ABSTRACT. This article examines how street-level bureaucracy operates within welfare administrations by analyzing the relationship between internal monitoring of frontline workers and the scrutiny directed toward welfare recipients in Belgian and Swiss social services. Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in local welfare offices, the study shifts attention away from individual discretionary judgments alone and toward the organizational structures that shape and constrain street-level practice. We argue that social workers operate within dense regimes of auditing, accountability, and inter-organizational oversight that profoundly structure how policies are enacted at the frontline. In consequence, the article shows how internal control mechanisms—such as audits, standardized reporting requirements, performance evaluations, and financial sanctions imposed on offices—produce a climate of suspicion that is subsequently transferred to interactions with clients. Caseworkers are “controlled about controlling,” and this recursive dynamic incentivizes risk-averse behavior, excessive documentation requests, and restrictive interpretations of eligibility. Rather than viewing frontline discretion as primarily attitudinal or individual, we demonstrate how discretion is organizationally patterned and embedded in hierarchical and horizontal monitoring systems. Empirically, the article compares welfare offices in Belgium and Switzerland to show how similar logics of control emerge across different administrative contexts. In both cases, street-level bureaucrats mediate competing mandates of care, legality, and fiscal responsibility, while also acting as intermediaries between welfare institutions and other state agencies, particularly migration authorities. These institutional entanglements intensify surveillance of non-citizen clients and reinforce classed and racialized distinctions of deservingness. By conceptualizing welfare offices as sites of parallel systems of control, the article contributes to street-level bureaucracy research by linking frontline interactions to broader organizational architectures of auditing and accountability. It demonstrates how bureaucratic control is reproduced through everyday practices, ultimately reshaping welfare delivery and deepening inequalities among those most dependent on state support.

ABSTRACT. Citizens’ encounters with the welfare state constitute a critical analytical site for examining how power is exercised through professional and administrative decision-making. In a welfare state context, state power is embedded in the everyday practices through which access to public support is granted, limited, or denied. These practices are not only sites of professional discretion but also central to the enactment of values such as fairness, responsiveness, efficiency, and the rule of law.

Highlighting legality as a core dimension of street-level governance and public professionalism, this paper presents an empirical study of how legality is enacted in practice in the context of Danish social services. Drawing on 35 qualitative interviews (19 caseworkers and team leaders across five municipalities and 16 legal professionals from the national social appeals body), the paper investigates how legality is produced through the interaction between social work practice and juridical oversight.

The analysis shows that legality is not a fixed or purely formal standard but the outcome of ongoing negotiation between social-professional judgement and judicial authority. However, this negotiation is marked by a pronounced institutional asymmetry. While social work practice operates within discretionary, relational, and resource-constrained settings, judicial oversight is institutionally anchored in formalised legal authority. As a result, juridical interpretations of legality tend to prevail, shaping frontline practices in anticipatory ways.

The paper argues that this asymmetry has important implications for power and equity in street-level bureaucracy, as the growing need to accommodate demands of judicial oversight may take precedence over other professional, relational and ethical considerations. This dynamic risks narrowing the space for professional judgement and may affect citizens’ experiences of public encounters, particularly in terms of responsiveness and recognition. Based on these findings, the paper conceptualises legality as a negotiated and hierarchically structured practice that requires sustained research attention.

ABSTRACT. Non-take-up of social benefits is commonly framed as a consequence of information deficits, administrative burdens, stigma, or rational cost–benefit calculations (Van Oorschot 1991; Hernanz et al. 2004; Currie 2006; Ko and Moffitt 2024). While this literature has advanced our understanding of incomplete take-up, it often treats non-take-up as an individual or technical problem. This paper argues instead that non-take-up is actively produced through everyday processes of street-level governance.

Focusing on the implementation of the Italian Assegno di Inclusione—the national means-tested minimum income scheme introduced in 2024 to replace the previous Reddito di Cittadinanza—the study conceptualizes access as a negotiated and stratified process shaped by discretionary translation, moral classifications, and relational infrastructures.

The analysis draws on twelve months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Milan and Naples. The research combines participant observation inside CAF and Patronato offices—key institutional nodes where eligibility and bureaucratic translation converge—with observation of surrounding spaces and informal interactions. An initial mapping of the local welfare ecosystem (third-sector organizations, municipal services, informal advice networks) situated these sites within a broader infrastructure of welfare mediation. The study also relies on semi-structured interviews with welfare claimants and frontline workers and focus groups with service providers.

Building on Street-Level Bureaucracy theory (Lipsky 1980; Dubois 2010), scholarship on deservingness and moral boundary-work (Van Oorschot 2006; Lamont 2000), and analyses of bureaucratic power (Wacquant 2009), the paper shows how frontline workers act as translators of a complex bureaucratic framework. Discretion, uneven professional competencies, and moral evaluations intersect with users’ self-perceptions and social networks. Administrative opacity—particularly for non-Italian citizens—functions as a mechanism of differentiated inclusion.

