Prevention at the Front Line: How home nurses, pedagogues, and teachers transform public worry into decisions on special efforts

Abstract

Within recent years, Denmark has implemented a number of preventive policies based on the line of reasoning that it is better to prevent than to solve problems. Preventive policies express political intentions aimed at solving core welfare state problems, but policy goals are ambiguous and vague, and policy tools are often poorly specified. Thus, front-line workers (FLWs) are pinpointed as key persons to implement these policies, because they hold a ‘specific knowledge’ about and ‘close acquaintance’ with citizens. In the article, we explore different types of front-line work, implementing preventive policies, and identifying children in need of a special effort.

Key words:

• Street-level bureaucracy
• discretion
• preventive policy

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers as well as Michael Lipsky, Deborah Stone, Steven Maynard-Moody, Michael Musheno, Peter Hupe, Aurelien Buffat, Joe Soss, Michael Hill, Søren Winther, and Vibeke Lehmann Nielsen for fruitful comments and discussions.

Notes

1. We know home nurses work in the most informal settings compared to teachers and pedagogues, however they meet families in a limited amount of time compared to teachers and pedagogues which we expect to balance out any bias towards more personal engagement.

2. The notation refers to interviewees. The first letter refers to profession (Home Nurse, Pedagogue, Teacher), the second letter to the municipality (A, B, C, or D).

3. Note here that all teachers are teaching what in Denmark is called ‘Introductory grades’, typically the 0th to the 3rd grade.

4. The following analysis is built on questions C.1, C.2, and C.3 (see Appendix 1).