Editorial: waiting in and for the welfare state

This special issue of the European Journal of Social Work takes its point of departure in experiences of waiting in and waiting for the welfare state. Waiting is in many ways at the core of social work. Not only do service users wait for various forms of decisions, information and resources, but social workers themselves also wait: for decisions from others, for information or for resources. In this special issue, we aim to, theoretically and empirically, contribute to a broader debate on how waiting in assorted ways is embedded into the fabric and practice of social work, and how people's access to social rights and welfare is regulated and limited through different forms of waiting. We understand waiting as a phenomenon at the core of social work, challenging us to reflect upon issues of power and the distribution of resources such as welfare rights and time. Waiting can hence be used as a lens to understand the relationship between social work, service users and the welfare state. Our ambition has not been to define ‘waiting’, but to openly ask: ‘What is waiting in social work; how is it experienced; what are the consequences of being forced to wait; and how come this is such a common activity?’

There is a growing body of literature exploring waiting as a specific phenomenon. While there are differences in terms of topics and theories, this research shows that waiting is a specific form of temporal practice that requires its own attention. Among other things researchers have explored the relationship between bordering processes and wating, (Jacobsen et al., 2020; Sager & Öberg, 2017); others have explored the relationship between waiting and resistance (Jul Sørensen et al., 2019); how waiting shapes poverty and vulnerability (Anderson, 2019; Auyero, 2012; Gatta, 2018), and how waiting is inscribed in neoliberal and colonial economic regimes (Bastian & Hassan, 2019; Janeja & Bandak, 2018; Khosravi, 2021; Ozolina, 2019).

In different ways the articles in this special issue explore and illustrate that waiting is created at the juncture between welfare areas. Many of the articles are therefore inspired by theoretical debates in research fields closely related to, but not at the core of, social work research, such as critical border studies, queer studies, critical race studies, feminist studies. With this special issue, we therefore, want to contribute to a theoretical discussion that places social work research and practice in dialogue with other fields of research. One valuable experience we have done during the time working with this special issue is how fruitful it is for social work research to be in constant dialogue with other research fields in order to fully grasp the complexity and diversity of a more “general” social phenomena like waiting.

It is impossible to grasp all forms of waiting in and for the welfare state in one issue, but hopefully, this special issue can be the beginning of a broader theoretical and empirical debate on how waiting in different ways in emedded into social work.

We primarily highlight three aspects of waiting that we think are central for social work research and practices: Waiting as bureaucratic violence and withdrawal of welfare rights; The everyday experiences of waiting; and Resisting and negotiating waiting – ‘unwaiting’ waiting. While these three aspects, of course, intersect and overlap and hence cannot be completely separated, they highlight how waiting operates and is done at different societal levels, from the organisations to the everyday, from the nation state to the local social work office, and in different ways they show that waiting is one of the ways of experiencing the effects of power (Bourdieu, 2000).

Waiting as bureaucratic violence and the withdrawal of welfare rights

A central theme explored in this special issue is how people who in some way or another need welfare, for example, healthcare, asylum systems, support to employment, are exposed to waiting through different forms of bureaucratic violence that inflict both harm and pain. As several of the articles show, to be keept waiting can mean a withdrawal of rights.

Waiting in relation to service provision and other bureaucratic processes is not new, but it takes specific forms in times of welfare state austerity and neoliberal policies. In this context, many of the articles propose that waiting is used as a measure of control, repression and punishment. In relation to social work practice, we can identify a tension between bureaucratic procedures needing to take their time, waiting as a form of bureaucratic violence, and waiting as a way to (indirectly) withdraw social rights.

In her article Philipson Isaac explores how the new regulation of migration in Sweden can be read in terms of time dispossession, that is, a temporal dynamic taking people's time and future. The migration bureaucracy, she argues, invokes a temporal dispossession through the use of temporal governance. An interesting finding is that the logics of NPM (New Public Management) within the migration complex constantly construct time as a scarce resource and create institutional norms of acceleration. State officials are constantly pushed to adhere to commodified time that is continually measured, rushed and constrained, and the people seeking asylum are continually positioned as ‘outside of time’ through temporalities that render it impossible to be on time. Central to Philipson Isaac's argument is that migration bureaucracy dispossesses both state officials and those seeking asylum time, yet with very different effects on the distribution of life chances for each.