By reframing non-take-up as relational gatekeeping rather than policy malfunction, the paper demonstrates how poverty governance and access are enacted and selectively restricted in everyday frontline encounters.

ABSTRACT. Street-level encounters have long been recognised as sites where categorisation and moral judgement shape citizens’ access to rights and resources (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003). Yet, as welfare provision becomes increasingly digital-first, these processes are no longer confined to face-to-face exchanges. They unfold across ‘screen-level’ exchanges in the form of eligibility architectures, documentation protocols, data fields, and interface designs that structure how claimants become legible to the state, and on what terms. Drawing on ethnographic research tracing the administrative journeys of economically marginalised young adults navigating digital-first government services in Ireland, the work examines how power operates within these mediated arrangements. Interviews and engagement with service providers and policy materials reveal how administrative requirements set the conditions under which young adults are recognised, as capable, compliant, risky or deficient, often before any conversation begins. This paper argues that exclusion in digital welfare systems cannot be reduced to an individual’s deficit or service failure. Rather, inequity emerges through the relational interplay of policy rules, procedural sequencing, interface structures and residual frontline judgement. In this way, digital mediation does not remove street-level power; it reorganises it by embedding authority in infrastructures that appear technical and routine, yet structure recognition in consequential ways. By foregrounding how claimants are rendered legible through digitally mediated processes, the paper contributes to debates on power and equity in street-level bureaucracy. It demonstrates that contemporary welfare governance embeds constraint in the mundane sequencing of digital procedure, rather than overt acts of refusal.

ABSTRACT. Traditionally, the role of Public Employment Services (PES) agencies as labour-market intermediaries is to provide information to employers and jobseekers. The rise of activation policies has triggered an increase in supply-oriented measures, focusing on ‘making jobseekers job-ready’. Policy reforms and labour-market changes have contributed to a shift from supply to demand-orientations. This shift reflects a shift in policy theories, especially those related to problems of long-term unemployment and labour-market exclusion. These theories are relevant when rethinking the role of PES agencies and professionals in dealing with them.

Employer services provided by PES have received relatively little attention. Based on interviews with Dutch Employer Services Centres, the study reported in this paper looked at how employer services are gradually being transformed and expanded. We focused on employer services aimed at promoting the labour-market participation of people with disabilities (PWD), as this group is exemplary for the increasing groups of ‘hard-to-employ’ jobseekers PES agencies are confronted with. We identified three styles of employer services. In the traditional vacancy-oriented style, PES agencies match jobseekers with employers’ vacancies. The unburdening employers style focuses on reducing risks and barriers employers perceive when employing PWD. In the strategic partnership style PES professionals aim to engage employers in a dialogue about how organizational and HRM practices create barriers for employing PWD, and how these can be reduced. In practice, employer services provided by Employer Services Centres contain a mix of the styles.

In the paper, we analyse what these styles mean for employer services and for relationships between PES professionals and employers. We argue that each style represents a different policy theory. That is, they reflect different views on why raising PWD’s labour-market participation is such a persistent problem; and, consequently, different views on PES agencies’ roles and tasks in addressing the problem.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents an empirical analysis of a labor-market integration program for long-term unemployed workers that combines wage subsidies for firms with mandatory employment-accompanying support by street-level bureaucrats (SLBs). While the financial component of the program is largely realized, empirical findings indicate ongoing difficulties in establishing street-level support within firms. As a result, social and biographical problems remain unresolved in everyday workplace interactions. Rather than framing this constellation as an implementation failure in a narrow sense, the paper conceptualizes it as a displacement of street-level governance. Drawing on Bernardo Zacka’s theory of street-level bureaucracy, it argues that discretionary and morally consequential decision-making does not disappear when SLBs are weakly present; instead, it is relocated. Employers increasingly find themselves addressing social vulnerabilities, mediating conflicts, and making consequential decisions about autonomy, discipline, and continued employment. The empirical core of the paper consists of four qualitative case studies that reconstruct how employers attempt to resolve organizational and employment-related problems through moral interaction. Across these cases, different care-oriented and morally advisory modes of engagement emerge, through which employers act as de facto street-level bureaucrats. Using Zacka’s typology as a heuristic, the analysis shows how morally motivated engagement—particularly care-oriented or consultant-like stances—can, under certain conditions, foster paternalistic practices, implicit stigmatization, and constraints on worker autonomy when enacted without a clearly defined mandate or professional role. The paper concludes that the observed forms of moral overload and paternalism are not individual ethical shortcomings, but systemic effects of displaced street-level responsibility, and it contributes to the street-level bureaucracy literature by extending its analytical focus to employers as non-state actors in governance processes.

