ABSTRACT. Until recently, the lack of citizenship, i.e. statelessness, has scarcely entered the discourses on forced migration in media and scholarship. However, with globally high and rising numbers of forced migrants, of which millions do not possess any citizenship, the phenomenon of statelessness is now slowly but steadily gaining more attention in public discourse. While the numbers of stateless persons have been declining since the 1950s, from the early 2000s onwards they increase again. In 2014, the UNHCR has called for the introduction of statelessness determination procedures (SDPs) to guarantee that affected persons can access the rights agreed to in the Statelessness Convention of 1954. Austria is a signatory state but belongs to those countries which lack statelessness-specific regulations, which have not introduced SDPs and which did not codify a definition of statelessness in nationality law.

In my dissertation, I investigate the meso level in this context and ask: How is statelessness negotiated in Austrian ministries as well as in asylum, migration and citizenship authorities? In particular, I focus on high-, mid-, and street-level civil servants’ perceptions of the phenomenon of statelessness to illuminate everyday decision-making processes and administrative practices. Drawing on a grounded theory methodology with expert and elite interviews, together with an ethnographic perspective, my data show that civil servants of all hierarchy levels argue that it is neither necessary to create a legal basis for statelessness in Austria, nor to introduce statelessness determination procedures. In this paper, I will elaborate the different perspectives of street-level and high-level civil servants, i.e. those who have considerable influence on the drafting of regulations, and those who implement the rules, respectively.

ABSTRACT. Scene I: With helmets and heavy equipment, Frontex officers arrived at the Turkish-Greek land border. Entrusted to enforce this frontier, they act as a shield to block unwanted migration. Scene II: In the context of post-Brexit, policing of Republican funerals and Loyalist parades sees the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s decision-making spark heated debates on the politics of "shared space" and transitional justice.

Although geographically distant, these scenes take place in environments characterised by risk of conflict, pressure from civil society, high political stakes and heightened media attention. Taking discretion–a concept central to the sociology of policing and SLB scholarship (Lipsky, 1980; Bittner, 1970)–as a starting point, we explore the formation of frontline officers’ moral dispositions (Zacka, 2017) in contested and politicised spaces. While how practices are enacted are shaped by a variety of factors, such as organisational culture (Loftus, 2010) and officers’ biographical life (Martin,2021), our aim is to understand to what extent highly politicised environments play a role in shaping how officers inhabit their role, the practices they enact and how they understand their contribution to increasingly diverse societies.

The paper draws on 59 semi-structured interviews with frontline officers involved in the policing of migration in the Mediterranean and of public order in Northern Ireland. In both cases, officers are subject to a plurality of demands such as human rights and refugee law, security imperatives, intergroup conflict and political violence. The paper shows that a distinct political consciousness is present in frontline officers’ reflections on their work and that this consciousness affects how officers interpret risk and how they build strategic responses. Rather than being detached and merely contextual, highly politicised environments, the paper suggests, animate everyday practices of police officers, shaping how they conceive their role in society and the tactical decisions they make on the ground.

ABSTRACT. In the midst of the so-called European refugee crisis, Danish asylum centers became critical organizational domains for managing thousands of migrants who had taken flight across Europe's borders. While the Danish welfare state assumed responsibility to house and protect asylum-seekers awaiting processing (many waiting for years), mass migration confronted the state, not only with practical difficulties, but also with conflicting political agendas of inclusion/exclusion, isolation/integration, and support/deterrence.

This article examines how these conflicting political dilemmas played out in the everyday life of street-level organizations (SLOs) responsible for the care, protection and well-being of asylum-seekers in the aftermath of the refugee crisis.

Drawing on 5 years of field research in Danish asylum centers (2016-2021), this article analyzes the struggles of front-line staff and residents to navigate everyday life in these settings and considers how these informal dynamics shaped both policy and the asylum experience.

In a departure from standard conventions of street-level research, this article also explores how the lived experience of asylum-seekers forms in specific organizational settings, assessing the implications of this experience for socio-cultural understandings of the host country, as well as for prospective integration or, alternatively, forced return. By illuminating the everyday realities of the asylum process, this study raises critical issues for policymaking and management.

ABSTRACT. New Public Management inspired performance measuring systems have put street-level workers’ behaviors and performance under closer scrutiny by their superiors, but also by the public at large. Existing literature on the impact of performance measuring systems on street-level workers has provided evidence for both the curtailment thesis and continuation thesis. There is only limited insight into how performance measuring may also enable street-level workers. This exploratory comparative case study has compared two street-level contexts in the Netherlands, hospital nurses and prison guards, to examine how performance measuring may enable street-level workers in their work, and the role of the meso context in facilitating this. Drawing on 31 formal interviews, 35 informal conversations, and 58 hours of participant observation, this study shows that performance measuring provides street-level workers with additional action resources, in the form of explicit and tacit knowledge, deemed valuable for the quality of service provision. This study contributes to existing scholarship by theorizing on the factors that could facilitate or hamper enablement.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores how ignorance influences discretion among the staff of a marketised Public Employment Service (PES) provider. Conventionally taken to mean an absence or lack of information which then provokes poor decision making, we take a broader view that ignorance can be strategic, generative, and purposeful. While classic street-level bureaucracy (SLB) literature has outlined how individual bureaucrats decisions are shaped by contextual factors, procedural rules, and marketisation, there has been less focus on the connections between discretion and ignorance.

We reveal the rationalities and mechanisms of outsourcing public employment service casework by reporting on a seven-year qualitative study of a marketized contract between a public employment service and two private providers. We draw on textual and documentary data from parliamentary testimony, minutes of meetings between providers and purchaser, and inspection reports of provider facilities to illuminate how marketization generates and prolongs ignorance. While the contract attempts to foreground and account for all contingencies, in practice, there are considerable ambiguities and gaps that give an important role to discretion, which comes under greater strain as performance monitoring and digitised systems attempt to automate decision making.

