Guest editorial: knowledge, skills and values in welfare to work services with vulnerable clients

ABSTRACT

This thematic issue adresses the knowledge, skills and values in welfare-to-work programmes (WtW) with disadvantaged clients. The aim of this special issue is to explore the status and development of professional work in WtW settings. In most countries, front-line workers implementing activation measures have no clear professional profile, and are recruited from a variety of professions, making them a heterogeneous group (Caswell et al. 2017). Scholars disagree on whether this area should be understood as de-professionalized administrative work, an emerging professional field of ‘activation work’, or a new specialization within social work (Andreassen and Natland 2022; Nothdurfter 2016; Nothdurfter and Olesen 2017; Raeymaeckers and Dierckx 2013; van Berkel, Penning de Vries, and van der Aa 2022). These questions are important because the way frontline workers manage the tensions between institutional policies and professional values in their everyday work is crucial for the welfare of vulnerable clients, and several studies have pointed to the importance of frontline workers’ orientations in the implementation of welfare policy (e.g. Gjersøe, Leseth, and Vilhena 2020; Jessen and Tufte 2014). Nevertheless, few studies have examined what forms of knowledge, skills and values are present and how they are shaped in the everyday work at the front lines of WtW.

KEYWORDS:

• Welfare-to-work
• activation work
• professionalism
• social work

Knowledge, skills and values in welfare-to-work programmes with disadvantaged clients

Welfare-to-work (WtW) is a policy orientation that has emerged and proliferated in Western welfare systems over the past three decades. WtW encompasses ‘programmes and services that are aimed at strengthening the employability, labour market or social participation of unemployed benefit recipients of working age, usually by combining enforcing/obligatory/disciplinary and enabling/supportive measures in varying extents’ (Caswell et al. 2017; for a comparative review, see, p. 3; Knotz 2018). This special issue seeks to engage with the everyday work of frontline staff who put this policy orientation into practice. We approach this through the concept of ‘activation work’, which refers to a wide range of activities and tasks taking place at street level, where WtW programmes and services are delivered to unemployed clients with the aim of facilitating their transition into employment or training programmes. Activation work can involve casework aimed at administering welfare benefits, engaging local employers in training placements, and providing coaching and upskilling for unemployed clients.

The introduction and/or increased emphasis on WtW has reconfigured the context of activation in several ways, including: (i) the content of activation policies, including the mix of supportive and disciplinary measures; (ii) the context of governance, including the improvement of performance measurement and control of policy implementation; (iii) the organizational context, including local approaches to the bureaucratic, managerial and professional organization of work; and finally (iv) the occupational context, including approaches to the professional training and orientation of frontline workers delivering programmes and services (Caswell et al. 2017; see also Clasen and Mascaro 2022).

The aim of this special issue is to explore the status and development of professional work in WtW settings. In most countries, front-line workers implementing activation measures have no clear professional profile, and are recruited from a variety of professions, making them a heterogeneous group (Caswell et al. 2017). Scholars disagree on whether this area should be understood as de-professionalized administrative work, an emerging professional field of ‘activation work’, or a new specialization within social work (Andreassen and Natland 2022; Nothdurfter 2016; Nothdurfter and Olesen 2017; Raeymaeckers and Dierckx 2013; van Berkel, Penning de Vries, and van der Aa 2022). These questions are important because the way frontline workers manage the tensions between institutional policies and professional values in their everyday work is crucial for the welfare of vulnerable clients, and several studies have pointed to the importance of frontline workers’ orientations in the implementation of welfare policy (e.g. Gjersøe, Leseth, and Vilhena 2020; Jessen and Tufte 2014). Nevertheless, few studies have examined what forms of knowledge, skills and values are present and how they are shaped in the everyday work at the front lines of WtW.

The (social) problem of unemployment

In this context, the term ‘disadvantaged clients’ refers to a very heterogeneous group of people who share the common problem of being unemployed and who face more barriers to obtaining work than other groups of unemployed people. Their heterogeneity consists of differences in the factors that may limit their chances of finding a job. These may be limitations in an individual’s ability to perform at work, such as mental illness and/or disability; circumstantial disadvantages, such as single parenthood and geographical location, which may limit their access to suitable employment; and disadvantages related to stigma, which may have to do with individual characteristics such as ethnicity, age, and religion.

