our analysis, we argue that among structurally disadvantaged users, certain workings of digital services hinder domestication.
We highlighted the structural circumstances hindering domestication of digital services among our participants by examining the social dynamics that organize their current everyday lives and their position in society (Smith, 1987).We showed that while their social characteristics might vary with respect to age, native language, migration background, educational level, work history, and health, they all faced similar intersecting disadvantages in their current everyday lives in Finland.All faced a minimum of two of the following obstacles: elementary Finnish language skills, low educational level, unemployment, poverty, poor health, and social problems.All the women also faced challenges caused by having their social networks -family members and friendssplit between two or more countries.
The research participants do not face their situation idly.At the time of the interviews, all of them engaged with diverse activities aimed at improving their future lives in Finland.Some of the women were stay-at-home mothers, some were attending a primary or vocational school, and others were registered as unemployed jobseekers.However, the participants' position outside of the labor market meant that they depended on various social security programs for their income.Such programs are administered digitally.Additionally, participants' everyday lives were shaped by the institutional logics of various other formal institutions, such as educational institutions, employment offices, and the health services.These institutional powers and processes influenced and even determined the course of their everyday lives (Smith, 1987).Currently, the ubiquitously digital Finnish state expects service users to access services digitally, requiring proficient use from all users.This bureaucratic blindness to user diversity is structural, resulting in an exclusionary dynamic that is mechanistic and therefore difficult to overcome.
Our charting of the participants' digital service use showed that their agency varied remarkably, both within and particularly between the four service categories.Accordingly, we identified agency and its boundedness as key social dynamics explaining the extent of domestication of digital services.The services of the first two categories, which allow alternatives with respect to the use of service technology and language (Bakardjieva, 2005), created no hurdles for the participants, but enabled valued actions, when used voluntarily according to their interests.However, the use of the same services became more complicated in less voluntary situations that involved the need to use the Finnish language and mastering the more complex content.Regarding private customer services, and particularly public health and social welfare services, the situation was completely different.These services utilize complex digital processes and complicated language.The fact that the content is mainly available only in Finnish and Swedish further hampers participants from using the private customer services and public services independently.Indeed, only one participant -a native English speaker -reported proficient use of all service categories.Our analysis of unequal domestication highlights the rigid inequalities structuring digital service use.In the case of the digital state, structural bureaucratic blindness is built into the digital infrastructure in ways that appear almost insurmountable for the studied disadvantaged population of migrant women.
Our charting of participants' digital service use highlights the need for researchers to observe that not only are users diverse but so are digital services in terms of technological complexity, language, and content.It is evident that the more closed services work in ways that are impenetrable and inflexible for some users.To make vital services accessible to vulnerable users, the service infrastructure would need to account for the constraints on user's resources, skills, knowledge, and understanding.In the case of our participants, their sets of skills and resources were a poor fit not only with the digital state but also with private customer services.In both service categories, technical characteristics, content, and the complicated language of the service infrastructure worked in tandem to create severe hurdles for disadvantaged users.In the case of the digital state, such hurdles endanger not only the users' basic rights but also the basic rights of family members who depend on these users.
Our charting of participants' limited domestication demonstrates that from the point of view of Finnish society, the participants' overall use of digital services can be characterized as restrained domestication at best and as non-existent at worst.Participants could use services that did not require Finland-specific skills and resources or proficiency in conducting financial transactions online.Yet, within this pattern, the participants were still restrained in terms of how they could use the services.While they could use the free services in their preferred language, familiarity with the service did not help them go beyond familiar uses to new domains, because they lacked the necessary language skills and Finland-specific knowledge to do so.
Regarding the digital state, our observations highlighted the inflexibility of bureaucratic categories and institutional logics.Service algorithms prioritize professional and organizational practices over affordances that would support users in understanding how the indicated principles apply in their situations (Breit & Salomon, 2015).In other words, individual users are expected to be able to adapt the general information to their situations (Thomas & Parayil, 2008).The lack of alternative channels for getting official advice aggravates the power that service algorithms exercise over disadvantaged users.