Conflicting temporal logics are also a central theme in Palmqvist's article. Palmqvist shows that neoliberal reforms of the eldercare in Sweden have caused a fragmentation of services between several actors. This fragmentation leaves the care users to wait for home care service on a daily basis, thus circumscribing their ability to control their own lives. According to the author, the concept of crip-time can help us explore the bodily temporal experience of waiting for care in an abelist and neoliberal context, where the needs of the care users are forced to align with the logic of the market and where all types of time become streamlined.

Several articles in this issue explore how waiting is used as a tool for the state to limit access to social rights through long periods of waiting. Jansson-Keshavarz and Nordling examine the implementation of the Settlement Act, which makes reception and accommodation of newly settled refugees mandatory for all municipalities in Sweden. By, for instance, providing poor housing or threatening with eviction people who are given short-term housing contracts, the municipalities in fact not only push refugees away from the place they were granted, but also redirect the housing responsibility to other municipalities and ultimately, by extension, place it on the individual – in a housing market everybody knows is extremely hard to navigate in as a newcomer. Waiting, Jansson-Keshavarz and Nordling argue, is used by the municipalities as an indirect strategy of mobility control, as these practices involve temporary solutions to keep the refugees from settling and, consequently, unable to access permanent residency and/or family reunification. Waiting can hence be understood as a form of discouragement technique used in various ways by the municipalities in order to reduce and/or control access to rights.

A similar argument is explored by Sen, Smeeton and Thoburn. They argue that difficulties regarding access to housing need to be addressed by social workers as these may risk restricting or withdrawing social rights. In their article they focus on how social workers working with families who are ‘waiting for’ adequate and secure housing are constantly limited by forces beyond their control. The long periods of waiting for housing are shaped the authors argue by structural forces (such as lack of social housing), policy limitations (excluding some families from the right to housing) and family-related reasons. In another welfare state context, Linander and Alm explore how young trans people experience waiting for gender confirming healthcare. They show how waiting is perceived by the participants as one of the most challenging aspects throughout this process, but also that waiting is used by the state as a diagnostic tool. This aspect of waiting becomes a way for the state to withhold trans youth rights and self-determination.

The analyses of waiting in the articles mentioned above, show the need to explore ways in which waiting is used as an organisational practice to both subject service users to violence, as well as a practice to withdrawal service users of their welfare rights, and how social workers also struggle with temporal logics that in many ways limit their possibilities of doing social work.

The everyday experiences of waiting

The second central theme that emerges in this special issue, is experiences of waiting in the everyday. Many of the articles take their departure in service users’ experiences of waiting for, among other things, paid formal work, residency and healthcare. The focus on the everyday illuminates how different categories of service users overlap and intersect in their contacts with the welfare state. In relation to this, there is a need to explore waiting as a phenomenon from an intersectional perspective. Waiting, as Khosravi argues (2021), is ‘not a neutral condition but rather a hierarchical, interwoven complex of gender, race, and class. Waiting, thus, is pre-eminently a political issue’ (2021, p. 13). Waiting produces and reproduces gendered, classed and racialized inequalities; it is an experience shaping the everyday of individuals as well as collectives. It needs to be understood and analysed in relation to, among other things, issues of inequality, unequal distribution of power, time, hope and economic resources. An everyday approach to experiences of waiting contributes to identifying how common experiences overlap between groups that often are seperated both within social work research and social work. For example, groups categorised as ‘homeless’, ‘migrants’ or ‘the elderly’ are all made to wait in their encounters with the welfare state.

Hansen and Gubrium explore how labour activation at the policy level, with its predefined activation trajectories, leads to negative consequences for the service users as well as for the social workers. Moreover, they show how seemingly similar experiences of labour activation is understood differently depending on other aspects in the service users’ lives, for instance if they think that they have options of work in the future or not.

