Waiting as sociality – relational waithood in Norwegian activation

ABSTRACT

In research on waiting and unemployment, waiting tends to be described as an asymmetrical power relation between those who wait and those who impose waiting within institutional contexts. This paper applies the concepts ‘waiting for’ and ‘waiting on’ to unravel waiting as a specific form of sociality and presence in an employment support context in Norway. Drawing on qualitative interviews with frontline staff and young participants in in-house activity centres, we find that waiting takes different forms; the counsellors not only wait for the participants to comply with the activity requirements, they also wait on them, to interact. Similarly, the young participants wait for ‘something to happen’, like a job opportunity, but they also wait on staff in the centres. Hence, both actors experience waiting in relation to rules, employment etc., but also as subjects with agency. We argue that activation can involve waiting as a form of sociality and presence, a dimension that receives scant attention in the literature on waiting and power.

SAMMENDRAG

I forskning på venting og arbeidsledighet beskrives gjerne venting som et asymmetrisk maktforhold mellom de som venter og de som har forventninger til andres venting, innenfor institusjonelle kontekster. Denne artikkelen anvender begrepsparet «å vente på noe» («waiting for») og «å vente på noen» («waiting on») for å belyse venting som en form for sosialitet og tilstedeværelse i en aktiveringskontekst i Norge. Basert på kvalitative intervjuer med ansatte i førstelinjen i NAV og unge deltakere i NAVs aktivitetssentre, finner vi at ventingen tar ulike former; De ansatte venter ikke bare på at deltakerne skal overholde aktivitetskravene, de venter også på dem, for å samhandle. På samme måte venter de unge deltakerne på at «noe skal skje», som en jobbmulighet, men de venter også på samhandlingen med ansatte på sentrene. Begge aktørene opplever derfor venting i forhold til regler, jobbmuligheter osv., men også som subjekter, noe som innebærer større handlefrihet. Vi argumenterer derfor for at arbeidsledighet og aktivering kan innebære venting som en form for sosialitet og tilstedeværelse, en dimensjon som får lite oppmerksomhet i litteraturen om venting og makt.

KEYWORDS:

• Activation
• epistemology of waiting
• frontline services
• Norwegian Labour and Welfare Service (NAV)
• social assistance
• young people

NØKKELORD:

• Aktivitetsplikt
• Førstelinjen
• Sosialhjelp
• NAV
• Unge
• Venting

Introduction

In this study, we argue that studying experiences of waiting among staff and young unemployed people in an employment and activation context can increase our understanding of ways of being together in encounters between those who wait and those who impose waiting. Asymmetry and power structures are often highlighted in previous research on public employment service encounters, where waiting is seen as patterned by the distribution of power in a social system and exercised through the server-client relationship (Danneris & Nielsen, 2018; Hansen, 2020; Lipsky, 1989; Schwartz, 1974). Waiting within institutional contexts is often perceived as a non-event, as ‘doing nothing’ (Ehn & Löfgren, 2010), as a problem to be avoided, a cost to be minimised (Durrande-Moreau, 1999) or an unpleasant experience (Gasparini, 1995). Hence, clients’ experiences of waiting might lead to feelings of powerlessness, hopelessness, frustration, and disappointment (Bailey, 2019).

Generally, ‘equipped waiting’ occurs when time is filled with meaningful tasks to reduce the unpleasant feeling of waiting (Gasparini, 1995). Such meaningful waiting includes forms of sociality; that is ways of being together and relating to each other through action (Bruun et al., 2011; Miller, 2019; Sillander, 2021). Research on everyday queuing shows, for example, how forms of sociality might develop around the queue, while people are waiting, in such forms as carnival-like activity and entertainment (Mann, 1969; Wiseman, 1979). However, as suggested by Puff and Zacka (2023, pp. 275–277), the evolution of public employment offices and their spatial and temporal organisation might reduce the possibility for meaningful waiting to develop; in the past, people often waited together in the same place/room, while modern queues involve waiting alone and one-on-one encounters, or exclusively online encounters.

