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Active labor market policy is talked into being in meetings between street-level bureaucrats and vulnerable unemployed. Recent developments in the street-level bureaucracy literature has identified potentials in more ethnographic work and a closer attention to responsiveness as a core value of the frontline work (Brodkin 2012; Zacka 2017). Contributing to this, the analytical perspective in this article is informed by conversation analysis and data consist of naturally occurring institutional interactions. The patterns of talk consist of both general and concrete talk. The general talk is broad and unclear, but institutionally and politically legitimate. The concrete talk is characterized by words specifically addressing work places, wishes, and experiences of the unemployed client. General talk function is to keep a labor market perspective acceptable and relevant, even when talking to vulnerable clients. This is, however, insufficient in a policy implementation perspective, as it is the concrete talk that enables the parties to negotiate and promote possible positive policy outcomes in ways that are responsive to the needs and wishes of the individual client.

AbstractActive labor market policy is talked into being in meetings between street‐level bureaucrats and vulnerable unemployed. Recent developments in the street‐level bureaucracy literature has identified potentials in more ethnographic work and a closer attention to responsiveness as a core value of the frontline work (Brodkin 2012; Zacka 2017). Contributing to this, the analytical perspective in this article is informed by conversation analysis and data consist of naturally occurring institutional interactions. The patterns of talk consist of both general and concrete talk. The general talk is broad and unclear, but institutionally and politically legitimate. The concrete talk is characterized by words specifically addressing work places, wishes, and experiences of the unemployed client. General talk function is to keep a labor market perspective acceptable and relevant, even when talking to vulnerable clients. This is, however, insufficient in a policy implementation perspective, as it is the concrete talk that enables the parties to negotiate and promote possible positive policy outcomes in ways that are responsive to the needs and wishes of the individual client.

The need for professional reflection has been argued extensively in social work literature. A separate literature has demonstrated the potential of using conversation analytic research (CA) in interventions seeking to inform professional practice in social and health care. Nevertheless, we know little about how social workers actually do 'reflection' and how CA can be used to facilitate reflection, specifically. The objective of this paper is to examine how CA can be used in interventions that develop reflective professional practice. Our dataset consists of audio recordings of 21 mutual learning and innovation platforms, taking place as part of a collaboration between researchers and five Danish social work agencies. We use CA to examine how researchers and professionals reflect on social work interactions. We find that the use of CA (a) makes professionals aware of aspects of practice that are often performed in routinised ways and (b) provides concrete starting points for the non-evaluative reflection on such practice. The paper has implications for researchers and professionals looking to utilise CA in developing reflective practice as it outlines one model for intervention, demonstrates the detailed ways in which reflection may be accomplished in interaction and discusses the organisational requirements of such interventions.

When looking at clients with a long history of unemployment and substantial health and/or social problems, stories of success (in terms of moving from being on cash benefits to getting a job) are limited. Thus, when a client does manage to gain employment or enter education, it represents an unusual1story of success seen from a political, organisational and individual perspective. In this article, we investigate empirically what can be learnt about current active labour market policies from these client cases. Methodologically this is explored through interviews with former clients who have managed to find a job despite dealing with complex health or social issues, and interviews with their former caseworkers. Thus, the article aims to provide insights into the crucial elements in making the move from vulnerable unemployed to being ready for a job, as well as finding it and keeping it.

EnglishThis article focuses on the use of the vignette method in social worker teams and thereby collective or shared aspects of practice, which cannot be reached through a presentation of a vignette separately to the individual members of the team. A video vignette case was presented to four social worker teams in connection with a focus group session in order to compare the teams' assessment of the client. The negotiations in the focus groups accentuate how teams interpret the same client in different ways and actualize questions as to where these differences stem from and what they are related to. The results support two methodological conclusions that we discuss in the article: that it is beneficial to use vignette in a multi-method design when comparing teams and that a focus group context is an advantage, when the characteristics of the team should be accentuated, while individual differences become secondary.DanishDenne artikel sætter fokus påbrug af vignettemetoden i socialarbejderteam og dermed kollektive aspekter af praksis, der ikke kan studeres ved at præsentere en vignette separat for enkelte medlemmer af et team. En videovignettesamtale mellem socialarbejder og klient blev præsenteret for fire socialarbejderteam i forbindelse med et fokusgruppeinterview med henblik påat sammenligne teamenes vurderinger af klienten. Forhandlingerne i fokusgrupperne synliggjorde, at teamene fortolker den samme klient forskelligt og førte til spørgsmål om, hvor disse forskelle stammer fra og hvad de er relateret til. Resultaterne understøtter to metodologiske konklusioner, som vi diskuterer i artiklen. For det første er det gavnligt at bruge videovignettemetoden i et multimetodedesign, når sigtet er at sammenligne teamenes vurderinger. For det andet er fokusgruppemetoden en fordel, når interessen er rettet mod at studere karakteristika ved teamene i stedet for individuelle forskelle.

Dorte Caswell and Ida Schultz: People in the Street

Bag people are different from other people who live on the street. Pictures of bag people are employed both literally and metaphorically to illustrate homelessness, but there is scant research in Denmark about this group of homeless. The purpose of this article is to shed light on the everyday life of the bag people of Copenhagen. The article is based on a "reflexive field study" employing the reflexive sociology of Bourdieu and symbolic interactionism of Becker and Goffman. By using these approaches it was possible to dissolve the analytical dichotomy of normality, which seems ever present in research on marginalisation and social exclusion. The results show how resourceful and structured the "marginalised" and "socially excluded" bag people also are.