Taking everyday waiting as their point of departure, Mulinari and Sager explore waiting as a form of everyday racism shaping the lives of women asylum-seekers in the UK and unemployed women in Sweden. They identify three layers of everyday waiting: everyday waiting as repetition, everyday waiting as forced or denied work, and everyday waiting as invisible and disposable time. In this context, they argue that waiting in and for welfare is a way for the state to create a racialised and gendered precarious workforce with a long experience of waiting and a long experience of irrational rules and insecurity.

The everyday of waiting is also discussed in several of the articles in this special issue, as temporal practices imposed by the state. Rota, Uzureau, Lietaert and Derluyn explore how waiting shapes the unaccompanied young refugees’ everyday, as they are constantly waiting for legal documents. The endless waiting, the authors argue, creates a ‘politics of exhaustion’, whereby many of the youth sense that they have no future left, that the system has deprived them not only of the presence of their loved ones, but in many ways also of their will even to be alive. The politics of exhaustion is central at the intersection of the migration and social welfare complex, where the endless waiting becomes a form a form of constant violence in the everyday of the young asylum-seekers.

An important argument raised by several authors is the need to explore how waiting in various ways reproduces gendered and racialized inequalities: waiting reflects inequalities, at the same time as the waiting itself creates and deepens those same inequalities. Gencer, Selçuk, Albayrak, Fırat and Demiröz's article studies the experiences of ‘rights-based’ waiting during the Covid-19 pandemic. Their focus is on the waiting experiences of individuals who lost their jobs or incomes and fell below the hunger line. One of the important contributions in the text is that gender-blind policies adopted in Turkey during the pandemic reproduced the individuals’ experiences of waiting and multiplied and reinforced gender inequalities. Also Raphael illustrates in her article how experiences of waiting of low-income women in India are shaped by the intersection of gender, class and caste. The author illustrates how the women in order to get the benefits promised, such as pensions, poor relief and accessible healthcare, are required to spend days on end queueing, spending time that could have been used to make their living through work. An interesting aspect raised in the article is the relationship between technology and waiting. As access to social welfare is increasingly reached through digital platforms, people who do not have access to those technologies have less chance of getting the welfare to which they formally have a right. Raphael stresses that waiting as a practice in relation to the state needs to be explored at the intersection of an analysis that explores how waiting for documents is embedded into struggles of redistribution and recognition, at the same time as they are inscribed in power structures. People are forced to wait, but waiting is also part of a struggle over rights.

While the majority of the literature on waiting tends to focus on it as being a personal experience shared by many, waiting should not be understood as only an individual temporal experience. Gustafsson's article in this issue contributes with such a perspective on collective waiting. She explores waiting as a collective experience through an analysis of waiting for family reunification. In this case, waiting cannot be understood as an individual experience, but as an experience regulating the lives and relations of the families, despite being set in different locations. Thereby the waiting forced upon people shapes the organisation of caring, economy, and the future, across the borders of the nation-state. The way that the collective aspects of waiting question the nation state as the point of departure for social work becomes evident in Gustafsson's article.

In different ways, these articles all show how waiting both produces and reproduces inequalities. They make evident the need to further explore how experience of waiting interacts with structural inequalities such as racism, gender and class. Another important contribution made by several of these articles is that they show that while people wait they are in fact also working, moving, and struggling.

Resisting and negotiating waiting – ‘unwaiting’ waiting

A central argument in several analyses of waiting is that waiting is not the same as doing nothing. Rather, waiting can be seen as a practice in which people in diverse ways resist and negotiate (Jacobsen et al., 2020). Various articles in this issue highlight experiences of waiting that generate different forms of negotiation through activity and resistance. This theme hence intersects with many of the articles presented above, but some of the articles address resistance and negotiations more explicitly.