In linking disadvantage to work opportunities, we recognize that labour market participation plays a central role in the well-being and socioeconomic standing of individuals and families. Furthermore, unemployment is associated with a wide range of problems, such as poverty, poor mental and physical health, low well-being and social exclusion (e.g. Norström et al. 2019). Sage (2011, 16) even argues that the link is causal, with unemployment exerting an independent psychosocial effect on individuals. Finally, research has shown inequalities in who becomes – and stays – unemployed (e.g. Røe 2011, on ethnicity; OECD, 2022, on disability). Unemployment is thus a social problem that is closely connected to a range of other social problems, and has a disproportionate impact on people with disabilities, non-majority ethnicities, low socioeconomic status, and so on.

At the same time, WtW policy developments have led to a gradual but consistent expansion of the target groups of activation policies, so that groups that previously were exempted from work and activation may now be treated as in need of work. With the emergence and institutionalization of an emphasis on employability in many Western welfare states, the goal of enhancing people’s transition to work has either supplemented or replaced other goals of more general social policies (Caswell et al. 2017, 3; Garstein and Jacobsson 2004), hence the relevance of the term ‘welfare-to-work’. This iteration conflates the complex connections between unemployment and other social problems, as well as the role of employment in individual well-being, so that unemployment becomes the only problem (and solution) for public welfare services, and employment (of any kind) is equated with welfare. WtW policies have been criticized for undermining the welfare state by placing conditions on social support to disadvantaged client groups (e.g. Wright and Patrick 2019), and for creating conditions for work that challenge professional norms and modes of work (e.g. Van Berkel 2019). The themed section of this issue focuses on the latter, while the additional articles (to some extent) share a focus on the former.

Occupational status of activation work

Professional work in WtW settings has mostly been studied in terms of the casework involved in managing clients’ access to benefits and other potential resources. This literature refers to workers as caseworkers, frontline workers, street-level bureaucrats and/or activation workers, and focuses primarily on the bureaucratic role of policy implementation.

While such work is often taken to be the domain of the social work profession, it is commonly recognized that caseworkers represent a wide variety of professional backgrounds. Nyheim, Stray and Thomassen (2023) characterize activation work as a practice-based profession, downplaying the influence of educational background in favour of organizational, managerial and other contextual factors that shape WtW. Similarly, van Berkel et al. (2022) view activation work as the practice of the activation profession (cf. Green 2009), thereby placing less emphasis on the educational background of front-line workers and understanding activation work as a multidimensional activity that can be practiced more or less professionally along eight dimensions. Noting the low degree of institutionalization of the activation profession, Van Berkel, van der Aa and van Gestel (2010) have described activation workers as ‘professionals without a profession’, making activation work an individual project rather than a shared professional practice.

Discretionary practices and tensions with WtW reforms are recurring themes in this literature. For example, Andreassen (2019) problematizes the non-professional status of front-line activation staff. She argues that there is an imbalance between the complexity of activation work and the skills and knowledge of front-line staff. While the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV), as in many other welfare states (e.g. Haikkola 2019), has sought to limit staff autonomy, Andreassen argues for the importance of increasing the professionalization of WtW in order to strengthen the decision-making capacity of front-line staff. Andreassen and Natland (2022) have found that front-line managers emphasize the need for front-line staff to possess sound professional judgement in order to meet clients’ needs. However, this emphasis on professionalism appears to conflict with the simultaneous emphasis on de-professionalizing measures such as standardization, performance reviews (Andreassen and Natland 2022.) and normative orientations towards welfare conditionality (Sadeghi and Terum 2023).

Social work and activation work

Activation work has been widely discussed within the field of social work. The link between activation and social work can be seen against the background of attempts to activate social assistance recipients in the Nordic countries and other welfare states (Knotz 2018; Minas et al. 2018). The reception has been mixed. In the early 2000s, critics of the ‘activation turn’ argued that it goes against the foundations of social work (Bauman 2000; Lorenz 2001). However, the academic discussion has gradually become more diverse, pointing to both opportunities and problems in the intertwining of social work and WtW. A key issue in this discussion is the question of empowerment.