While certain decisions may seem illogical or absurd, drawing on the theoretical lens of agnotology (ignorance) studies, we demonstrate that many irregularities are best explained by accounting for how actors and institutions deliberately cultivate ignorance in a transformational process we call ignorancing. This raises a provocative critique of marketisation, one that goes deeper than the incivilities and harshness of contemporary active labour market policies by revealing how advantageous it can be to ‘know what not to know’ by demonstrating that ignorance is structural rather than agentic and goes beyond a mere lack of knowledge.

ABSTRACT. While the ethnographic turn in street-level bureaucratic research has brought attention to the connection between macrolevel phenomena and experiences on the microlevel, little attention has been given to the details of what actually happens in interactions between clients and professionals (Bartels, 2013; Caswell, 2020). This paper uses conversation analysis (CA) to examine 1150 recorded phone calls from parents to the Swedish Social Insurance Agency’s (SSIA) national front office. This approach enables a fine-grained account of how welfare service encounters systematically unfold in real-time (Bruhn & Ekström, 2017) and an analysis of practical language use that is crucial for understanding the work of street-level bureaucrats, as “communicative skills are at the heart of policy implementation” (Caswell 2020:35). The paper investigates how social insurance case officers balance contradictory values inherent to policy in areas of parental leave and child maintenance, specifically in relation to gender inclusivity and gender equality, where they are expected to encourage more gender equal parenting and at the same time treat mothers and fathers equally and neutrally. The analysis focuses on case officers’ explanations of social insurance regulations to clients, showing how such explanations involve orientations to ideals of gender neutrality, for instance when case officers use the non-gendered language of formal regulations rather than adapting their terminology to the client’s (which tends to be gendered to a larger extent). Meanwhile, the case officers work to design their talk in ways that display sensitivity and responsiveness to who the client is, treating categories such as gender and sexuality as relevant in the encounter. In sum, the paper emphasizes the argument that “social equity is realized when put to practice, not when discussed in principle” (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2012:21), and provides insight into how communicative action in micro-level interactions on the street-level reflect and contribute to macro-level structures.

ABSTRACT. During the past decade policies emphasizing early prevention and detection of vulnerable children have been developed and implemented in many European countries. The aim is to address potential threats to the child’s wellbeing earlier in the childhood and before the threats turn into actual problems. Though this idea is strongly emphasized, the definitions of what should be prevented and considered risks are vague and leaves a large room for interpretation in the frontline implement. The paper presents some of the results from a large Danish study investigating how frontline workers within the field of childcare and child protection in a large municipality Denmark implement a local policy aiming to improve early detection and prevention. The paper explores how social class of the parents affects the frontline workers’ interpretations of symptoms of vulnerability and their decision to establish preventive efforts – and in this light how and when early prevention is implemented. The study draws on insight from the street-level bureaucracy literature in combination with the theory double standards and status characteristics. The paper is based on 11 group interviews (40 informants) with frontline workers using two vignettes. The results show that similar symptoms of vulnerability in a child are interpreted differently based on the social class of the parents leading to different decisions in the cases. The findings support the idea of a double standard mechanism, leading to an evaluation based on much stricter criteria in the case of the low social class family than in the case of the middle-class family, where the criteria for being a competent parent is much more lenient. This not does not only stigmatize the low social class family but is also impose a risk of overlooking risk factors for the children from the middle-class family, which should have led to a preventive effort.

ABSTRACT. The offered paper is based on a research project on the response of social service providers in the fields of debt counselling, counselling for homeless and addicted people, vocational training and integration courses to the Corona pandemic (Kaps et al. 2021, 2022). It discusses, how street-level organizations did adapt to the challenges arising from contact restrictions and health risks during the pandemic, what innovations they developed, if they redirected their services, if the power between management and street-level staff disrupted and in what way the structure of service provision altered. The paper takes up conceptual considerations of Evelyn Brodkin to SLO during crisis. First, she asks “how crises might disrupt SLOs, leading to possibilities for rapid change, path departures, and alternative patterns of practice” (Brodkin 2021: 16 f.). The paper therefore discusses, how did service providers reengineer work processes to continue services, what challenges arose from digitization of service provision during the pandemic for the organization and the street-level staff, how did both react to these challenges and what consequences did this have for the balance of power between both. In our research we found innovation, adaption and redirection. The paper will outline these developments. Second, Brodkin asks “under what conditions do crises alter the structure of provision and to what effect?” (Brodkin 2021: 24 f.). The paper therefore discusses what consequences innovation and adaption bring for changes in the structure of service provision? What does this mean for the relationship between service providers and contractors? We found challenges arising from the digitization of social services, because it sets in motion processes of trans-territorialization of services and flexibilization of working hours at the street level. This causes a need for institutional adaptation, a new balance between principal and service providers and the development of a new culture of trust.

ABSTRACT. On January 1, 2019, the “Participation Opportunities Act” (POA) took effect in Germany. The law was widely praised because it addressed a problem that arose from the Social Code II or “Hartz IV” labor market reform: Due to its strong emphasis on “work first”, the reform led to neglecting long-term unemployed with multiple placement obstacles. Job centers did not have sufficient resources to support them appropriately. This was at odds with a central aim of the Hartz reforms, i.e. to improve participation opportunities for long-term unemployed.

While the implementation of the scheme faced many obstacles, like a lack of time or delayed and unclear regulations, our presentation will focus on its financial aspects. Job Centers are facing the task to integrate the additional means provided by the government into their “integration budget”, balancing resources between the POA scheme and other activities like further training. They have to deal with high costs (in the first two years, job centers completely refund wage costs to employers) and the duration of the scheme, which may bind them for five years.