Drawing on interviews with staff and young participants in the Norwegian Employment and Welfare Service (NAV), we investigate how waiting is experienced when the participants and staff interact through longer encounters, in shared activities in the in-house activity centre such as job searches, conversations and meals. The purpose of the activity centres is to strengthen the support provided to people who are unemployed by engaging in various activities, such as writing job applications, practising for interviews, visiting the doctor, or just chatting over coffee. Hence, these centres differ from the agency that unemployed people go to in order to provide information to a caseworker and claim a benefit. In research on unemployment among young people, ‘close follow up’ and strengthening of social networks is emphasised as a prerequisite for successful integration into work life (Frøyland et al., 2022). However, there is a lack of research on how forms of sociality are experienced while waiting for employment.

Naidu (2023) argues that engaging in new temporalities also allows time to establish new responses and ways of being in the world. Andersen and Bengtsson suggest in a similar way, that ‘the rhythms of the welfare bureaucracy and everyday lives of youths can be “out of sync” in different ways’ (Andersen & Bengtsson, 2019, p. 1510; see also Isaac, 2022). How people who are unemployed perceive waiting is shaped by their different life rhythms (Hansen & Gubrium, 2022).

In this study we suggest that in-house activity centres are particularly useful as a case for exploring waiting as sociality. We ask: How do young unemployed people and frontline workers experience ways of being together while waiting within the institutional frames of an employment activity centre? Exploring sociality in discussions on employment services for unemployed young people is particularly important given that social and relational aspects are frequently cited as particularly important for successful inclusion and integration (Görlich et al., 2019; OECD, 2018).

Analytical framework: waiting on and waiting for

In this study, we consider waiting to be ‘the action of remaining stationary or quiescent, in expectation of something (…) or someone’ (Gasparini, 1995, p. 30). We are concerned with forms of waiting in institutional services. Institutions could be described as a socially constructed set of practices, beliefs, rules and systems through which individuals make sense of their social reality and act accordingly (Thornton et al., 2012). Minnegal’s (2009) distinction between ‘waiting for’ and ‘waiting on’ is useful in exploring how we recognise waiting as sociality. Most of the waiting we do is waiting for something to happen (Minnegal, 2009). Minnegal suggests that ‘waiting for’ emerges in any context where a division of labour exists (such as within institutions); to achieve something, the actor is dependent on another actor’s actions. Clients in public services, have no choice but to wait for others to play their part. ‘Waiting for’ can be considered a passive form of waiting. ‘Waiting on’ denotes waiting for an appropriate moment to act in relation to another subject (Minnegal, 2009). Waiting on other subjects and ‘recognising the need to wait for them to reveal themselves rather than presuming to know what they are’, entails an intense engagement with and attention to the present (Minnegal, 2009, p. 3). ‘Waiting on’ provides the actor who waits autonomy to initiate action. Hence, waiting cannot be reduced to merely being in a waiting room for future events to happen (Minnegal, 2009, p. 5). Waiting within institutions is also social action, where people are mutually dependent on each other, sharing time, speech, silences and other collective performances, and emotionally engage in dialogue and action with each other. In this way, ‘[b]y strategic waiting, as much as by strategically making others wait (…) we give rhythm to social life’ (Minnegal, 2009, p. 2). Elaborating on Minnegal’s relational epistemology though the concepts ‘waiting for’ and ‘waiting on’, we argue that this distinction brings forth a clearer development of forms of waiting that might take place within institutions; waiting for things to happen is given meaning in light of the institutional structured expectations of what it takes to be a citizen in a given political and national context. Waiting on other people reflects the ever-present sociality in ongoing interaction practices and is an invisible ‘backdrop of our personal existence’ (Ingold et al., 1996, p. 53).

Activation in the Norwegian welfare and employment service (NAV)

Although Norway has a comparatively low rate of young people who are unemployed, there is a high rate of young people who are neither in education, training nor registered as actively searching for a job, and who suffer from mental health problems and have low formal qualifications (OECD, 2018).

In 2017, the ‘mandatory activation’ scheme was introduced in NAV, requiring young recipients (18–30 years) of the social assistance cash benefit to participate in an activity that could expedite their entry into employment or education. Social assistance is a last-resort cash benefit scheme provided by the NAV offices. Non-compliance with the requirements of mandatory activation may be sanctioned with a cash benefit reduction.