Conclusions
We began by emphasizing the need to develop domestication research on digitalization to account for the diversity of everyday domestication patterns in the use of digital services.We aimed to move the field forward in several respects (cf.Haddon, 2017).To advance the conceptualization of everyday life in domestication research, we inverted the traditional approach.Instead of focusing on one digital service at a time and on capable users, we followed Dorothy Smith's (1987) lead in treating the everyday as problematic and examined first the participants' everyday lives and then domestication in that context.By 'tipping' the study design, we were able to analyze the social dynamics underpinning the domestication of digital services.Our inequality-focused conceptualizations of everyday life (Smith, 1987) and agency (Aaltonen, 2013;Evans, 2002Evans, , 2007) ) helped us theorize the situation of people who face hurdles when attempting to use digital services.Accordingly, we were able to examine the social limits of the domestication of digital services.
Our research demonstrated the diversity of digital services and domestication related to them, highlighting how a user's agency is constructed in different usage situations.We maintain that the everyday domestication of digital services depends on the material and social resources of users and on their past and present lives.Everyday constraints may intersect in unexpected ways when people tackle inherently diverse digital services.We further demonstrated how the interplay of wider social and societal powers and processes is salient in some digital services but more marginal in others.Consequently, the study contributes to domestication studies by highlighting how private and public institutions may coerce people, regardless of the hurdles they are facing, to use digital services.This may force them to rely on a proxy, which creates potentially risky dependences rather than domestication (Buchert & Wrede, 2021).Disadvantaged people who are forced to depend on proxies are not only exposed to dependency and abuse from the part of the proxies, but must also suffer the consequences of the mistakes the proxies are doing while using the services on their behalf (Buchert et al., 2022).Thus, future studies need to be able to differentiate coercive digitalization from the voluntary domestication of digital services.
Our results are in line with previous research on the digital divide and associated inequalities, which has shown that people with scarce opportunities and resources use digital devices and services less and for different purposes than those in more advantaged positions (Leguina & Downey, 2021;Thomas & Parayil, 2008;van Deursen et al., 2021).We also demonstrated that diversity-blind and ableist digital services consolidate social disadvantage, hindering the equal domestication of digital services.While online banking, and public health and social welfare services may be a good fit for resourceful people, people who are experiencing disadvantaged circumstances in their everyday lives face insurmountable hurdles.While all our participants actively attempted to improve their digital skills, seeking help from NGOs, they were still exposed to the dangers of not being digitally independent.Ultimately, people in similar situations who are unwilling or unable to actively seek help for tackling hurdles are likely to be even more exposed to digital dangers of the contemporary societies.

Notes
1.The research conforms to the principles embodied in the Declaration of Helsinki.The University of Helsinki Ethical Review Board in the Humanities and Social and Behavioral Sciences approved the study protocol (#2/2021).Participation was voluntary and based on informed consent.The data were anonymized, stored and used carefully.To secure anonymity of the interviewed migrant women in a vulnerable position and ensure ethical handling of their sensitive data, amount of reported detailed direct and indirect personal information has been minimized.For that reason, the NGOs that helped the researchers to contact the interviewees are not named, and the interviewees' former home countries, native languages, migration details, health, family, and life situations are discussed only in general.
2. Interviews were conducted by two interviewers: 15 by the first author and 7 by a student whose master's thesis was supervised by the first author.Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, all interviews were conducted over the phone.All interviews conducted by the first author were made with the help of a certified professional interpreter-that is, the interview call involved the interviewer, an interviewee, and an interpreter.The women were interviewed in their preferred language, usually their non-European native language.The master's student followed a similar procedure with three interviews, as well as conducted two interviews in English and another two using both English and Finnish.The interviews lasted 41 min on average, with a range of 19-66 min.3.In contrast to digital identification, which refers to a person claiming to be somebody by using for example a username or email and a password or pin code, we use digital authentication here to refer to proving that you are really the person who you claim to be by using additionally another, more secure digital system.