The presentation is based on qualitative interviews with representatives of the „street-level-management“ (Evans 2016; Gassner/Gofen 2018). We will elaborate on the following questions: How do managers balance hopes (for participation) and financial constraints? How does their concept of participation influence the implementation of POA? What strategies do they use to deal with conflicting goals of their internal policy, and how do they try to steer everyday frontline implementation? Resources of the job centers differ widely, which allows us to reconstruct and compare the management strategies and practices of high and low budget job centers.

ABSTRACT. In this study, we explore the political roles of street-level bureaucrats in highly politicized contexts where employees are hired and managed based on particularistic criteria (e.g., political affiliation). In these environments: how are SLB´s behaviors and performance influenced by partisan politics? What political roles do SLBs play and how do these affect their work, and ultimately, policy implementation? In order to further explore additional dimensions of street-level bureaucrats as political actors and agents, this case study draws from the experience of SLBs and their managers in Puerto Rico and in Mexico. Based on the in-depth interviews of public sector employees within street-level organizations, this study explores the influence of politics on SLBs and the role of SLBs as political actors and agents. Findings indicate that in highly politicized contexts, SLBs identify both as political agents and as professionals. These identities at-times compete and at-times align, depending on the changing political context. Moreover, even SLBs who entered public service with a non-political outlook become politicized as a consequence of politicized personnel management practices. The politicization of SLBs in turn, directly and indirectly, affects workplace dynamics and service provision. Furthermore, politicized service provision, in which clients with the same political identity are favored, uncovers client’s political affiliation as an additional influence on the ways through which SLBs exercise their discretion. This study aims to bridge clientelism and patronage literatures with SLB theory.

ABSTRACT. I am working on a Ph.D. in social studies. This paper looks at how youths experience NAV (1). 19 qualitative interviews in 2020 and 2021 underpins the paper. My aim is to give the users of SLBs a voice of how they experience the attempts to make them co-produce their own emancipation through Honneth’s theory of recognition.

According to the IFSW definition, social work is an emancipatory practice. To achieve empowerment and liberation of clients, a social worker must address personal barriers (2). According to Honneth, recognition will result in emancipation from such internal barriers. This freedom leads to self-realization, which, in turn, leads to a successful life. Honneth thus claims that self-realization and a successful life can only be achieved through recognition from others (3). Recognition is a means to a scientifically defined and constructed end about human nature. Clients of SLBs are thus defined as co-producers of their own emancipation and self-realization.

However, the youth I have spoken with seem to define self-realization, freedom, success, and human nature quite differently than scientists and experts. They seem to experience recognition in a radically different way than Honneth’s theory suggests. They do not believe they have any internal barriers which interfere with their self-realization. Rather, they seem to experience them not as barriers at all, but as positive traits within themselves, and necessities for their own definition of freedom. In their experience, these traits are a valuable, crucial, and defining part of their nature. They seem to deem themselves free because of these traits. When these traits are recognized as inhibitions or barriers that must be overcome, their experience is therefore not one of empowerment or emancipation. Instead, they seem to experience that the only thing they hold dare about themselves is scrutinized and attacked as deviant traits.

ABSTRACT. Family policies promoting gender equality and parents’ shared responsibility for their children tend to assume good parental collaboration post separation. However, this assumption obscures the reality of conflict and intimate partner violence (IPV) in some separated families. Such arrangements may therefore be complicated to handle, for families as well as professionals in various sectors. In Sweden, a recent reform has emphasized the importance of collaboration regarding child maintenance whereby the handling of maintenance transactions is transferred from a government agency - the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SSIA) - to the parents. Previous occurrence of IPV may complicate these processes, as parental claims of abuse can constitute grounds for continued maintenance via SSIA.

Drawing on interviews with case officers at SSIA units across Sweden, this paper analyzes how they handle changes in their professional role but also how they reflect upon their emotions associated with new and challenging features of their work following the maintenance reform. The strategies displayed by the interviewees suggest that the reform has made it relevant to uphold a distinction between the position of bureaucrat on the one hand, and one more oriented towards a social work practice paradigm on the other – mainly due to the obligation to assess claims of IPV that the reform has entailed. The concept boundary work has previously been used to describe how professions have become distinguished from one another, and how various claims of expertise have become linked to different professions and positions. Here, the concept is used to illustrate how case officers at the SSIA navigate in the partly new landscape that the maintenance reform has brought about, with a focus on how they deal with parents’ accounts of IPV within this altered paradigm which in turn calls for more social work-oriented approaches governed by discretion and empathy.

ABSTRACT. This paper explores how we can improve our theoretical and conceptual notion of individual co-production as a street-level interaction. Although co-production has attracted wide attention in both research and practice in the past years, the theoretical foundations to explain how co-production initiatives develop in organizations can still be strengthened. The paper focuses its model on the individual co-production of people-changing social services – services in which co-production is close to essential and that predominantly deal with socioeconomically vulnerable citizens. While this target group is often believed to be hard to engage in co-production, at the same time co-production is seen as an essential part of such public services. Building on street-level bureaucracy, sociological institutionalism, and Moulton & Sandfort’s (2017) strategic action field (SAF) framework, the paper will propose a conceptual model of how variables at the street-level (micro), the organizational level (meso), and in the policy field (macro) may influence how co-production develops at the street-level. Thereby, the paper aims to inform future explanatory research. Furthermore, the paper aims to shed light on the potential and pitfalls of co-production. While theoretical, paper seeks to invoke contemporary examples from the Netherlands in order to illustrate its arguments.