Mandatory activation not only places a requirement on young recipients but also involves a responsibility on behalf of the NAV office to provide young clients with suitable activities. As a result, many NAV offices have in-house activity centres to provide activities to young people who are on mandatory activation. Activities typically consist of work training, writing job applications and CVs, counselling, and assistance with various barriers experienced by the young person to entering employment or education. A large share of the frontline workers in the activity centres within NAV are trained social workers, and thus the centres can be regarded not only as bureaucratic but also as professionalised. As such, the staff are able to exercise discretion in identifying and providing the right support, and they do so in dialogue with the young participants.

Data and methods

The data for this study derive from qualitative interviews conducted between 2017 and 2018. The study was part of a wider research project on the implementation of mandatory activation on the frontline in NAV. We follow Brinkmann and Kvale in their emphasis on interview-based knowledge as being ‘relational, discourse-based, contextual, linguistic, narrative and pragmatic’ (Brinkman & Kvale, 2014, p. 76). With an ambition to grasp variation among practices in the frontline services, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 33 people: 17 people working as counsellors in activity centres, and 16 young participants at these centres, across six different municipalities in Norway. Among the staff informants, 15 were women and two were men, and their age varied between 24 and 48 years. Their tenure within NAV varied from two to 24 years. The young participants interviewed were between 19 and 29 years of age; 14 of them were women and two were men. The young informants had ongoing or previous participation in the mandatory activation scheme. We did follow-up interviews with eight of these young people seven months after the first interviews. The purpose was to get a picture of how mandatory activation was perceived in retrospect and whether the scheme had improved their situation. The two groups of informants differ in terms of position within the system; the staff are at their workplace while the young informants are required to participate at the activity centre. The staff and the young participants had similarities regarding cultural and ethnic background – all but one were ethnic Norwegian. In the smaller municipalities, staff and young participants also shared a particular familiarity with the local place and culture.

Inspired by an active interview approach (Holstein & Gubrium, 1995), the interviews were directed towards the topic of activation combined with more general and descriptive questions (Spradley, 1979). For instance, the informants were posed questions about their experiences with NAV (either as a workplace or as a centre preparing them for employment) and mandatory activation. The descriptive questions included questions such as ‘Could you please describe a usual day?’ in addition to questions about the informants’ background (e.g. age, home, education, family). Descriptive questions are useful in trying to grasp settings in which the informants carry out routine activities – settings that are not defined by the researcher (Spradley, 1979, p. 49). The data obtained from descriptive questions enabled us to investigate topics across the different informants (staff and young participants). Although waiting is not directly observable (Ehn & Löfgren, 2010, p. 14), descriptions and notions of waiting were identified in the interview material.

All staff informants were interviewed in their office or at the activity centre. The young participants were in some cases interviewed in a separate office or room in the activity centre, and sometimes in a library, at a café or at home. We are aware that carrying out interviews in a workplace may reinforce status differences that exist within the workplace, for example between professionals and clients (Gerson & Damaske, 2021, p. 131). Descriptive questions can help to downplay the status differences and reduce the influence of the interview context, searching for similar everyday descriptions in the interview data.

The interviews lasted between 1 and 2 h, and all were audio recorded and transcribed. We analysed the interview transcripts thematically and inductively and gradually narrowed the analysis to what we perceived to be central themes. A main theme was how the informants talked about waiting in terms of what they did together and what their expectations of each other were. Thus, after several rounds of analyses, we looked for what we found to be keywords in the material, namely ‘waiting’, in addition to a series of words with temporal implications, like ‘before’, ‘after’, ‘future’, ‘improve’, and ‘include’. We identified two forms of waiting in our material: waiting for things and waiting for other people. Waiting for things tends to be more passive (e.g. waiting for a new phone, or a job), while waiting for other people was expressed as a more interactive and social form. Throughout the process, we discussed our findings and analysis critically.

The research was conducted in compliance with guidelines from the National Committee for Research Ethics in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (NESH), and the data were handled in accordance with the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (SIKT) and the Norwegian Data Protection Act. All names in this article are fictive.

Findings

The activity centre

The activity centre was typically situated in a municipal building within walking distance of the local NAV office. Some offices had a waiting list of people who had been referred as part of mandatory activation. The activity centre often had an area for eating and cooking, a living room for chatting and discussions, and an area for ‘office work’ with PC stations. The atmosphere in these centres was quite ‘homelike’, and the staff made efforts to make it cosy, for instance by lighting candles at the table.