ABSTRACT. The agendas of activation and social investment are often presented as complementary pillars of contemporary employment policy. However, when implemented at the frontline of public employment services, contradictions arise from their coexistence. While social investment strategies emphasise upskilling, capability building, and long-term employability, activation largely focuses on its disciplinary aspect, emphasising conditionality, behavioural compliance, and rapid job entry. In Germany, both social investment and activation exist within the political framework of employment services, leaving frontline job centre staff to reconcile competing policy imperatives in their day-to-day work.

This paper examines how these competing logics play out in practice at the street level by analysing ethnographic observations of interactions between frontline workers and welfare claimants in German job centres. It explores how notions of ‘rapid’ versus ‘sustainable’ employment, conditionality and training are invoked, negotiated and enacted in these encounters. Particular attention is given to how different forms of work – ‘standard’ and ‘non-standard’ – and various types of training are framed and valued by both frontline workers and welfare claimants.

The analysis reveals that, while immediate job placement is often deemed unrealistic, explicit references to longer-term integration or individual capability building also remain rare. Routines and conventions structure these encounters, leading claimants to anticipate a disciplinary approach rather than an enabling one, and to align their self-presentation accordingly. The paper concludes that, in order to realise social investment goals, employment services require stronger institutional commitments to career guidance and more participatory engagement with claimants as co-producers, which must be an integral part of activation work.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines how affect and emotional labour shape frontline practices in Slovenian public employment services (PES), contributing to debates within street-level bureaucracy. Building on governmentality studies including recent theoretical developments integrating insights from the affective turn (Bjerg & Staunæs, 2011), we investigate how affective technologies are mobilized in everyday encounters between counselors and unemployed citizens. The analysis draws on qualitative fieldwork conducted between 2020-2023, including 19 interviews with PES counselors, eight focus groups with counselors, and 42 interviews with unemployed people. We explore how emotional and “affective currencies” (Pultz, 2018) are deployed in interactions, and how counselors navigate the tension between policy demands and relational engagement. Slovenia represents a particularly interesting case characterized by a combination of hard activation measures and softer employment policies (Hansen & Pultz, 2020), alongside relatively wide professional discretion among counselors. Our findings show that counselors frequently rely on psychological frameworks and therapeutic vocabularies when engaging with citizens, emphasizing motivation, recognition, empathy, and the importance of “meeting people as human beings.” Discretion is framed as enabling creativity and responsiveness, with relational competences positioned as central tools both for supporting unemployed people and for sustaining counselors’ own sense of professional purpose. At the same time, these affective practices operate as subtle governing mechanisms, shaping motivation, responsibility, and self-understandings among jobseekers. We situate these dynamics within Slovenia’s historical trajectory (Aspalter, Jinsoo, & Sojeung, 2009; Calic, 2019) highlighting how a socialist past and subsequent activation reforms inform and influence contemporary uses of psychological and affective technologies. The paper argues that emotional labour is not merely supportive but constitutive of governance at the frontline, functioning as a key medium through which activation policies are enacted, negotiated, and made legitimate in everyday practice.

ABSTRACT. There has been an ‘affective turn’ in public administration research and practice. This is reflected in demands for more relational models of government (Mussagulova, 2024) and anchoring public administration in the value of empathy, recognising that public service work involves forms of relational work that can be highly consequential for citizens’ experiences of the state. One particular domain where demands for a more ‘relational’ (Cottam, 2012) state have grown loudest is the area of welfare administration. An example is the growing demands for welfare-to-work programs to become explicitly ‘trauma-informed’(Scullion and Curchin, 2022). This has been motivated by growing awareness that people with histories of trauma are particularly likely to interact with welfare and employment services (Levenson 2020: 288), and that service interactions may worsen pre-existing symptoms. However, relational and trauma-informed practice models require street-level workers to engage in highly sophisticated forms of emotional labour and emotion management. This is often in the context of New Public Management-oriented governance logics that incentivise delivery agents to focus on output achievement and which subject frontline staff to intensive performance monitoring.

This paper examines how trauma-informed public administration is enacted in frontline employment services, focusing on the emotional labour of employment consultants delivering Australia’s welfare-to-work program. Drawing on 24 months of qualitative fieldwork across three sites, we analyse how practitioners balance empathy, conditionality, and performance metrics in a marketised service environment. Findings reveal that workers engage in high levels of emotional labour, deep and surface acting, emotional recalibration, and culturally attuned strategies, including code-switching, to build trust and de-escalate participant distress. This emotional labour is often invisible in performance frameworks, despite being critical to achieving activation goals. Moreover, tensions between trauma-informed care and outcome-driven contracts produce ethical and emotional stress for frontline staff, and contribute to staff turnover.

ABSTRACT. The article investigates how street level bureaucrats (SLBs) navigate in-between differentiated perceptions of what it means to care for their clients. It suggests that research on coping strategies of SLBs lacks a stronger conceptual and empirical understanding of such differentiated perceptions of care. Thus, not only do SLBs navigate in-between sometimes conflicting demands regarding what they ought to do, such as client-oriented demands for respect and system-oriented demands for efficiency. They also navigate in-between differentiated and occasionally conflicting understandings of what it means to work for the benefit of the client. Investigating such differentiated understandings of care add important new insights to the scholarly understanding of coping strategies applied by SLBs.