ABSTRACT. What role do the perceptions of clients about the procedural justice that street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) use when implementing policy play in prompting citizens to engage in vigilante actions? We examine the unintended effects of SLBs’ implementation of policy on citizens' vigilantism. Vigilantism is an illegal activity, carried out by a private citizen in response to criminal activity committed by another private citizen, against that same perpetrator. Research suggests that the factors that lead to vigilantism are correlated with the outcome that the crime victims receive from law enforcement. We argue that, to characterize the relationship between the public and the authorities, we must focus on the process that citizens experience throughout their interaction with street-level law enforcement agencies and workers – not merely on its outcomes. Procedural justice is an element of street-level work. It refers to the degree of fairness in the process of allocating public goods. Processes that lack procedural justice imply that decisions are made based on personal opinions, which signals to people that they will not receive fair treatment. Thus, the role of SLBs is important not only because of their influence on policy outcomes, but also because how they implement policy may prompt citizens to engage in vigilante activities. To investigate this issue, we use a qualitative methodology, which includes in-depth interviews with Israeli police officers and civilian crime victims, some of whom acted as vigilantes. We will analyze our information using grounded theory. We hope to contribute to the literature on public management and implementation by expanding existing knowledge about the relationship between SLBs' discretion and work routines and the perceptions and behaviors of citizens. We also hope to contribute to the literature on policing by discovering the missing link between police officers’ procedural justice and vigilantism.

ABSTRACT. For European governments and administrations, the arrival of several hundred thousand refugees from Syria and other humanitarian crises regions in 2015 and 2016 constituted a massive challenge. For the German state administration, the challenge was particularly high: Between 2014 and 2016, more than 1.3 million newly arrived refugees applied for asylum in Germany, turning it into one of the top 5 hosting countries of refugees worldwide. Similar to other European countries, Germany’s political approach to enable and promote refugees’ labour market integration – as a main road to social integration and to overcome welfare dependency – turned the labour administration and specifically local jobcenters into pivotal actors. This article explores how placement officers in different organizational settings coped with the exceptional situation and task to activate the newly arrived refugees. We develop a conceptual framework to understand the inherent logics of activation and the potential breakage points that might render the activation process vulnerable. Based on the analysis of 45 qualitative interviews, we identify different organizational responses to the crisis as well as two different action types of street-level bureaucrats. We find that due to divergent role understandings in working with refugees, the street-level bureaucrats handle the various limits of activation very differently. The different on-the-ground practices, in turn, have important consequences for the labour market and social integration of refugees. Our findings contribute to the literature on ethnic diversity in the welfare state and to an emergent discussion about crisis management at the street-level.

ABSTRACT. Refugees report lower mental well-being than the average of the German population while depression and post-traumatic stress disorder are more likely. Female refugees more often become mentally ill and less often report well-being than their male counterparts. Despite frequently experiencing miserable living conditions, however, the majority of female and male refugees are not mentally ill. Against this backdrop, the research project focuses on the mental health of refugees. Specifically, the project is about recognized refugees who are being supported by German job centres on their way into the educational system and the labour market. We see job centres as street-level bureaucracies and frontline workers as street-level bureaucrats who transfer public policies into practice by making use of their discretionary leeway. Their work takes place on the interface of labour market politics and integration politics, the latter being increasingly influenced by the activation paradigm. The projects’ focus thus lies on perspectives, experiences and practices of placement and counselling staff within the job centres. In addition, the long-term experience of health and counselling institutions that support refugees with different mental health statuses on their way into the labour market and society will be gathered. The project assesses what psychological stress and, vice versa, what psychological potentials and resilience can be found within different groups of refugees and how job centre staff deals with them. Female refugees, who participate less in the labour market than males will receive special attention. It is important for us to not only look at deficits but also on potentials and resilience of refugees: Are these aspects considered by frontline workers or are they ignored due to processes of othering? Our methodological approach includes a quantitative online survey, qualitative individual and group interviews and non-participant observations. Theoretical and methodological aspects of the project will be presented and discussed.

ABSTRACT. The Norwegian community health centres are one of the main providers of maternal and child health care services. They are often the primary as well as a regular point of contact for women during pregnancy and after childbirth. As such, they are a place where encounters between primary health care providers like public health nurses, midwives, and immigrant women are frequent.

Midwives and public health nurses play an important role as state employees in the distribution of universal health provisions at the local level. This is especially important in meeting the diverse needs of service users in a universal health care system. This study investigates the implications of cultural diversity for health care practice in a universal system. It employs a qualitative approach, using data from nine semi-structured interviews with midwives and public health nurses across three Norwegian municipalities. It analyses their experiences in working with immigrant women during pregnancy and after childbirth through thematic analysis. The findings illustrate the practitioners’ different approaches to meeting with culturally diverse patients, the challenges they face in their work, and how they overcome them. The discussions address the practice of cross-cultural health care in the absence of national guidelines or formal training using street-level bureaucracy as an analytical concept. This article contributes to knowledge on the practice of cross-cultural health care at Norwegian community health centres in the absence of culturally cognizant health policy. On a broader scale, this study illustrates the implications of diversity for policy and practice in a universal welfare state.

ABSTRACT. ‘Professionalism’ in activation work has become an increasingly important issue; not least as activation has been extended to wider cohorts of citizens with more complex needs that require more tailored, individualised support. Achieving such levels of personalisation will depend considerably on the ‘professional judgement’ (Rice, 2017) and level of expertise of frontline workers. Yet activation workers often resemble ‘professionals without a profession’ (van Berkel et al., 2010). They are expected to personalize services without any formal qualification to work in employment services or recognized body of professional knowledge. The ‘professional’ status of activation work may come under further pressure in governance contexts where service delivery has been contracted-out to market providers through forms of performance-based contracting. This arises from how market governance instruments generate trade-offs between cost and quality, while generating incentives for providers to reduce costs.