The day at the activity centre was regulated by an institutionalised time; time was measured, rushed, and restrained (see Isaac, 2022, p. 954). Often, the ‘opening hours’ were from 9 am to 2 pm The young people were required to arrive at the centre when it opened, to be on time. As justified by most of the staff, the temporal structure and emphasis on punctuality were a way to teach the young people the rules of work life. Beside CV writing and other work-oriented activities, the activities within the centres included informal and social activities between staff and the young participants, such as small talk, sharing meals and drinking coffee, playing cards and chess, and discussing everyday issues. The institutional arrangement of the activity centre produced forms of waiting, such as waiting for scheduled events to take place (e.g. meals, coffee time and interview practice), and waiting on people to show up or being waited on by someone. Hence, the staff and the young participants had less of a typical caseworker-client relationship and more informal and social relations.

Waiting on young people and dealing with their waiting times

Waiting as a form of labour and care

In the activity centres, waiting was part of the staff’s everyday work. For instance, before the activity centre opened in the morning, Karen would wait outside. She said:

I am outside and waiting for the young people to come. Some arrive a bit early, others just in time. I expect that they all show up by 9 am.

Although Karen described this form of waiting with excitement in her voice, showing up on time was also a requirement she placed on the young participants. If a young person was delayed by more than five minutes, that person could be sanctioned through the withdrawal of a certain amount of their cash benefits. The staff could make deals with the participants, who knew that if they did not show up on time, it was better to have sent a message. In this way, the staff also considered waiting for young participants a part of the follow-up. The young participants could negotiate with the staff whether they should be sanctioned or not. Thus, the dynamic between the staff and the young participants involved some degree of flexibility. If they had a good reason for being delayed (e.g. a car broke down, they had a bad morning, problems at home) and informed staff that they would be delayed, then they could keep the full benefit.

During a day at the activity centre, the staff would also spend part of their time waiting for the young people to return from, for example, a meeting with an employer or a consultation with a doctor. Kristin explained how and why it could sometimes be necessary to spend some more time on a participant than ‘normal’, emphasising the valuable dimension of slowing things down and waiting to act, for example, regarding the young person’s capacity to work:

Maybe we wait for an appointment with the primary doctor and examine [the young person] a bit more, like the conditions and causes for the young person’s situation. (…) Yes, it happens that I wait to initiate [employment-oriented activities] if I am uncertain. Like, we give it another week.

For the counsellors, having room for discretion in setting the pace and deciding upon individual adjustments for the young participants gave a sense of meaningfulness to the job.

The ‘unproductive’ waiting for other colleagues

The staff made a distinction between social forms of waiting that took place at the activity centre and waiting that, according to them, was caused by ‘the system’. The waiting time generated by ‘the system’, that is by caseworkers in NAV or in other public services, was viewed by the activity centre staff as negative for the young participants and for the goal of supporting them and helping them enter employment. When a young person applies for a benefit, they often need to wait until their work ability is assessed before they receive the money. Monica, one of the staff, explained:

When assessing a person’s work ability, there are things that might occur along the assessment process; maybe there is another diagnosis to be accounted for than first assumed, then they need to be investigated [by a doctor] again, it happens quite frequently. There is always waiting time between things.

Monica’s description illustrates a shared understanding among the counsellors and the young participants: the ‘slowness’ in the bureaucratic system, or the lack of smooth and efficient communication between services. Another counsellor, Tor, exemplified this with reference to the lack of coordination between services in the case of mental illness:

NAV should be much earlier involved for those young people with mandatory activation, attending mental health services. (…) the doctors just write a sick note saying: ‘the client cannot participate at the activity centre. And we [young participants and staff] are waiting, waiting and waiting.

According to Tor, providing care at the right time is challenging but crucial for responding properly to young peoples’ needs. Hence, the activity centre counsellors experienced waiting for events to happen that they had little control over. When a young participant is referred to the health services and is taken out of the activity centre, the counsellor is waiting for a medical diagnosis and treatment plan from the health services to continue with the activities. The health services and NAV are ‘waiting’ for different things to happen (recovery or work).