The article draws on around 30 qualitative interviews with frontline workers situated in five Danish municipalities, to analyze how SLBs implement a recent Danish workfare scheme. It introduces the term ‘spectrum of care’, allowing us to analyze how they navigate in-between conflicting understandings of what it means to care for clients: In one end of the spectrum, care is about compassionately responding to the apparent needs of client. In the other end, care is perceived as a matter of developing the capacities of clients, thereby aiming to move them towards less onerous life situations. Coping, according to this analysis, is therefore not just a matter of moving pro or contra the needs of clients, but – more emotionally demanding – a matter of establishing what those needs of clients even are.

ABSTRACT. In this paper we take an interest in how the work of meeting professional standards for emotional control – framed as emotional labour – unfold amidst the use of digital technology in client and collegial interaction. With an ethnographic approach we explore what digitalization mean for social workers’ emotion work and the balance between deep and surface acting. The empirical material comes from an organizational ethnographic study in five Swedish municipalities at units responsible for financial assistance and child protection. In total, 200 hours of observations and 59 interviews were conducted, and 20 documents were collected. We have been particularly interested in the interaction of first-line managers, administrators and social workers with and around various digital tools. Theoretically, we depart from selected ideas from the sociology of emotions’ framework developed by Arlie R. Hochschild: The meanings of emotion work and feeling rules, the distinction between deep and surface acting, and the understanding of emotion work in times of speed up. Our analysis demonstrates three ways in which digitalization changes the arena for emotion work by 1) feelings triggered by malfunctioning technology 2) technology speeding up work tempo and 3) the physical and psychological distance of digitalized interaction. These circumstances have in common that they offer (not only unwelcome) challenges for enacting deep-acting and have been visible in the participants’ talk about feeling rules such as having control over one’s feelings, displaying mature feelings, and feeling genuine towards clients and colleagues. The results raise questions for research about how emotional labour is valued in modern human service organizations.

ABSTRACT. The public service reform movement new public management (NPM) meant a reorganisation of public services according to business principles like efficiency, improvement and learning. This also meant redefining the citizen as customer. Drawing from my PhD research, this paper is interested in the professional identifications, patterns of action and stocks of knowledge of street level bureaucrats working in local governments’ complaints management. Comparing the English (as an early proponent of NPM reform) and German (a “late starter”) cases, has proven fruitful in providing insights into national specifics. A Grounded Theory analysis of problem-centred interviews from both contexts showed that whilst general influences on the job (like digitalisation) were similar in both countries, the influence of new public management was more pronounced in English local government, where the “customer” narrative was more dominant. There was also a stronger orientation to performance management and organisational learning. Professional role identifications and stocks of knowledge also showed great overlap in both countries, but again the German complaints managers were shown to still hold more identifications according to Weberian administrative culture, with the English showing a greater emphasis on being drivers of organisational learning and change. In both countries, however, the job of complaints manager in local government can be characterized at its core as being about “organizing responsiveness”, with “responsiveness” integrating a wider set of meanings than “simply” an orientation to customer satisfaction. Organizing as social action has been defined by Pfadenhauer (2008) as guiding and facilitating other peoples’ actions. This applies to the street-level bureaucrats in complaints management, whose role positions them at the interface between a councils’ complaints function, the citizens and a council’s service areas whom they supervise and manage in their dealing with complaints.

ABSTRACT. Social investments delivered through targeted programs with outcome-based repayment schemes represent a new approach to public service delivery. This paper examines how such programs reconfigure state-citizen encounters by investigating the normative tensions that arise in the implementations of social investment programs within welfare services for citizens experiencing homelessness, as seen from the perspective of frontline professionals. Social investment programs targeting homelessness aim to combine social returns—stable housing and wellbeing—with financial returns such as increased self-reliance and reduced public support costs. Research on the practical implementation of social investment programs remains limited, and the perspectives of frontline professionals are largely absent. To address this gap, our paper presents a study of two social investment programs with outcome-based repayment schemes in Denmark. Our findings suggest that, in line with their objectives, the programs enhance frontline discretion, enabling professionals to develop dynamic, cross-sectoral responses to the complex needs of citizens in/at risk of homelessness. At the same time, the formalization embedded in contracts risks stifling innovation and constrain flexibility, producing a paradox we term contracted flexibility. The case studies show how the programs generate new normative tensions between efficiency, respect, fairness, and responsiveness, which frontline professionals manage through coping responses ranging from successfully advocating contract modifications to emotionally distancing themselves from repayment goals. The study ultimately seeks to advance a bottom-up normative theorization of social investment programs. Drawing on Zacka, we propose beginning policy deliberations with the question of how we want the state to interact with citizens. If frontline professionals are to remain sensitive to competing normative considerations in a sustainable way, programs must be implemented in ways that protect their moral integrity. Including the voices of frontline professionals in considerations of how, whether and when public services should be delivered as social investments is therefore essential.

