Navigating the context of the Swedish welfare system when unemployed, sick, or disabled is complex and multifaceted as it involves agencies governed by national, regional and municipal decision-making bodies, as well as different legal frameworks. Despite significant structural and organisational barriers, these agencies must collaborate around individual cases. The aim of this article is to gain an understanding of how welfare professionals make sense of the role of inter-agency collaboration when trying to address the support needs of long-term unemployed individuals with disabilities and/or ill-health. Focusing on sensemaking, as a form of knowledge claim, of those who work in frontline or coordinating roles on a local level draws attention to tensions between different institutional logics that are crucial for policy implementation. The analysis presented is based on data from 16 semi-structured interviews with welfare professionals from different agencies working in the same region of southern Sweden. Two key competing logics are highlighted: a work-first logic and a welfare logic. The findings show how welfare professionals seek to navigate through the competing logics by identifying alternative ways of working. By harmonising these logics, trying to fit them together in a hybrid logic, they attempt to find ways of meeting the needs of vulnerable individuals, but without challenging the structure and principles of Sweden's overarching 'workfirst' approach to social security.

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.

This article focuses on citizens’ experiences of enablers of- and barriers to obtaining digital citizenship. E-applications for social assistance are used as an exemplar. In Sweden, as in many countries, there is political pressure on welfare services to become more digitalized, and to offer different kinds of self-service technology such as e-applications. Even if the goals of implementing these technologies are to increase efficiency and transparency and offer faster services to citizens, there is a risk of expanding the ‘digital divide’. and making it more difficult to obtain one’s digital citizenship and gain access to social rights. This article draws on a qualitative interview study and explores citizens’ experiences using e-applications in two Swedish municipal social assistance agencies. Results show that most citizens had positive experiences applying for social assistance online, but there were some potential barriers. There were also differences in experiences in the two municipal social assistance agencies. We discuss how the increased digitalization of welfare services seems to push towards a blend of digital and social rights. In this process, social workers play an important role in countering new types of inequalities that emerge in evolving social assistance organizations. The article identifies several areas that merit further research.

The "work-first approach" (arbetslinjen) is a fundamental concept in Swedish welfare policy, shaping both progressive and regressive policy agendas. In contemporary political discourse, marginalised communities have become the focus of initiatives aimed at reinforcing the work-first approach among the unemployed through increased conditionalities. Consequently, the work-first approach has become a site of struggle over the direction of Swedish labour market and welfare policies. This article aims to analyse how the work-first approach is realised as a hegemonic practice within municipal service centres located in marginalised communities. Based on a relational ethnographic approach, we examine how the work-first approach is realised in daily interactions between residents and community guides, as people navigate administrative activation measures, experience hyper-exploitation, and manage life on the margins of poverty. Our findings highlight the fluid nature of the work-first approach, demonstrating how it is both reproduced and contested across different social contexts. We argue that the work-first approach, as a hegemonic idea, faces a significant challenge: increasing social conflict and coercion within the welfare system and labour market are undermining the active consent of marginalised groups—a consent critical for maintaining the work-first approach as a dominant framework in Swedish policy.

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.