Reducing waiting as a form of care

To respond to the slowness and waiting imposed on the young participants, the staff tried to reduce waiting times where possible. Eva explains:

If some of our participants need a meeting with one of us tomorrow, they get it tomorrow instead of waiting another month.

The counsellors referred to the characteristics of young people in general in explaining why their waiting time needed to be reduced. They viewed the participants’ young age as a specific trait that required quick response and action when approaching NAV. In the interviews, the counsellors expressed that young people in general are impatient; they expect things to happen ‘here and now’. Cristy illustrated this in the following way:

To work with young clients, you need to be present, you need to be there when they want. You cannot wait. You need to be there at once. You need to get in contact with the employer and make appointments for work training. They easily lose their motivation if it takes time. When it comes to older adults, you might wait a week or two, but with the young clients, I do not take that chance.

The above quote illustrates how the staff think of the young participants as people that should not be left to wait, ideally. If the staff do not react quickly when the young people enter NAV, they could risk losing momentum. As shown in the conversation with counsellor Cecilia:

Interviewer:

So what could happen if you couldn’t follow up quickly?

Cecilia:

I am not sure. It is very individual. And it depends on several things, but I think they might lose their motivation – they are ill some of those who are here. And their problems or health issues might be felt stronger if they keep going on waiting, in a way.

Although they were aware that the young people had other obligations and relations outside the centre, the staff’s motivation for reducing the participants’ waiting time was often followed by an aim of being ‘efficient’ and ‘filling’ the time spent waiting with activities such as job training or social or other work preparedness activities. Tor said:

The young participants live two parallel lives; their lives ‘out there’ and their lives ‘in here’, they are just popping into the activity centre for some hours, then they continue their life outside.

Since the focus of the activity centre is employment, time spent waiting there was seen as less bureaucratic and not as ‘dead’ waiting time by the staff. Thus, the counsellors did not talk about reducing waiting time at the activity centre. They experienced their role as significant in contributing to keeping young participants activated and helping them be included in working life. Kristin explained:

When you are selected to participate at the activity centre, the purpose for us is to reveal the challenges you have, what works and what does not work. When it doesn’t work, we need to talk, right?

The above quote illustrates how relational work is a central aspect of the time spent at the centres. By rhetorically questioning the need to talk to the young participants, also illustrate a certain uncertainty about the forms of being together established within the activation context.

Waiting for things (to happen) and being waited for

Meaningful waiting

By being mandated to participate in the activity centres, the young participants were drawn into structured, but also relational, forms of waiting. The activity centres structured their waiting times so that the young participants’ days felt meaningful. Silje, a young woman, said:

For my part, I think it has helped a lot to come here. When you're not in a permanent job, you have a poor daily rhythm. So, I think it has helped a lot that I come here, because then I kind of must get up every day and get a normal routine. That Monday to Friday I get up, sort of, early.

The participants talked about the time before they started at the activity centre as ‘dead time’ or ‘killing time’, ‘sitting home, playing play-station’, and being a ‘couch potato’ (sofagris). In the activity centre, there seemed to be a shared discourse that evaluated the ‘doings’ as more desirable than the ‘doings’ before one started there. Anna explained that although she was going to school again, NAV wanted her to work so as not to ‘waste time’. She said:

NAV wants you to fill unallocated time with work. They argue that I needed to have a job in the meantime while waiting for the school to start in the autumn, that I needed something in the meantime. Also, that I need to apply for a part-time job while going to school, right?

The sociality of waiting in the activity centres

The combination of the duty to show up and socialising while being at the centre characterised the young participants’ descriptions of their days at the centre. Most of the young people attending the centre were positive in their description of it. As Brita said, ‘it is good to have a place to go to’. While both Eva and Martin had experienced a lack of response from employers, they described the activity centre as a nice place to come where other people were waiting for you and expected that you would show up.

In the activity centre, the young participants had to engage in waiting together as well as together with staff. They were encouraged by the staff to approach employers or to return to school, if that was what they needed to get the job they wanted. Sissel described the positive dimension of waiting at the activity centre: ‘You get more confidence in yourself when it comes to contacting the employers.’ Mary, another young participant, explained that the requirement to show up was experienced as a meaningful expectation:

It is expected that you show up in the morning. If you do not show up, they [one of the counsellors] will contact you.