ABSTRACT. A main problem among health systems is avoidable hospital readmission, but why do some succeed and others fail? To answer that question, health systems' outcome for citizens – measured by the proportion of avoidable hospital readmission – is related to coordination for managing street-level bureaucracy, studied over a ten-year period. The purpose is to explain how accountable governments create and accumulate value by street-level bureaucracy through reducing avoidable outcomes for frail ordinary citizens with limited capacities due to ageing and multi-morbidity.

The specific case examined is Sweden, pursuing horizontal management since the early 1990s. The region together with the municipalities of each health system, share equal and same-level responsibility for hospital and primary health care provided by regional government, and nursing health and social eldercare delivered by local governments. This governance of integrating care services is managed in collaboration by at least one coordination body per health system, staffed with accountable politicians, administrators (senior management/managerial professionals) and care professionals (middle/frontline managers). General policy reform – including the 2018 “Good Quality and Local Health Care” Act and the 2025 Social Services Act – paved the way for disruptive change by emphasizing anticipatory (förebyggande) work performed by the individual in public services, but little is known about anticipatory street-level bureaucracy.

Avoidable hospital readmission in regional health systems between 2013 and 2024 was linked to local and regional governments collaborating in a sample of 50 coordination bodies repeatedly surveyed in 2015, 2019, 2023 and 2025 after the 2010-14, 2014-18, 2018-22, and 2022-26 terms of office among all ordinary members across 15 of Sweden’s 21 regions. The findings show how inner check by managerial professionals in the coordination body/bodies of health systems is systematically and long-term reducing avoidable outcome. The stronger the inner administrative check at coordinating-level, the greater the anticipatory street-level bureaucracy effect.

ABSTRACT. Although Nordic countries are recognised for high-quality employment, nearly one-third of their workers are engaged in non-standard employment, with Finland showing the highest share. Meanwhile, active labour market policies (ALMPs) are shifting away from skill investment towards individual activation. International research shows that stricter conditionality and benefit sanctions lead to transitions into low-quality jobs, lower earnings, and repeated unemployment.

This article examines the intersection of precarious jobs and frontline public employment service delivery under increasingly workfare-oriented ALMPs. It asks: What are frontline employment service workers’ views, roles, and strategies in either guiding jobseekers into low-quality jobs, or reducing their risk of falling into precarious traps in the labour market? The analysis draws on a 2022 structured online survey of 122 Finnish frontline workers across three regions, focusing on public employment services in the context of partial unemployment.

In Finland, unemployment benefit eligibility requires seeking full-time work—a condition that is both enabling and restrictive. When full-time jobs are scarce, frontline workers often encourage part-time work, framing it as a stepping stone. However, these jobs frequently become precarious traps: they rarely offer advancement opportunities. Paradoxically, while these jobseekers remain entitled to employment services during full-time job search, they are no longer served. They become excluded from services such as labour market trainings due to scheduling conflicts and because resources are fully allocated to serving fully unemployed jobseekers, despite often being low-educated and in clear need of skill development. Moreover, if they resign from jobs accepted under frontline worker encouragement, they face sanctions.

Employment services thus participate in normalising precarious work. In the long run, such ALMPs may strengthen employers’ incentives to offer low-quality jobs. I argue that, overall, public employment services and frontline workers play an underexamined role in shaping whether labour markets evolve towards high-quality or low-quality employment.

ABSTRACT. Welfare policies across Europe increasingly condition social assistance on recipients’ availability for paid work. In the Netherlands, the Participation Act embodies a workfare approach aimed at rapid labour-market reintegration. Yet many recipients who cannot enter paid employment contribute to society through unpaid work such as volunteering and informal caregiving. Limited recognition of these contributions creates a mismatch between policy goals and recipients’ lived realities.

Local governments and their street-level case managers sit between national regulations and recipients’ everyday lives. Drawing on interviews with 30 welfare recipients and 15 case managers across three Dutch municipalities, we ask: how local policy logics manage unpaid work under a work-first regime; how do case managers enact and reshape these logics; and how does this affect recipients to engage in meaningful work?

Preliminary findings indicate variation between municipalities, ranging from a strict work-first to a quality-of-life approach. However, the most consequential differences occur within municipalities: recipients’ opportunities to engage in unpaid work depend heavily on which case manager sits across the table. Case managers’ discretion is guided by moral logics that inform what they see as appropriate; these are not fixed, but shift across cases and contexts, shaping whether they give room to recipients’ unpaid work. These logics are shaped by client categorizations and organisational context (team identity, and workload), as well as by case managers’ professional cues (e.g. role conception) and biographical cues (e.g., their own experience with unpaid work). Together with the “institutional capital” case managers possess, this shapes how far they are willing, and able, to stretch the work-first legislation to create room for recipients’ unpaid work.