This paper considers the intersection between marketisation and ‘professionalism’ in activation work, through a comparative study of Ireland’s mixed economy of activation. Ireland makes for a particularly interesting case for studying how governance modes reshape street-level practices due to its ‘pluri-governance’ model. From 2015-2021, employment services for the long-term unemployed were contracted-out separately in two ways: private firms were contracted through a competitive tender to deliver a new Payment-by-Results programme, JobPath; whereas not-for-profit organisations continued to deliver Local Employment Services (LES) through costs-met funding and partnership contracting. Drawing on research with JobPath and LES staff, this paper examines the effects that JobPath’s marketised model had on the professionalism of activation work, finding that it reconfigured frontline workers’ professional identities through processes of de-skilling, de-collectivisation, and occupational fragmentation. This was allied to shifts in workers’ normative understandings of unemployment. The findings show that quasi-marketisation is complicit in the de-professionalisation of activation work and that the project of pursuing personalization through marketisation faces inherent challenges.

ABSTRACT. Knowledge sharing enables street-level workers to navigate complex tasks and is essential for ensuring equitable treatment across cases. In street-level organizations as elsewhere, knowledge sharing is often mediated by digital technologies such as email, video conferences, and chat functions, particularly when workers are physically dispersed. Still, we know little about how, when, and to what effect different digital technologies mediate these practices. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in two Danish regulatory agencies, the Tax Agency and the Agricultural Agency, this paper explores the ways in which digital technologies enable, constrain and shape knowledge sharing in street-level work. Findings show that knowledge sharing is easily mediated by digital technologies when the subject matter of the tasks is also primarily digital and relevant knowledge can be easily verbalized. If the subject matter of the task is primarily analog and involves non-digital artefacts or tacit forms of knowledge, digitally mediated knowledge sharing becomes more challenging. Further, emerging practices of increasingly mediated knowledge sharing may constrain indirect forms of knowledge sharing such as storytelling and “listening in”, which allow participants to acquire and share knowledge fortuitously and beyond the immediately purposeful. The study contributes to theoretical development regarding the role of knowledge in street-level work and opens up new avenues for research into the consequences of street-level digitalization.

ABSTRACT. Frontline professionals in social welfare- and healthcare aim holding to various health conception dimensions in their work with clients with combined psychosocial problems. These health conceptions including beliefs about what health is and what the factors and practices promoting health are may be combined differently in the work practices of various professional domains. There is only limited insight into how frontline professionals in social welfare and healthcare try to care for clients with psychosocial problems. By studying actual professional behaviors on the work floor, we explored how various health conception dimensions work out in practice for frontline professionals working in this complex and collaborative work environment. By drawing on [x] hours of shadowing and [x] formal conversations with frontline professionals in social welfare and (mental) healthcare, this research gives insight into the professional use of health conception dimensions and the possible barriers professionals may experience towards using their ideal health conceptions. Possible outcomes are that frontline professionals in social- welfare and healthcare feel compelled to use different health conceptions dimensions under certain circumstances because of policy guidelines, their complex collaborative work contexts or their work with different types of clients. This study contributes to existing scholarship by theorizing on the aspects that could facilitate or hinder healthcare for people with combined problems.

ABSTRACT. As a result of the 2007 structural reform in Denmark and the following legislation, the newly formed municipal job centers became responsible for the employment efforts for all categories of unemployed, including people with disabilities. To ensure that the job centers had a specialized knowledge base to help this group, each job center was to appoint at least one disability keyperson with the responsibility of distributing knowledge to colleagues. Studies from 2009 and 2012 showed that the implementation of this keyperson differentiated between job centers – both regarding the number of keypersons, the time dedicated to the function and the placement of the function in the job center (Rambøll 2009; Amby 2015). Hence, the studies identified a lack of systematization in the efforts to assist unemployed people with disabilities and as a consequence, questioned the effect of the function.

The purpose of this study is to examine how the disability keyperson is used in job centers by reporting on a survey from 2019 with managers, caseworkers and keypersons (N= 617). The survey shows a continuing lack of systematization between job centers. However, the results also indicate a shift in the placement of the keyperson from being predominantly placed in sections with insured unemployed (who are in principle ready to work) to being placed in sections dealing with people on sick leave benefits.

We argue that examining the further use of the disability keyperson roughly 15 years after its implementation is a suitable case for analyzing the complex organizational outputs of political reforms. Following the framework of Winter (Winter & Nielsen 2008), we believe that the lack of systematization in the job centers can be explained by an unclear policy formulation and -design leading to a lack of focus in the job centers.

ABSTRACT. It is widely acknowledged that UK employment service delivery has shifted towards a model primed on core ‘workfare’ objectives–that is, ensuring behavioural compliance to work-related duties and expanding participation in work. Nevertheless, significant gaps remain in our knowledge about how workfare is implemented daily by frontline staff. The existing (inter)national street-level research on employment service delivery reveals how workers use a range of discretionary practices to achieve workfare objectives. Yet this literature largely ignores how, in practice, a key aspect of ensuring behavioural compliance and encouraging work participation is through contending with its opposite– behavioural non-compliance. Analysing 14 interviews with frontline staff, this article contributes to the existing literature by revealing the ways managers and workers in UK employment services are encouraged to detect and correct variations of claimant non-compliance. Such practices are conceived here as an important feature of a long-term social policy trend towards the expanded governance of advanced marginality via criminalisation of poor communities and their daily means of getting by.