Economic sanctions have gained more political legitimacy and are being more widely used as a tool to improve the willingness of unemployed welfare recipients to participate in activities within the framework of active labour market policy (ALMP). The focus of this article is the use of economic sanctions on cash benefit recipients in Denmark, Quantitative analyses show a substantial increase in the use of economic sanctions in Denmark, including sanctions on those who are categorised as having problems in addition to unemployment. In this article we will direct our attention to responses from both the organisational and individual level regarding the implementation of sanctions. Empirical material consists of interviews with managers and frontline social workers in municipalities with a high number of sanctions. We argue that organisations matter in shaping street-level behaviour, resulting in substantial differences in the use of sanctions from one municipality to another.

Economic sanctions have gained more political legitimacy and are being more widely used as a tool to improve the willingness of unemployed welfare recipients to participate in activities within the framework of active labour market policy (ALMP). The focus of this article is the use of economic sanctions on cash benefit recipients in Denmark. Quantitative analyses show a substantial increase in the use of economic sanctions in Denmark, including sanctions on those who are categorised as having problems in addition to unemployment. In this article we will direct our attention to responses from both the organisational and individual level regarding the implementation of sanctions. Empirical material consists of interviews with managers and frontline social workers in municipalities with a high number of sanctions. We argue that organisations matter in shaping street-level behaviour, resulting in substantial differences in the use of sanctions from one municipality to another.Research on street-level bureaucracy focuses on the role of organisations when analysing street-level behaviour (Brodkin 2011; Soss et al. 2011b). This paper draws on this research, looking at organisational structure and how social workers and managers argue for the use of economic sanctions. The research question is: Which organisational practices make a high level of economic sanctions possible? Empirical material consist of documents and qualitative case studies in two municipalities, were interviews with managers and frontline social workers were conducted. We make the argument that organisations matter in shaping street-level behaviour and coping, enabling substantial differences in the use of sanctions from one municipality to another. Our analysis show, that organisations are balancing the dilemma between individual discretion and policy compliance by making organisational structure overruling the discretion, while arguing that frontline discretion is very central when legitimising economic sanctions.

The reforms of the social and employment services that have swept across most of the developed world since the 1990s have enormously expanded the groups of citizens receiving active employment measures. Nevertheless, up until now, most countries have only seen limited results from enhancing the labour market participation of the most vulnerable groups. We argue that the goal of including a greater share of the harder-to-place unemployed in the labour market is not likely to be achieved through the tried and tested ways of developing knowledge, policy and practice. Rather, we propose a different approach to generating and exchanging the necessary knowledge for developing active employment policy and practice. As an alternative to the evidence-based knowledge paradigm, we set up a model for knowledge production that is made through co-operation between practice and research. This model investigates the potential for integrated services and for co-production by acknowledging the importance of the experiences of frontline professionals and clients in developing employment services.

This themed issue contributes to European research on the role of front-line work in the implementation of welfare-to-work policies. A number of factors underline the relevance of such study. First, the focus on activating and disciplining the unemployed seen in many countries may on the surface look similar. However, a closer look at these policies and how they unfold in different contexts reveals many and interesting differences. While all contain a certain level of disciplining and coercive elements, they also to a varying degree contain elements that focus on the upgrading of skills, building human capital and providing other types of support in promoting labour-market participation. In turn, these policies contain both people processing and people changing technologies that are used for different aspects of policy delivery. In addition, policy developments have gradually expanded the client group of these policies, including more hard-to-place unemployed, thus making the client group more heterogeneous. Finally, we have seen a strong political belief in the positive effects of using punitive sanctions. Research supports this belief when it comes to clients with high employability and limited problems besides unemployment, but the knowledge-base is rather shaky when it comes to the hard-to-place clients with substantial problems. Using punitive sanctions or other disciplining or coercive measures in frontline work has caused controversy and resistance. In order to qualify our understanding of welfare-to-work policies, we need to take a step closer to where these policies are translated into reality for the target group.

In the Danish employment system social workers have the important institutional task of trying to establish a labour market perspective for each cash benefit recipient, even when the client has other problems in addition to unemployment. The client's 'capacity for work' must be documented and described. In this article we examine the dilemmas that occur in the interaction between clients and social workers. We show how clients try to evade the demands of labour market related identities in their negotiations with social workers. Our analysis focuses on two cases, selected from a vast qualitative material, that represent cases in which the client's dissatisfaction becomes apparent. The results indicate that clients are active participants who resist, protest against and sometimes even avoid the identities offered by the employment system.

The paper explores recent developments in Australian and Danish unemployment policies with a special focus on the technologies used to classify and categorize unemployed people on government benefits. Using governmentality as our theoretical framework, we consider the implications of reducing complex social problems to statistical scores and differentiated categories — forms of knowledge that diminish the capacity to think about unemployment as a collective problem requiring collective solutions. What we argue is that classification systems, which are part and parcel of welfare state administration, are becoming more technocratic in the way in which they divide the population into different categories of risk.