By incorporating both frontline workers’ and clients’ perspectives, we show the difficulties case managers face in implementing workfare policy. This demonstrates how institutional dynamics and professionals’ moral logics produce fragmented and unequal opportunities for recipients.

ABSTRACT. This paper presents early work from my PhD project on frontline discretion in UK social work under austerity, located in Liverpool, UK. Since 2010, UK local authorities have operated under fiscal restraint and reform while demand for services has steadily increased. For practice, this has resulted in rising thresholds, rationed support and an intensification of recording, risk management and institutional defensibility.

For an SLB audience, Liverpool provides a clear vantage point of sharpened contradictions as it combines intense socioeconomic inequality with sustained pressure on services, creating an appropriate context for analysing how welfare state decisions are actually made in everyday practice.

This paper has 3 distinct contributions: (1) it situates discretion within a specific austerity landscape (Liverpool, Uk), rather than treating constraint as a background condition. (2) It places affective labour, ethical strain and moral injury at the centre of its analysis – social workers are expected to sustain relational practice, absorb distress and conflict while maintaining ethical commitments/practice inside institutions focused on compliance and defensibility. (3) The research is being conducted by myself, a registered practitioner turned researcher, which raises practical ethics for street-level research while exploring typical scenarios and key decision points: what becomes non-negotiable, what is deferred, how thresholds are interpreted and what becomes invisible or unrecordable under pressure.

The study uses an empirical qualitative design that is currently moving from the early research stage into main interviews with frontline social workers. The project is grounded in Lipsky’s (2010) concept of discretion under constraint and in Brodkin’s (2011) argument that street-level practice functions as policy work. The contribution is an early account of social work discretion as policy work under austerity, with focus on affect and ethics in frontline state - public encounters.

ABSTRACT. Background. The activation of welfare states and the associated individualization of services (van Berkel & Valkenburg, 2007) and responsibilization of clients and street-level bureaucrats (SLB’s) (Bengtsson et al., 2024), require more interaction and affective labor of both parties to realize clients’ return to work and for SLB’s to navigate multiple interests (Penz et al., 2017). However, more research is needed to understand how SLB’s deliver activation services in which clients’ perspectives are included more substantially. We applied Menger’s (2018) framework of the ‘working alliance with mandated clients’ to examine the relationship between labor experts and long-term sick-listed employees in the Netherlands. Here, labor experts act as private SLB’s, performing state-mandated tasks in activation services. Methods. We adopted a qualitative research design, where we observed real-life meetings (9) between labor experts and clients, and conducted interviews (17) with both parties separately to capture their perspectives on the meeting. Results. The results indicate that labor expert practice is not solely about fulfilling goals and tasks, but especially implies affective labor for both labor experts and clients. Feelings of mutual trust, having a bond and openness are important for the quality of the working alliance, although these (assumed) emotions seem hardly ever openly discussed. While labor experts prefer a personal approach, if clients do not cooperate, they appear to adopt a formal approach and focus on legal demands – although explicit attention for emotions might be more beneficial for their working alliance. Conclusion. Labor expert practice in the Netherlands is a complex balancing act between fulfilling institutional demands (e.g., legal, professional, employer) and providing individualized services, which seems dependent on the emotional relationship between labor experts and their clients. Our study contributes to the concepts of affective labor and governance, relational street-level bureaucracy and the literature on the working alliance within activation services.

ABSTRACT. Research on emotional labour has largely focused on street-level workers and the increasing expectation that they “work feelingly” (Guy et al. 2008; 178) in the delivery of welfare-to-work programmes. Yet, the emotional demands of activation do not stop at the front desk. This paper argues that emotional labour in welfare-to-work is fundamentally two-sided. Drawing on a year-long ethnographic fieldwork with four unemployed people in rural Denmark, this paper examines how citizens themselves navigate the affective expectations embedded in activation regimes. Participants manage feelings of shame (Bjerg & Staunæs, 2011; Pultz, 2018), frustration, and hope (Connaughton & Pultz, 2025) presenting themselves as motivated and cooperative to comply with conditionality and engaged in processes framed as co-creation (Larsen & Caswell, 2022). Emotional composure, optimism, and self-responsibility become practical requirements for maintaining benefits and sustaining workable relations with the job centre. The study shows that unemployed citizens engage in emotional labour as they translate their experiences into institutionally legible forms. They explain missed appointments, engage with the moral implications of sanctions, and weigh what parts of their vulnerability can be or should be made visible. These everyday efforts are part of how the emotional dynamics of welfare encounters are constituted. Thus, emotional labour emerges not only as a demand placed on frontline workers, but as a relational process that extends into the lives of the unemployed themselves. By centering on the experiences of welfare recipients, we expand the conceptualisation of emotional and affective labour in activation policies. This paper highlights how emotional labour is relationally co-produced and socially differentiated, and how the legitimacy and functioning of welfare-to-work programmes depends on the often invisible emotion work performed by citizens themselves.

