Responses from the Frontline:How Organisations and Street-level Bureaucrats Deal with Economic Sanctions

Economic sanctions have gained more political legitimacy and are being more widely used as a tool to improve the willingness of unemployed welfare recipients to participate in activities within the framework of active labour market policy (ALMP). The focus of this article is the use of economic sanctions on cash benefit recipients in Denmark, Quantitative analyses show a substantial increase in the use of economic sanctions in Denmark, including sanctions on those who are categorised as having problems in addition to unemployment. In this article we will direct our attention to responses from both the organisational and individual level regarding the implementation of sanctions. Empirical material consists of interviews with managers and frontline social workers in municipalities with a high number of sanctions. We argue that organisations matter in shaping street-level behaviour, resulting in substantial differences in the use of sanctions from one municipality to another. </jats:p

The long road to data-driven decision-making : How do casework registrations become management information?

The implementation of digital technologies in organisations is often seen as a means by which to ease the administrative burden, create transparency, and to provide for better management information. Based on in-depth interviews with social workers, admin staff, and managers from eleven Danish municipal disability offices, this paper shows the nuances of the perceptions and ambitions to make management and welfare organisations data-driven. The article maps the infrastructures making management information possible. When social workers insert data in digital case management systems (CMS) on clients, services, and service costs, it becomes possible to extract this data and use it as management information. However, achieving this requires much more than a few clicks of a mouse. In fact, there is quite a lot of invisible work performed by the admin staff. The paper demonstrates how information on cost data and case overview travels and transforms within an organisational hierarchy. The analysis shows that the human impact is not out of the equation, even though some performance information is automatically aggregated. Performance information is indeed a result of cooperation between man and machine. Seeing as information is not a neutral raw material to be easily transported challenges the belief in data-driven organisations as a pure technical matter

Sagsbehandling i en digital virkelighed: Digitalisering, standardisering og individuelle hensyn

The Danish digitisation strategy states that case management systems are one of the means to digital welfare. is article examines Fælles Sprog (common language) which is used by case managers within the area of care for the elderly. Based on interviews the article illustrates how cross pressures from concerns of the in- dividual needs of the clients on the one hand and the system requirements for standardisation on the other hand are handled by the street level bureaucrats. In this way, the article presents e-government in practice within social welfare provision.