ABSTRACT. We analyze how the layering of NPG-inspired administrative reforms on top of existing governance arrangements, lead to novel mixtures of freedom and power at different levels within frontline organizations. As our case, we analyze the Danish employment services. Recent reforms have both strived to cut down red tape and instruct job centers to treat clients with greater dignity and enhance their participation. Such reforms mirror many of the central ideas of NPG and should thus ideally enhance client co-production and trust-based governance. However, the article shows why the adoption of such NPG-inspired principles are marred by difficulties as they are inscribed within frontline organizations already influenced by multifaceted and hybrid governance arrangements. Empirically, we rely on a combination of documents and interviews with managers and caseworkers. Theoretically, we draw on governmentality theory to investigate how the adoption of NPG-inspired principles constitutes a bracketing of existing forms of power and governance, rather than a wholesale displacement. We analyze how such bracketing of power creates new mixtures of freedom and power at the level of the job center, the caseworker and the client. For job centers power functions as a potential that might suddenly be (re)enacted by the ministry of employment if job centers fail to administer their freedom wisely. Caseworkers view power as a threat to the trust-based relation with the clients and therefore actively keep it at a distance by marking it as related to the “system” rather than the individual caseworker. Finally, the power over the client is also put on hold, only to resurface as a gentle adjustment of client-choices, when these divert too much from the path deemed acceptable by the job center. The article thereby highlights novel interplays between power and freedom, when principles of deregulation and coproduction are inserted into heavily law-regulated and conditionality-based institutions.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how public child welfare and non-governmental organizations facilitate children’s participation in decisions about children’s lives and children’s involvement in changing child welfare policies and practices. It aims to contribute to the scholarship about how street-level bureaucracies can facilitate democratization processes and child welfare in different parts of the world by promoting the participation of marginalized and empowered children. The countries we discuss include Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Nicaragua, Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United States.

We analyze the conditions in which children’s participation flourishes, which we call “participation generators.” Participation generators include facilitatory and transformative legal, policy, and practice approaches and capacity-building of children and adults. Participatory professional practices are characterized by caring, consistent, and respectful professional attitudes, relationships, and methods allowing all children to participate regardless of age, ability, ethnicity, gender identity, migrant background, sexuality, etc. Professional attitudes towards children promoting participation are nurturing and free of biases, labeling, and stigmatizing children. Creative practice approaches combining playful visual and non-verbal modes with verbal modes of expression encourage children’s involvement.

Children are involved in changing child welfare systems in several ways. For example, children who are “experts of experience” of the child welfare system educate social work professionals in Norway and evaluate and develop a new social work practice approach in Denmark. Care leavers shape child protection law and policy in Israel. Children draw on several resources, which we call “participatory capital,” including emotional, financial, time, and logistical supports for children. Children’s participatory capital varies depending on their age, ethnicity, gender, nationality, etc. It encompasses children’s creativity, capacities, strengths, skills, cooperation with other children, and partnerships with adults working in non-governmental organizations, public child welfare agencies, and other government entities.

ABSTRACT. The aim of this paper is to critically explore the co-production of social care work by a municipal street-level organization (SLO) providing social services for socially vulnerable drug users and an NGO and its volunteers (in a large, Danish city). It focuses on the creation of social work methods and intra-organizational and inter-organizational structures of collaboration, as well as the creation of a new social care activity for the citizens using the SLO, a volunteer driven “activity club”. The overall aim of the collaboration is to reduce social isolation among the citizens through social, cultural and outdoor activities. The work started in 2016. Today, the collaboration and inclusion of volunteers is an integrated part of the SLO and of the social workers’ work with the citizens.

The inclusion of NGOs and volunteers in the SLO is a top-down initiative passed on from the senior level of the municipal administration to the SLO to concretize and implement. The initiative is not only an example of co-production but also of social innovation. The social innovation and co-production process has not been without challenges. The challenges and successes are all analysed.

The paper is based on a case study (in progress) of the process of co-production and social innovation in the SLO. It includes semi-structured interviews with strategically selected professionals, middle-managers and volunteers, for example, and document analysis. It will be completed prior to the writing of the paper.

The analysis is contextualized within the SLO research tradition. The paper draws on theory on co-production and social innovation. The concept co-production is often associated with citizen co-production. However, this paper focuses on community co-operation and cross-sector co-production, i.e. the co-production of public services by community members such as NGOs and volunteers. Theory on social innovation is also included (Note the list of references).

ABSTRACT. The concept of citizens as “co-producers” of service has a long history in the public administration literature and highlights the importance of understanding the citizen’s role in public service provision ([1-4]). As citizen-government interaction is increasingly taking place online, it becomes important to understand how co-production is supported by different mediations, and what needs of the citizens co-production contributes to meet and how. In order to ensure quality of digitalized services, we need detailed and empirically based knowledge of what it is that is being digitalized. Otherwise, important aspects of non-digital co-production may be overlooked, marginalized, or minimized during digitalization.

Therefore, we present a qualitative study which seeks to establish a deeper understanding of co-production in face-to-face bureaucratic encounters between citizens and SLBs. Our study is based on of interviews and observations at citizen service-centres and jobcentres in Danish municipalities. We illustrate citizens’ experiences with face-to-face bureaucratic encounters, the features of these encounters that support co-production, and what needs of the citizens’ co-production meets. Our analysis shows how co-production enables the negotiation of power, meaning, identity and outcome and supports citizens’ needs for process security, relational security, and discretion. Our findings on citizens’ co-production of face-to-face services raise several challenges and limitations for digitalization that should be addressed when designing services. Hereby, we offer contributions to both the public administration literature and digital government literature, as well recommendations for practitioners and digital designers.

ABSTRACT. Frontline workers’ behaviours and actions confer judgements about ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ clients (Hasenfeld, 2010). The use of discretion therefore involves judgements about questions of value (Zacka, 2017). My paper draws on the literature on public perceptions of deservingness (van Oorschot, 2000) to examine how jobcentre advisors judge the individual deservingness of their clients and to investigate what role these judgements play in translating activation policies into practice. The core argument of deservingness theory is that the public does not deem all groups of the population to be equally deserving of welfare support. Criteria such as claimants’ control over the situation, their need and the perceived reciprocity serve as heuristics in judgements about the deservingness of potential welfare recipients. However, little is known so far about the role that these criterial play in professional judgements.

The analysis draws on qualitative data gathered in a research project on back-to-work agreements that involved several German jobcentres (Bernhard et al. 2018). It is shown that advisors vary the intensity of regulatory and disciplining elements depending on whether benefit recipients fulfil reciprocity expectations and are deemed to have control over the unemployment situation. Whether or not they choose an enabling, supporting approach, and the extent to which they do so, depends on judgements about the client’s amenability to change and the presumed outcome of labour market policy instruments. Moreover, the analysis indicates that frontline workers use experiential cues such as appearance and self-presentation in the face-to-face encounters in order to interpret the client. Overall, the findings highlight the relevance of the normative dimension of frontline work.