Mary knew that there were people at the activation centre waiting for her to show up and comply with the requirement, but also waiting on her in order to go on with the day at the centre.

The vulnerabilities of waiting

Martin described his engagement with NAV primarily as ‘waiting time’. He was waiting for things to happen; first of all, for the bus to come that took him to the activity centre every day, and also for other concrete things, like money to buy things he needed: a new phone and a sim card, which was a prerequisite to be contacted by an employer. Second, for a job and an income, he was waiting for a call for a job interview. Others emphasised that they were waiting for an apprenticeship as part of their vocational training programme in upper secondary high school (e.g. a carpenter or a car mechanic). In the long run, the young people were waiting to being able to settle down, have a family, and have ‘the usual things’, such as a car, a dog and a house. Their waiting represented an experience of waiting to access other statuses and positions. This way of waiting was also emphasised through activities at the activation centre, for example drawing lifelines on a sheet of paper; what would their life look like in the next 10 years. Sissel said:

Yesterday, we made drawings of our own situations in a few years, which steps we would take. Today we presented it. I usually do not like such presentations, but this was not really a problem.

Hence, the activities and purpose of the activation centre; getting people close to the labour market, produced forms of waiting for things to happen, that were negotiated by the young participants.

Eva, another young participant, complained that she had never received an answer from an employer when she handed in an application. She was waiting for an answer. The staff at the activity centre told her she should do something useful in the meantime (like Anna). Eva told us that now she was waiting for funding and time to take her driving lessons.

Describing their situation in terms of forms of waiting illustrates the young peoples’ vulnerable situations – their waiting had an uncertain outcome: Would people answer? Was there someone waiting for them? Would things work out in the long run?

Waiting relations outside of NAV

Some of the young people emphasised that acting as if you had no network or friends – even though the opposite was true – was important to play ‘the game’ with NAV. When applying for social benefits in their first meeting with NAV, some of the young participants have experienced the importance of showing that they need help. In the following excerpt, Lars talks about his first meeting with NAV, which resulted in admission to the activity centre:

Lars:

When I came to NAV, I didn’t have a place to live nor a job. I was living on the street.

Interviewer:

You were living on the street? That must have been cold!

Lars:

It might be cold. But I had luck. I have a lot of good friends and I was also able to live with my mother for a short period.

I:

You have a lot of good friends?

L:

Yes, but NAV shouldn’t know, you see. I told NAV that I didn’t have anywhere to stay. And then they helped me.

It was particularly in their first encounter with NAV, usually a formal meeting with a caseworker at the NAV office, that young participants talked about such strategic underplaying of their social life out there, as a strategy to get access to social benefits, and to the activity centre. In light of Minnegal’s (2009) perspective on forms of waiting and autonomy of action, we might interpret Lars’ case as an example of how young participants are involved in multiple productive activities, within and outside NAV, which provides them with autonomy of action, sometimes waiting on others, sometimes waiting for others; being as Minnegal says, ‘simultaneously subject’ (with agency) ‘and object’ (to NAV) (Minnegal, 2009, p. 5) in their lives.

Discussion

In this study, we investigate frontline workers and young unemployed peoples’ experiences of waiting in an institutional setting – NAV activity centres. The findings suggest that waiting could be explored as a form of sociality and presence, a dimension that is often overlooked in the literature on waiting and power in general and waiting and unemployment in particular.

Waiting is more than something happening in a physical space; it is about sociality (Minnegal, 2009). Social situations in which people experience waiting can be conceptualised as ‘microsystems’ in which order and justice is managed, but also where forms of meaningful sociality tend to develop (Ehn & Löfgren, 2010, p. 52; Leseth et al., 2020). Hence, the space in which activation takes place can also shape frontline workers’ attitudes and discretion. The activity centre could be described as such a ‘microsystem’, where waiting takes the form of engagement with other people, or as something to be avoided, reduced or managed.

On the one hand, the purpose of activity centres is to speed up the process of entering employment. On the other hand, job-seeking activities take time because interaction and relations between people (staff and people who are unemployed) are central to the process. Hence, we find that the waiting for employment is experienced as a tension between a socially meaningful activity and the institutional expectations which implies a timeline of acceleration and employability.