On the one hand, the economic and social benefits of employment can be used to argue for an emphasis on employability. From this perspective, the increased autonomy that can come with employment is an important reason for helping disadvantaged clients to overcome their unequal access to the labour market (cf. Hansen and Natland 2017). On the other hand, contemporary labour market policies based on WtW tend to make economic support conditional on participation in mandatory activities. In other words, if clients refuse to participate in activation programmes, they may face a reduction in economic support, such as social assistance. From a social work perspective, conditionality has been heavily criticized for undermining the idea of human rights and social citizenship based on economic security (Rogowski 2010). Another way of approaching the issue is that the empowerment debate, within WtW, illustrates more general and inherited tensions that arise in social work practice due to the asymmetric power relations between social workers and clients (Andersen 2019; Dall 2020; see also Raitakari, Juhila, and Räsänen 2019). From this ‘middle position’, the tensions that arise when emphasizing WtW in social work are not unique to this field, but are a feature of social work in general.

How best to respond to these tensions is also a matter of discussion. In line with critical social work, some scholars point to the potential for social workers to be a source of resistance. Hyslop (2018) argues that social workers can engage in discursive resistance in their everyday practice. Observations of such resistance in a Danish context have been made by Rasmussen (2018). Beyond discursive resistance, Vandekinderen et al. (2020) identify additional strategies to address the tensions of social-work-based activation, including focusing on process rather than product and ‘working in a connecting way’. Tabin and Perriard (2016) illustrate how the actual implementation of ‘active social policies’ is modified or reinterpreted by social workers, as they are able to develop more holistic services, while Hansen and Natland (2017) and Dall (2020) illustrate how social workers attempt to balance between client and institutional orientations.

These studies highlight individual discretion as a core feature and skill of professional work. On the one hand, in many welfare states, discretion seems to have been restricted by the managerial changes accompanying WtW reforms. On the other hand, although several studies have problematized the prerequisites for professional (social) work, scholars acknowledge that discretion is unavoidable, because of complex goal conflicts and acts of categorization and assessment that cannot be easily managed (Roets et al. 2012). This understanding of the persistence of discretion stems from the work of Lipsky (2010) and later scholars (e.g. Zacka 2017) who point to the ‘exaggerated death of discretion’ (cf. Evans and Harris 2004).

New occupational developments around employer engagement and work inclusion

During the last decade, employer engagement (EE), understood here as ‘the active involvement of employers in addressing the societal challenge of promoting the labour-market participation of vulnerable groups’ (van Berkel et al. 2017, 505), has emerged as a novel area of frontline work in WtW settings (Ingold 2018). The emergence of EE as a professional field in the Nordic countries has been accompanied by an emphasis on the methods of supported employment, an approach to work inclusion that favours providing personalized support not only to a person with a disability, but also to the person’s employer and co-workers, in order to establish the person in the workplace (Gustafsson, Peralta, and Danermark 2018; Wehmann 2012).

The EE literature has focused on the knowledge and skills needed to meaningfully engage employers in activation efforts (e.g. Enehaug et al. 2022). Studies have stressed the need for ‘market knowledge’, often derived from EE consultants’ extensive experience of business negotiations, business management, coaching, recruitment, and sales (Bakkeli and Breit 2021, 95). Several authors have characterized EE consultants as ‘brokers’ between public services and the market (Aksnes 2019; Gustafsson, Peralto, and Danermark 2013; Raspanti and Sarius 2021) or as boundary spanners working at the interface of their own organization and partnering companies (Ingold 2018). Therefore, building, maintaining and utilizing networks of employers when working with individual clients is considered to be their main activity (e.g. Frøyland 2019; Glover and Frounfelker 2011; Gustafsson, Peralto, and Danermark 2013; Lexén, Emmelin, and Bejerholm 2016) and relational work is considered to be at the core of EE consultants’ skill set (Dall, Larsen, and Madsen 2023; Frøyland 2019; Gjersøe and Strand 2021).

Several studies have revealed tensions between the methodological principles of (specific methods of) EE work and the realities of WtW organizations (Bakkeli 2023; Frøyland 2019; Hardonk and Halldórsdóttir 2021). To some extent we see the same challenges to professionalism when it comes to the caseworkers, but the professionalism of EE consultants is rarely problematized, perhaps because EE staff have even more diverse professional backgrounds than caseworkers. The profession of social work is rarely mentioned in this context, and when it is, it is used to illustrate what EE work is not. Sadeghi and Fekjær (2019) found significant but small differences between social workers and non-social workers in their self-assessments of ‘market competency’, which is similar to the ‘market knowledge’ mentioned above.