ABSTRACT. This paper examines two interconnected shifts in contemporary welfare state reform that fundamentally reshape street-level work in social and employment services. First, reforms inspired by New Public Governance (NPG) promote integrated service delivery as a response to fragmentation and increasing complexity in welfare governance. Second, these reforms advance relational and customized welfare practices by explicitly expanding professional autonomy at the street level. Drawing on long-term qualitative research in Denmark and the Netherlands, two welfare states often portrayed as frontrunners in NPG-oriented reform, we analyse how these ambitions are translated into organizational arrangements and everyday frontline practices.

The paper shows that efforts to reduce complexity through integration often have paradoxical effects. Rather than simplifying governance, they intensify hybrid arrangements by layering collaborative and relational ideals onto enduring structures of legality, performance management and welfare conditionality. At the same time, professional autonomy, which was previously treated as an unavoidable and often problematic feature of implementation to be constrained or disciplined, is transformed into an explicit reform ambition. Autonomy is now actively promoted as a prerequisite for responsiveness, customization and co-creation, without a corresponding reconfiguration of accountability frameworks.

Together, these dynamics constitute a double paradox in welfare state reform. Increased integration generates new forms of organizational and governance complexity, while the promotion of autonomy relocates tensions between responsiveness, accountability and equality to the street level. Discretion is thereby transformed from an individual coping mechanism into a collective and organizational governance challenge.

The paper contributes to street-level bureaucracy and NPG scholarship by reconceptualizing professional autonomy as an institutionally organized and managerially mediated resource embedded in hybrid accountability systems. While the analysis is empirically grounded in social and employment services, the paper addresses reform dynamics that are characteristic of NPG-inspired governance across multiple welfare domains. Key words: Welfare state reform, professional autonomy, complexity and customization, qualitative research, Denmark, Netherlands.

ABSTRACT. Recent research highlights that coordinating services for unemployed individuals with complex needs takes place in an increasingly contradictory and layered hybrid landscape (Andersen & Breidahl 2024). Coordinated services are assumed to improve outcomes through mechanisms such as individualization of support, mobilization of local actors, and the creation of innovative service combinations, that are key concerns in street-level bureaucracy and contemporary public management reforms.

There is, however, a lack of empirical research showing that coordination of local services has the expected positive labour market outcomes. This paper addresses this research gap by focusing on collaborating relationships at the municipality level, between the Norwegian Employment and Welfare offices (NAV) and other welfare agencies (e.g. health care, education), and the relationship between the NAV office and employers. We ask whether local variation in these two sets of collaborative relationships has a positive impact on the individual NAV users’ employment prospects, net of individual characteristics.

We use an underutilized approach which combines self-reported data from caseworkers in 194 Norwegian municipalities and administrative data from several national registries, encompassing all recipients of the main health-related benefit scheme (Work Assessment Allowance) from 2018 to 2023 (N = 30,903). These recipients have reduced work capacity and additional challenges like poor health and low skills, i.e. “complex needs”. We estimate multilevel linear models and present the results with municipality-level clustered standard errors.

Preliminary results indicate that, net of variation in individual characteristics like gender, age, former work experience, educational level etc., more collaboration between the local NAV office and the health services and the educational system has no significant impact on return to work, but that more collaboration with local employers has a significant positive impact on subsequent labour market participation. The findings suggest that collaboration with employers activates mechanisms distinct from intra-welfare collaboration.

ABSTRACT. Despite the central role of family in social work, there remains a considerable need for professionalisation. Although increasingly acknowledged, this need often stays conceptually vague in teaching, research, and practice. In street-level practice, the debate centres on the development and use of professional family concepts or models. Particularly in child and youth services, such concepts structure professional reasoning, guide interventions, and facilitate the transfer of knowledge into practice. In light of growing family diversity and ongoing policy changes, it can be assumed that societal and political developments shape how families are conceptualised and how professionals understand and enact their mandate. Reflecting on family concepts is therefore crucial for supporting social workers in responding to complex life situations. However, two issues remain unresolved. First, the notion of a "professionalized" concept of family lacks clear definition and integration with the theory of the professional mandate.; second, it is unclear whether social workers and parents share similar understandings of professional practice in family-related interventions. This paper addresses these gaps in three steps. First, it develops a theoretical framework for a multidimensional understanding of professional family social work, drawing on Müller-Hermann and Becker-Lenz’s theory of professionalisation. Second, it presents the validation of a 13-item scale measuring three core dimensions—professional ethos, working relationship, and case analysis/assessment—based on a quantitative online survey of 500 social workers and 500 parents in Germany, analysed using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). Third, it compares both groups to identify similarities and differences in their perceptions and offers initial interpretations. We conclude by discussing preliminary implications regarding what social workers require in order to act “professionally” in street-level interactions - from both their own perspective and that of their clients.

