Organizing local social service measures to counteract long-term social assistance receipt. What works? Experiences from Sweden

ABSTRACT

Active labour market policies and programs (ALMPs) have over the last decades been established as main instruments to promote the transition from welfare to work. In this article we study strategies employed by Swedish municipalities to help recipients ending spells of social assistance take-up. By using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data we try to identify which approaches stand out as more successful than others with respect to social assistance duration. We have formed pairs of municipalities similar in important respects, but with different social assistance exit rates as predicted by a statistical model. Then we conducted case studies in the selected municipalities’ social assistance units, gathering information on how work is carried out and organized. Information was collected by semi-structured interviews with department managers and front-line social workers. In the interviews we identified various elements of practice that emerged as relevant, suggesting that shorter spells follow from activation with a focus on human resource development, programmes targeted at young adults, well-functioning collaboration, and use of sanctions or an overall approach characterized by systemized efforts.

ABSTRAKT

Arbetsmarknadsaktivering har under de senaste decennierna etablerats som ett huvudinstrument för att främja övergången från socialbidrag till arbete. I föreliggande artikel studerar vi vilka strategier som används av svenska kommuner för att hjälpa mottagarna till självförsörjning. Genom en kombination av kvantitativa och kvalitativa analyser identifieras vilka metoder och organisatoriska strukturer som framstår som mer framgångsrika än andra när det gäller detta. På grundval av en nationellt heltäckande kvantitativ analys av individuella socialbidragsförlopp har vi bildat par av kommuner som liknar varandra i viktiga avseenden, men som uppvisar olika mönster avseende bidragstagandets varaktighet. I nästa led har dessa kommuner studerats i fallstudier med fokus på hur arbetet utförs och organiseras. Data samlades in genom semistrukturerade intervjuer med avdelningschefer och handläggare. I intervjuerna sökte vi identifiera vi olika typer av praxis. Resultaten visade på att kommuner med jämförelsevis mindre av varaktigt bidragstagande i jämförelse med överiga kommuner hade tydligare inslag av aktivering med fokus på utveckling av humankapital, program riktade till unga vuxna, väl fungerande samarbete med arbetsförmedling samt användning av sanktioner när det gällde medverkan i programmen. Dessutom präglades dessa kommuner av en högre generell ambitionsnivå samt mer systematiserade arbetsformer.

KEYWORDS:

• Social assistance
• duration
• activation
• Sweden
• social services

NYCKELORD:

• Socialbidrag
• varaktighet
• aktivering
• Sverige
• socialtjänst

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Åke Bergmark is a professor of Social Work at Stockholm University, Department of Social Work. His research areas are social assistance, social services organisation and welfare state structures. He is also chief editor of International Journal of Social Welfare and a member of the National Comission for Equity in Health.

Olof Bäckman is an associate professor of sociology at the Swedish Institute for Social Research (SOFI), Stockholm University. His research mainly concerns poverty, crime and social exclusion in a life course perspective with a particular focus on the youth-to-adulthood transition. How structural factors such as social policy, educational policy and the economic cycle intervene in processes of cumulative disadvantage is an important theme in his research.

Renate Minas, associate professor of social work at Stockholm University, Department of Social Work. Her fields of interest are welfare state reforms in Sweden and in European countries with a special focus on social assistance schemes and activation policies from a governance perspective. She is in particularly interested in questions related to social inclusion and poverty with a focus on institutions and organizational solutions.

Notes

1 The major cities of Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmoe and municipalities with less than 15,000 inhabitants have been excluded from this selection step. This since the social services organisation here is decentralized down to smaller geographical units where no statistics has been available for our preparatory quantitative analysis.

2 For example, young people are more likely than old people both to enter and to exit social assistance dependency (Bergmark & Bäckman, 2004).