ABSTRACT. Street-level bureaucrats are important players who strongly influence policy outcomes, mainly through their role as implementers of public policy. Street level Policy entrepreneurs (SLPEs) are individuals who exploit opportunities to influence policy outcomes and aim to create new horizons of opportunity through non-traditional strategies and innovative ideas. These individuals are willing to take risks, identify policy problems and solutions, and use their political skills and sense of timing to achieve a specified outcome. This article aims to investigate under what conditions integration policy implementers act as street- level policy entrepreneurs seeking to change policy. In this context, we want to explore their motivation for extending the boundaries of their professional activity.

In a labour market with high demands for formal training, the lack of measures which provide formal training has been identified as a major obstacle for transition to the labour market for immigrants with low formal education, particularly for refugees who often lack relevant language skills and networks. Our analysis is based on a case study of two Norwegian municipalities that have developed particularly effective collaboration across municipal sectors, the labour and welfare administration (NAV) and governance levels to establish measures that provide formal training. Our findings indicate that there is a gap between designed and desired policy for implementing these measures, which lead to street-level bureaucrats work actively to influence the policy design and even challenges established systems and structural conditions to promote desired policy outcomes.

ABSTRACT. With the shift to a knowledge economy, many advanced countries are experiencing skill shortages in expanding sectors. One possible way to reduce this skill shortage is to train refugees for these sectors. We investigate how refugees are trained in a country, Switzerland, that relies on a collective skill formation system, i.e. a system in which vocational training is provided jointly by vocational schools and firms. We discuss the national strategy for refugee integration and then focus on the street-level implementation in one Canton (Vaud) on the basis of a qualitative vignette study carried out among 23 case workers. We find that both the national strategy and street level implementation are focused on quick access to vocational training or employment, including for refuges with a high potential. This means that refugees tend to be directed towards the low skill segment of the training and labour market. Case workers recognize that this strategy may be unsuitable for the more skilled refugees, but apply it nonetheless. They also argue that given the permeability of the vocational training system, a more ambitious career project can always be developed later. We conclude that case workers’ decisions may limit the ability of the country to make the most of the human capital brought in by refugees. However, the decisions are broadly in line with the overall integration policy objectives. Finally, the permeability of the Swiss vocational training system may be a mixed blessing for refugees, as it is used as an argument to withhold support for the more ambitious career plans.

ABSTRACT. Based on 103 qualitative interviews with intra-EU migrants, service providers and welfare counsellors, this article focusses on immigrants’ differential experiences of claiming social assistance benefits in Germany, regardless of manifest legal entitlements to social benefit receipt. The findings illustrate how institutional constraints of street-level organisations delivering welfare policy at the frontline, along with migrants’ individual preparedness shape claims-making in practice, opening up space for welfare brokerage as a bridging function. Formal welfare brokerage by statutory welfare organisations, as institutionalised opportunity structures, can systematically change the resource equation for migrant claimants by not only easing resource constraints during individual claims-making, but also by advocating for institutional change among political decision-makers due to their unique institutional mandate.

ABSTRACT. The (partial) withdrawal of welfare payments in case of non-compliance with welfare programme rules and behavioural requirements is a common regulatory welfare instrument. In the majority of European countries, welfare regulations even allow for an entire benefit withdrawal (Gantchev 2020: 258). Sanctioning decisions have therefore important consequences for welfare clients.

Frontline sanctioning practices are embedded in organizational structures and routines (e.g. Caswell and Høybye-Mortensen 2015; Soss et al. 2011) and involve individual judgements of frontline workers (e.g. Schram et al. 2009, Torsvik et al. 2022). Our paper explores the role of frontline workers’ normative ideas in sanctioning decisions. Informed by research on deservingness perceptions (van Oorschot et. al. 2017), we explore how frontline workers categorize benefit recipients. We examine which cues these categorizations rely on, whether and to what extent different types of benefit recipients are regarded as “worthy” of sanctions and how these judgements structure decision making. The empirical basis are interviews with frontline workers and team leaders in several German jobcentres that were conducted in 2021 and 2022. In addition to interview transcripts, the documentation of sanction processes in electronic case files is analysed. The results suggest that deservingness perceptions of frontline workers depend on client specific expectations which mirror for example on a client’s ability to make use of institutional knowledge in the bureaucratic encounter.

ABSTRACT. This paper reports an exploration of the state role in institutionalized childcare as described in official policy with respect to early years education and childcare (ECEC) in Brazil and Denmark. The analysis is a prelude to an in-depth comparative work on detailed practice. It uses a perspective seeing this activity as a ‘civilising process’ and pays particular attention to the ways in which views on the practice of ‘pedagogy’ are deployed. It suggests that despite an expectation of divergence between two societies, as implied by variants of regime theory, the arrangements for state supported ECEC have much in common. It shows how the analysis of policy variation, in a situation where there are strong impulses towards convergence, requires a qualitative approach sensitive to subtle cultural differences.