ABSTRACT. Street-level bureaucrats increasingly operate in governance settings marked by fragmentation, ambiguity and interdependence. In these contexts, frontline work requires continuous boundary spanning aimed not at coordination of tasks, but at the ongoing alignment of knowledge, goals, resources and interests across organizational and professional boundaries. Boundary spanning has therefore become a routine and necessary dimension of contemporary street-level practice, particularly in welfare and activation policies where outcomes depend on inter-organizational sense-making rather than formal control. Despite this necessity, street-level organizations struggle to mobilize and embed boundary-spanning knowledge in everyday practice. This paper argues that these difficulties can be understood as a triple learning challenge that systematically undermines professionals’ capacity and willingness to learn boundary-spanning work. First, street-level bureaucrats are expected to act reflexively and relationally while operating in organizational environments dominated by performance metrics, compliance demands and risk avoidance, leaving little space for reflective experimentation. Second, boundary-spanning professionalism represents an inherently ambiguous form of practice, lacking stable role definitions, shared standards and a clear professional identity at the frontline. Third, attempts to apply boundary-spanning strategies expose professionals to tensions around legitimacy, loyalty and authority, which weakens confidence and encourages retreat into safer, rule-bound routines. Empirically, the paper draws on ten postgraduate action-learning trajectories involving street-level professionals, managers and public leaders working in complex actor constellations. Across these trajectories, recurring patterns of learning avoidance, stalled experimentation and selective disengagement emerge, directly linked to the triple learning challenge. In response, the paper develops a pedagogical approach to knowledge mobilization in street-level organizations that emphasizes situated, relational learning through apprenticeship-based trajectories with experienced practitioner-exemplars. This approach supports professionals to individually and collectively engage with, work through, and gradually overcome the triple learning challenge that constrains boundary-spanning practice at the frontline.

ABSTRACT. Across welfare states, street level bureaucrats play a decisive role in how activation policies and employment services take shape in practice. Their discretionary decisions have direct impact on citizens’ access to income support, labour market participation, and other social rights. As state agents, they implement legislation with limited resources; as citizen agents, they respond to the particular situations and needs of citizens; and as moral agents, they continually make normative choices within their discretionary space. Fulfilling this public task therefore demands public professionalism. Universities of Applied Sciences educate a substantial share of these frontline workers, raising the question: How can higher education contribute to their professionalisation?

Activation policies in many countries are being revised due to concerns about effectiveness, fairness, and the human dimension. Such reforms underscore the central role of street level bureaucrats in translating abstract policy goals into concrete interactions. Their work requires not only technical competence but also the ability to make and justify context sensitive normative judgments within legal institutional and organisational structures.

Professionalisation efforts in employment services often focus on enhancing individual skills. Yet enabling professionals to act in socially just ways requires a broader perspective, including Normative professionalization - reflective engagement with the moral dimensions of practice– and collective professionalisation—strengthening shared norms and professional identity.

To address these dimensions, we developed a minor programme for current and future professionals in employment and income support. This collaborative initiative — uniting researchers and lecturers of Social Work and Applied Law, professionals, managers, clients, and SAM, the Duthc professional association — integrates multiple forms of professionalisation to foster professional agency and justice oriented service delivery. We reflect on this approach and explore how educational innovation can support the professionalisation of frontline practice within evolving activation regimes.

ABSTRACT. Research on street-level bureaucracy has emphasised how frontline discretion shapes policy outcomes, while studies on digital governance have examined how algorithmic tools constrain, enable or reconfigure discretion. This paper shifts the analytical focus, investigating how implementation itself – through the instruments it mobilises – shapes emergent forms of professionality. We therefore conceptualise street-level implementation as a process redefining roles, boundaries and meanings of (public) work. Empirically, we examine the implementation of the recent Italian Active Labour Market Policy reform in Public Employment Services. This setting illuminates how “professionals without a profession” operate in a hybrid occupational field, intersecting administrative and relational mandates. Here, the digital profiling tool introduced under the reform is analytically relevant because it makes visible the pressures workers interpret, negotiate and sometimes contest. Our analysis explores professionalisation in the making across three dimensions: (1) workers’ discourses about the reform and the digital profiling tool; (2) their implementation practices; and (3) their understandings of their role. Ethnographic evidence (96 days of observation and 20 interviews) shows that the digital tool is framed ambivalently: as a source of coherence and legitimacy, yet also as a constraint on relational judgement. Operators develop shared ways of adjusting and navigating the tool, stabilising collective practices within local offices. These practices rely on their understanding of their role and competences, framed as expertise grounded in experience, relational engagement and pragmatic reasoning. We conceptualise this process as “organising professionalisation”: expertise does not precede organisational arrangements but is forged through them, with shared practices emerging within organisational contexts to make frontline work meaningful and sustainable under evolving digital and policy constraints.