Herz in his article takes the point of departure in the everyday activity of people waiting in line to receive donated food in a large Swedish city. The group of people in the queue is disparate, but all have in common food poverty and insecurity in an often-considered-generous welfare state. Herz explores and visualises the tension between waiting and activity among the people visiting a foodbank in Sweden. In the analysis, the concepts of ‘waiting in line’ and ‘glimmers of hope’ are considered part of a neoliberal governance where poor people are expected to be ‘activated’ in certain ways whereas other forms of activity, while waiting, are made invisible.

Lipatova's article, too, discusses hope as it addresses the dynamics of waiting among asylum-seekers. She analyses a collective march among asylum-seekers that was called The Glitter of Hope. The march intended to bring asylum-seekers and refugees in Greece together, but the mobilisation encountered an enormous resistance from the state, all the way from examples of direct violence towards participants to efforts of making it impossible for people to join the march by not letting them use collective transport. The march was physically and verbally attacked by the Greek government, making many leave. The state also used the vulnerable position of the demonstrators by promising that, if people ended the march, they would receive better accommodation. Two different aspects of hope emerge here: one where hope is a collective asset used to demand and act upon the desired but yet unavailable future, and one where hope is used by the state to govern and discipline. Another form of resistance, often less visible, occurs at the everyday level. In their article Ramachandran and Vathi discuss how asylum-seekers residing in Glasgow use everyday tactics to manage the waiting that is part of the UK asylum process and beyond their control to affect. In the UK, the location of residence of asylum-seekers is decided through a dispersal process. In addition, asylum-seekers have no right to work, but they receive a small sum by way of government support for food and clothing. This causes isolation, experiences of time as meaningless and an economic constraint that is difficult to survive on. The authors point out the need to look beyond waiting as a structural power (exercised by the state) and investigate how everyday mundane activities can be understood as forms of resistance against waiting as a tool of power.

In many ways these articles show that waiting is an active practice despite forcing people to stand in line or to stay in place, and that waiting for the welfare state takes a lot of work, time, energy and life. Waiting is thus a practice that in many ways place people in the arbitrariness of state and organisations.

Waiting for more

The aim of this special issue is to explore waiting in the context of social work and show the importance of analysing waiting as a central feature of social work practice. In various ways the articles contribute to a deeper understanding, both theoretically and empirically, of what waiting means and how it is to wait in and for the welfare state. The articles illustrate how waiting operates in many different ways and in many different areas, emphasising the importance for social work research and practice to seriously consider the ways in which waiting shapes social work as well as people's access to social rights and social services. Through the lens of waiting, this special issue makes visible how keeping people waiting can be a way not only to delay, but often to deny people fundamental rights. Waiting can in these cases be understood as a form of bureaucratic violence that, as the articles in this issue show, inflicts both pain and suffering. It is used by a range of actors within states and municipalities to create temporal borders that produce and reproduce inequalities. It is also experienced by both practitioners and service users, who in different ways resist through activity and, sometimes, protest.

The topics explored in this special issue range from the provision of healthcare to trans people and young asylum-seekers to women selling second hand clothing in India and poor people waiting in line for food in Sweden. Waiting can hence be used as a lens to explore similar experiences of waiting for and waiting in the welfare state, among groups that wait for totally different things. One important contribution of this special issue is therefore to underline the need to study how forms of temporal inequalities shape the everyday life of people and also identify overlaps between different groups of service users in different national, regional and municipal contexts. But as several of the articles also show, waiting shapes the profession of social work and its relationship to service users. Waiting can be used as a lens through which we can explore, on the one hand, the changing temporal logics of social work and, on the other, how those changes affect professionals and service users in different and similar ways. Hence, we argue, a starting point in the exploration of waiting can be for social work research, as well as practice, to identify commonalities between service users and social workers in apparently different situations, and to identify how inequalities are reproduced.

At the core of this special issue is the question of whose time, and hence whose life, can be defined as being in need of control. Waiting is embedded in power structures, shaping the everyday of people in diverse ways. The articles in this issue have all shed light on some of those ways. With this this collection of research we hope to contribute to the broader debates on waiting, as well as pointing to how these debates can contribute to the field of social work. We also hope to inspire further debates on the relationship between time, power and social work.