This article focuses on young unemployed people in Sweden involved in two activation measures. Using the analytical framework of governmentality, it analyses how the participants perceive and value activation measures as government-driven interventions aimed at bringing young people into the labour market based on a neoliberal discourse of the welfare state. The article highlights that the welfare system tries to not only promote behavioural changes, but also change the way people think. At the centre of the study are the people-changing technologies embedded in the Swedish norms of a strong work ethic. The analysis underlines how these technologies are internalised and even become a part of the participant's own free will.

This study illustrates the complexity and challenges of knowledge utilization in social work practice through an analysis of interviews with social workers working in the field of social assistance in Sweden. The participants had all taken an online course at their workplace, and the interviews illustrate how knowledge is either distanced or used to induce change. More importantly, the results illustrate how knowledge in practice is more than merely facts from research results, as it is more focused on process. Therefore, it is possible to use knowledge in various forms critically in everyday work life to improve practice. This study offers valuable insights into knowledge utilization in social work that could influence views about knowledge use and its implications in practice. Moreover, social work education and training need to more thoroughly prepare students and new social workers to use knowledge in various forms in their organizational settings. If a more process-oriented approach to knowledge use is to be implemented in practice, it has to be established in training.

Activation is crucial for beating unemployment for those with high thresholds for entering the labor market. The municipalities in Sweden have become an important factor in the activation. However, no formal argument or decisions were ever made to support the inclusion of municipalities in labor market policy. A government report was, however, compiled and sent to different stakeholders for comments. The present study is based on an analysis of the comments, here termed knowledge claims. The analysis shows that there is a low level of interest from different stakeholders except for the municipalities who are burdened with the cost of social assistance when the unemployed do not find work. The municipalities legitimize and reproduce a dual system for labor market policy. The Public Employment Service (PES) prioritizes unemployed persons who have unemployment insurance and a low threshold for entering the labor market, and the others are left to the municipalities to deal with.

In the last decade, digitalized automated decision-making (ADM) has been implemented in many Swedish municipal social services to achieve values such as legal security, client empowerment and time efficiency. The paper aims to understand how ADM policy is legitimized and performed through time efficiency, by a comparison of ADM policy in two Swedish municipalities’ social assistance agencies. It builds on 17 interviews with managers and professionals in two Swedish municipalities’ social assistance units. Findings show ADM is legitimized through arguments of activation and relationships, and performed by handling more applications or increasing time spent with clients, rather than being perceived as increasing the quality of social assistance services. This highlights the significance of organizational goals regarding how street-level bureaucrats perform tasks within their discretionary powers.

Inter-agency collaboration plays a central role in contemporary Swedish welfare provision and access to social security for citizens that are long-term unemployed and suffer from ill health. Drawing on Nancy Fraser's theorisation on the 'politics of needs interpretation', this article examines how needs and rights are interpreted and contested in inter-agency meetings involving local representatives from national, regional and municipal Swedish welfare agencies. Contextualised against social security reforms that put emphasis on the limitation of access and a 'work-first' approach, the article suggests that localised inter-agency meetings of this nature are arenas where perceived injustices are symbolically elaborated and challenged 'from within' welfare organisations. Although discourses emphasising self-sufficiency and the importance of work tend to act as depoliticising and normalising, the way they are implemented in practice is not passively accepted by frontline professionals, who question interpretive justifications, as well as harmful consequences for individuals.

Today’s ambition to adapt and individualize welfare delivery poses a challenge to human service organizations at the same time seeking to standardize clients, with consequences for street-level bureaucrats. In this article, the implementation of an instrument for standardized assessment of income support (IA) in Swedish social services is used to investigate what strategies street-level bureaucrats use to cope with tensions between standardization and individualization. Results from six focus groups in two organizations show how job coaches cope by individualizing their practice towards the client, while caseworkers equally often cope through standardization, which could work towards or against the client, in order to keep their discretion and handle organizational demands. Results point to a loose coupling between IA as an organizational tool for legitimacy, and as a pragmatically used questionnaire. Conflicts and contradictions are left to street-level bureaucrats to deal with.

This study aims to understand how goals of activation and gender equality interact in labor market programs directed towards activating unemployed participants. The study draws on interviews with 28 social workers and managers at four Swedish municipally governed labor market programs typically targeted towards poor, unemployed individuals with little to no attachment to the labor market or social insurance system. Our findings show that activation goals are understood to be clear cut and a dominant logic within the labor market programs. The gender equality goals are understood as fuzzy and subordinate to the activation logic. Our theoretical analysis, based on neo-institutional theory, shows that gendered activation as a hybrid logic is created within the four programs as a means of handling the competing logics of gender equality and activation. Gendered activation may be reasonable on an individual level, where women in long-term unemployment can sustain a higher income through work and become financially independent. In the context of the gender segregated labor market, gendered activation reproduces gendered inequalities when an increasing interest for activation policy among welfare states overshadows claims of gender equality. Furthermore, our study exemplifies the systemic reproduction of racist discourse within social- and labour market policies. Within the logic of gendered activation, migrant women become singled out as specifically problematic for Swedish society to handle when unemployment is given gendered and cultural explanations. Through the logic of gendered activation, gender equality goals become no-matter-what employment rather than employment leading to equal outcomes.

The social worker-client relationship is described as essential to social work but is a broad and multi-layered concept. Today, the relationship is strengthened and challenged by digitalisation. The aim of this configurative literature review is to understand how research on social work from 2015 to 2020 describes and analyses digitalisation's significance for the social worker-client relationship. Three themes depict the benefits and disadvantages of digitalisation, how digitalisation generates new ethical questions and dilemmas, and the different theoretical perspectives used. Future research should go beyond the pros and cons of digitalisation and should use various theoretical approaches to challenge data, illuminate client perspectives, and pose additional questions.

The aim of this chapter is to create a greater theoretical understanding of social welfare, unemployment, and vulnerability among youth and its impacts on a local level. We do so by re-analysing a study of how social workers treat young unemployed and how these young people experience their possibilities and constraints in relation to the demands of the social services. In this chapter, we will meet the empirical example with a time-geographical perspective and discuss what such an interpretation adds to the knowledge about the vulnerability of the young unemployed. The geographical and temporal aspects of the lives of young unemployed show how different types of constraints affect young people’s everyday lives. The results show that the constraints can boil down to five underlying forms of vulnerability for the young unemployed: constraints in mobility, constraints in access to technology, constraints in social relations, constraints in accommodation, and constraints in autonomy and integrity. By using time-geography, we are able to theorise the differences between local administrations of social welfare in the municipalities and the constraints the young unemployed face in their local environment.