Moreover, for both the counsellors and the young people, experiences of waiting are influenced by the temporalities of the institutional context (e.g. waiting for employment, decisions on benefits), which implies an asymmetric relationship that is defined through their positions as counsellors and ‘help-seeking’ unemployed, respectively. The staff must exercise discretion to interpret the rules on how activation should be managed. Since the staff has the authority to impose rules, the uncertainty lies mostly with the young participant. Previous research suggests that citizens accept to wait because they build trust with frontline workers and believe that they have no power to reduce the waiting time (Hansen, 2020, p. 1129). The young people in this study have little choice but to engage in waiting together with others in the centre.

However, both the staff and the young peoples’ experiences are formed by the sociality and expressed through forms of interaction and togetherness. The counsellors do not only wait for the participants to comply with the activity requirements, but they also wait on them as other subjects. The young participants do not only wait for things that provide them with access to work life, but they also wait on other people, both within the activity centre and outside the centre. The waiting also makes the young people feel that someone is ‘waiting on’ them. Hence, they find it good to be waited on, to be anticipated.

The Norwegian welfare state is characterised by a strong work ethic (Halvorsen & Stjernø, 2008), and is based on an egalitarian ideology (Vike, 2018). Hence, an important point is that the activities and forms of waiting at the activity centres can also be described as ‘proper sociality’, i.e. conforming to social and cultural values of being together that creates hierarchy in more subtle ways (Bruun et al., 2011, p. 2). Processes of sociality, in which social codes becomes valuable (e.g. ways of behaving, dressing, talking) can therefore involve mechanisms of not only inclusion, but also exclusion.

When waiting for the young people to find employment, for decisions made by other actors in or outside the organisation, the centre staff wait for events to happen, events over which they have little control. However, when they are oriented towards finding the right pace of activities for young people and when they wait on the young participants, for instance turning up in the morning or returning from a job interview, it creates a social rhythm in which both the counsellors and the young people engage actively in the present.

However, the counsellors’ perceptions of young people having less ability to wait and needing rapid support could entail a lack of insight into the young participants’ lives. The young people express various experiences of waiting both inside and outside the activation context, which illustrate this point.

Engaging in social activities with the young participants is not constantly a matter of power asymmetry at the local level. The counsellors try to reduce the young peoples’ waiting time in the system, which is caused by a complex bureaucracy. They also wait together with them (drinking coffee, writing CVs, playing games etc.) in the immediate here and now, in the present. The counsellors shield the young people from waiting for bureaucratic decisions and fill the waiting time with activities; it could be perceived that as a result, waiting within the activity context is transformed to social ways of being together where one is waiting on each other rather than waiting for the bureaucratic decisions. In this way, waiting time might be experienced as more predictable for both the counsellors and the participants.

Conclusion

In this study we have elaborated on Minnegals’ (2009) relational epistemology through the concepts ‘waiting for’ and ‘waiting on’, suggesting that this distinction bring forth a clearer development of institutional and social forms of waiting. Investigating different temporal dimensions of waiting together in an activation context, we suggest that the experience of ‘waiting on’ another subject provides all people involved, both staff and young participants, with agency. Waiting as a form of sociality could add important insights to the literature on waiting and power. While previous research highlights the power asymmetries in waiting for services and support, the findings in the present paper suggest that sociality take place between people with different positions. This does not mean that power asymmetries are not relevant, but that take other forms. Hence, we suggest that one cannot take for granted that power asymmetries between counsellors and young unemployed participants corresponds to differences in experiences of waiting. In what ways cultural and social ways of being together is valued and hierarchised in different contexts has implications for participation in society and must be investigated empirically.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Heidi Moen Gjersøe

Heidi Moen Gjersøe is a professor at the faculty of Social Studies at VID Specialized University, Oslo, Norway, and at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Social Work, Child Welfare and Social Policy at OsloMet, Norway. Her research areas include service users’ perspectives, frontline work and professional discretion in the context of activation policies and social policies.

Anne Birgitte Leseth

Anne Birgitte Leseth is a professor at Centre for the Study of Professions at OsloMet. Her research areas include cultural analytical and anthropological perspectives on the encounters in the frontline service of the welfare state, as well as education and working life.