ABSTRACT. Welfare-to-work or activation policies are generally considered a common policy trend among OECD countries. These policies aim at strengthening employability, labour-market and social participation of welfare users through programmes that often employ a combination of supportive and disciplining measures (Caswell, Kupka, Larsen & van Berkel, 2017). Particularly in the last decades, policy reforms across several countries have increased mandatory activation for benefit receipt and benefit sanctions (Knotz, 2020). Benefit sanctions such as reductions, suspension or benefit stop, apply when welfare users fail to comply with these measures. Frontline workers at welfare services are those who implement and mediate such measures, and co-produce welfare-to-work policies through their everyday encounters with welfare users (Lipsky 2010; Brodkin 2013). This paper studies how welfare-to-work policies are delivered in social assistance in two different countries: Norway and Portugal. Even though earlier research has shown that frontline practices are contextualised and country-specific, there is a consensus in literature that similarities have increased in the contexts in which frontline practices develop (van Berkel, Caswell, Kupka, Larsen, 2017). This paper investigates what frontline workers in Norway and Portugal experience as meaningful activation work and how they experience imposing benefit sanctions to social assistance clients. Studying two divergent countries particularly concerning the stringency of sanctions in social assistance, gives insights about the common understandings that guide frontline practices and further contributes to implementation literature. To this purpose, I draw on fieldwork and interviews with frontline workers at welfare services in both countries during 2017-2018. Preliminary findings indicate that despite contextual differences at the policy, governance and organisational differences, frontline workers who mainly have similar educational backgrounds as social workers, tend to perceive welfare-to-work measures as positive and legitimise their practices based on social work rationales as such provide help to self-help, and that they refrain sanctioning through different strategies.

ABSTRACT. This paper draws attention to how policies concerning children delinquency and criminal behavior becomes enacted, rather than simply administrated, at the frontline of public authorities. We recognize from previous studies denoting SLB that enactments of policy not always correspond with the intentions of policymakers, and that the outcome depend not only on regulations but also experiences gained and – not least – the qualifications and resources available for those implementing policy and initiatives. Inspired by ethnography, this paper explores how street-level public workers organize bottom-up. The analysis draws on material from pro-longed participant observations of a local cross-professional organization – the YOA-project – and in-depth interviews with members of that organization. This study reveals insights of the everyday work among local social workers and representants from the police acting out of an ambition of preventing children from becoming accountable criminals. It shows us how actors at the frontline may confront the system, organizing bottom-up rather than top-down. Their work may better be described as a craft rather than administration. Thus, to succeed in doing a good job, one needs to learn the craft and earn the tools. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, it shows how cross-professional organizing may affect professional identities and create blurred borders between social work and police investigations. In the primary analysis, I make use of Losekes concept of constructing social problems and provide examples of how various elements and ideas may influence not only public policy but also public understandings of the problem.

ABSTRACT. Abstract Deservingness theory was originally developed to understand popular support for targeted social rights. We substantiate this theory by asking to what extent it can apply to social obligation orientations comprising attitudes towards social obligations and discretionary decision-making in the context of sanctioning non-compliant social assistance recipients. Based on a national survey of 817 street-level bureaucrats, and by use of the CARIN criteria, it was found that with the exception of the identity criterion, all other deservingness criteria were associated to street-level bureaucrats’ obligation attitudes. More specifically, those who to a high degree perceive clients as in control of their predicament, neither in great need of support nor viewed as contributors to the financing of the welfare state, are more likely to embrace conditional social assistance. However, paradoxically, only the identity criterion was significantly related to decisions regarding sanctions of non-compliant client behaviour. In other words, street-level bureaucrats who to a high extent perceived social assistance recipients as part of one’s own in-group, display lower probability of sanctioning recipients who violate activity requirements. We conclude that deservingness theory, and relatedly the CARIN-criteria as conceptual framework is indeed useful in the study of social obligation orientations.

ABSTRACT. Since Lipsky’s influential work on street-level bureaucrats (SLB’s), much scholarly attention has focused on the way SLB’s exercise discretion amidst competing demands brought forward by policy expectations on the one hand and clients’ needs on the other. Faced with policy changes that are often politically driven, they have the challenging task to reconcile competing policy logics as posed by different public management reforms. Building on this literature, this paper aims to explore what exactly determines which policy demands are dominant for SLB’s and hence decisive for their choices in practice.

Empirically, we conducted a nested case study into the Dutch social welfare system, focusing on the execution and enforcement of three different social welfare provisions by SLB’s: unemployment benefits, the public pension scheme, and social assistance provisions. Data included policy documents, focus groups (7) and interviews (15) with SLB’s and other representatives of involved executive organizations (e.g. team leaders and managers), policy makers and experts (40 respondents total).

Corresponding to its main findings, this article’s contribution to literature is twofold. First, this study empirically finds that a key influence on the interplay of competing logics as it manifests itself at the frontline of public service delivery is the national and local political tide. Therefore, contrary to studies that attribute the accumulation of role-demands for SLB’s solely to the different models of public management reform as well as contrary to studies that argue that SLB’s are mostly themselves key in shaping their discretionary space, this study underscores the importance of the political influence on how SLB’s execute public policies. Second, based on key similarities between SLB’s responsible for the execution and enforcement of different social welfare provisions, this article shows that especially recent demands of client-centered service provision in fact pose dilemmas for SLB’s that ultimately even undermine welfare state’s aims.

ABSTRACT. Marketization has remade the scene for the street-level bureaucracy in most welfare services, more recently in the family foster-care services. Through a case study design, the social workers supervising foster care, supervising social workers, view of the marketized foster care system was investigated through five group interviews in five Swedish municipalities. One main finding concerning the changes of the foster care social workers situation is that in some municipalities, parts of the work with recruiting, educating and supporting foster carers, with an emphasis on the children with great needs, has been handed over to private providers. This has according to supervising social workers solved issues such as recruiting and supporting family foster-carers far away from their work place but also changed their part in the process in the cases where private providers are used: from the main contact and building trusting relationships with foster carers into investigators mainly tasked with judging the capacity and suitability as family foster-cares. The relational character of the work is changing into an auditing one when foster care is contracted out to private providers. This experience is in line with previous observations of the changes in the role of the welfare street-level bureaucrats with the increasing tendency to divide the social work practice between the auditing public customer and the audited private provider. The difference here is interesting as the audited provider is tasked to supervise the actual day-to-day provider of around the clock care provider of out-of-home care for children.