Digitalising activation work

As in many other sectors of welfare services, activation work has been subject to digitalization. The dominant area of digitalization at present is the administration of social assistance and social insurance, i.e. the process of assessing the eligibility of unemployed people for financial assistance and the amount of support they receive. In a study of the digitalization of NAV, Breit et al. (2021) found that it enabled front-line staff to ‘outsource’ parts of the administration to clients. In other words, the digitalization of services left clients with greater responsibility to ‘co-produce’ services. On the one hand, this could be empowering for more resourceful clients, according to the authors. On the other hand, the authors acknowledge that it could be problematic for marginalized client groups. Turning to the clients’ perspectives, Finne et al. (2023) found that young adults who received digital services through NAV had mixed experiences of them. Some clients appreciated the digital services, because they perceived them as less stigmatizing than visiting a NAV office. Other clients, however, felt that the digital services were inadequate, as they replaced the personal (and necessary) relationship with a caseworker.

Introducing computers in a workplace requires compartmentalizing tasks into smaller pieces. In human service organizations, this can lead to a compartmentalized understanding of clients. In a study on employment counselling, Løberg and Egeland (2023) found that the implementation of digital tools created fragmented representations of clients among counsellors. Although the digitalization of services does not make it impossible to build trusting and productive relationships between front-line staff and clients, the authors stress that it does require front-line workers to adopt new strategies and mindsets. In a similar vein, Ranerup and Henriksen (2022), in a study of automated social assistance administration in Sweden, propose a hybrid model in which humans and computers bring different abilities to the table (see also Ranerup and Svensson 2022).

The themed section

In the themed section, we aim to raise questions about the state of activation work around disadvantaged populations. The literature on professional work in WtW settings has tended to focus on how the disciplinary aspects of WTt create tensions or are managed by workers, while less attention has been given to outlining more supportive aspects or practices, or approaches that resist efforts to de-professionalize the occupation.

In the article ‘Professional responses to exogenous change: the social work profession and the jurisdictional domain opened up by the Norwegian welfare-to-work reform’ Alm Andreassen & Breit discuss the question of why social work has not positioned itself more clearly in the area of WtW. Tapping into sociology of professions, they discuss the social work profession´s response to changes in the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration that increased the professional jurisdiction for social workers, to also include activation measures. Opposite to the common image in the sociology of professions, the Norweigan social workers did not struggle to expand its jurisdiction but rather refrained from activation work to defend their core jurisdiction.

Nordesjö, Ulmestig and Scaramuzzino as well as Schellenberg Strømhaug and Halvorsen examine different aspects of how the work is affected by digitalization in frontline work. In the article ‘Ambivalence in digital social work: giving advice about welfare-to-work programmes to unemployed clients’, Schellenberg Strømhaug and Halvorsen examine the digital, written interactions between counsellors and clients. The study illustrates in a number of ways how the professional role of caseworkers is caught between the demands of policy, on the one hand, and the needs and autonomy of clients, on the other. The authors shed light on the interactional challenges of addressing such potentially ambivalent issues in a digital counselling setting, where asynchronous and written interaction transforms the client-counsellor relationship.

In ‘Saving time for activation or relationships? The legitimation and performance of automated decision-making for time efficiency in two street-level bureaucracies serving poor and unemployed clients’, Nordesjö et al. look into digitalized automated decision making (ADM), one of the aims of which is to make the administration of social assistance more efficient, thereby freeing up caseworkers’ time for personal attention to clients’ needs. However, the authors show that while ADM may allow caseworkers to spend more time with clients, this is not necessarily perceived as improving the quality of their work. In their examination of two Swedish cases, the authors show how supportive and disciplinary aspects of WtW are divided between professional roles (caseworkers or job coaches) and/or between different modalities (digital or face-to-face), and argue that this division is a consequence of how the goals of ADM are formulated and performed locally.

In ‘Reflection on action by activation workers as professional learning strategy’, van Buren-Bense & van der Aa explore the potential of reflection on action to enhance the professional learning of activation workers who are required to assess complex, diverse and value laden situations in order to put individualized activation interventions into practice. The authors argue that reflection on action can be a nuanced approach to helping activation workers to better handle the professional challenges inherent in their work, and that it offers a model for how to introduce such reflection into their professional practice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).