Welfare State Regimes and Caseworkers’ Problem Explanation

Abstract

In frontline bureaucracy research, the dominant view holds that frontline workers resist managerial pressure to “blame the poor” by bending the rules based on moral considerations, a practice labeled “citizen agency.” We suggest that frontline responses to managerial pressure are filtered through welfare state regime type. Based on in-depth study of caseworker reasoning in Sweden and Denmark, we find a “structural problem explanation” that sees reasons for clients seeking support as rooted in the structures of society—not in the individual client. We find and present two narratives hitherto not problematized in frontline bureaucracy research: the “statesperson” and the “professional.”

Keywords

social insurance policy welfare state regime street-level bureaucracy frontline solidarity role perception problem explanation

Research on how managerial pressure influences public policy and administration has shown more support for resilience than initially expected and has indicated that responses are largely sensitive to context: Paul Pierson (2005) argued that welfare state regimes persist, Kenneth Nelson (2007) argued that the degree of targeting has impact on resilience, and Christopher Pollitt and Geerth Bouckaert (2011) argued that responses to managerial trends vary between trajectories in path-dependent ways. Studies at the frontline level also show evidence of resilience toward managerialism; the coping literature shows multiple forms of individual strategies among frontline workers to resist managerial pressure, such as avoiding individual assessment by technocratic means (Thorén, 2008, p. 88) and avoiding complex systems of rules by routinizing student contact (Trowler, 1997). An influential proposition in this literature is provided by Steven Maynard-Moody and Michael Musheno (2003), who held that frontline workers resist managerial pressure to “blame the poor” by bending the rules based on their personal moral considerations, a practice the authors label “citizen agency.”

In the area of social trust, recent literature has further argued that there is a link between the solidarity citizens’ feel for “the other” and the welfare state structure. In more socioeconomically equal societies, people generally perceive “most people” to be like themselves, which emphasizes solidarity as dependent on the institutions in society and state (Larsen, 2013; Sønderskov & Dinesen, 2014). Drawing on this literature, we propose that the image of “citizen agency” can be seen as anchored in more residual societies based on an “individualistic worldview,” where frontline workers are first and foremost individuals, who are responsible both for the good and the bad in clients’ lives. This, however, leaves open the question of how solidarity is practiced in other welfare state types, such as the encompassing welfare states.

We propose that in the same way that general solidarity can be anchored in the regime structure, caseworkers’ solidarity with clients may also be influenced by design solutions on this level (Stensöta, 2009; Möller, 2009). We contend that the image of “citizen agency” may be anchored in the U.S. welfare state regime, while we might find quite different responses to managerial trends in other types of welfare state regimes, where the solidarity with clients, as well as the problem explanations regarding who is to blame for the clients’ situations, might find different forms. In general, we find that the literature on street-level bureaucratic roles that use the United States as a case most often do not explore their arguments across different types of welfare states, which limits the application of their arguments. An exception to this is Jewell (2007), who has previously shown that the welfare state regime is important for frontline responses when he suggested that mechanisms anchored in the program level (flat-grant system vs. individual assessments) affect frontline workers’ norms and solidarity. The program he studied was, however, targeted or means-tested needs assistance, which is a core policy area for the liberal welfare state type, but not for the encompassing welfare state type as in the Nordic countries where social insurance (unemployment, sick leave) is commonly considered to be a core policy (Esping-Andersen, 1990).

An additional point of criticism regarding previous work is that it leaves questions unanswered about how this influence proceeds in greater detail. We address this latter problem using the scholarship on the importance of problem definition (Bacchi, 1999) and suggest that the type of welfare state regime influences the problem explanations that caseworkers develop as more specific accounts of why clients need aid. These explanations further correlate with the responses caseworkers give, which we capture as role perception. This, we argue, provides a more detailed account of mechanisms.

We explore our argument in Denmark and Sweden, two countries that both belong to the encompassing welfare state type (Esping-Andersen, 1990), and consider the case of granting of sick-leave benefits. Our material consists of in-depth interviews with 51 caseworkers making decisions on granting of sick-leave benefits.

We find evidence of a “structural problem explanation” that sees the reasons for clients seeking support as rooted in the structures of society—not in the individual client. On closer examination, we find evidence of two narratives of role perceptions connected to this problem explanation, which we coin the “statesperson” and the “professional.” The statesperson is characterized by loyalty to clients as citizens, which includes their role as taxpayers, exemplified by the following quote: “I think like this: in the end it is the taxpayers’ money, and if you are entitled to support, you should receive it, but if you are not, you should be kept out” (code statesperson, Case S12). The professional is characterized as someone who has developed his or her own ways to conduct the tasks, without, however, trespassing on the frames of the law. “When you start you think you have to follow the rules slavishly, but when you mature in your work role you make it your own . . . You learn how to work autonomously but still within the frames” (code professional, Case S16).

Theoretically, we interpret our findings such that frontline responses are filtered through the welfare state regime structure, indicating a larger variety of possible responses than previous literature has shown. We contend that the managerial pressure has been present in both countries in the form of the general political discussion on rising numbers of persons on sick leave as a considerable societal and political challenge, and we further contend that managerial pressure inclines toward an individual problem explanation as a way to curtail the discretion of eligibility to a matter of personal will. In this context, we regard the two narratives as a contribution to previous research on casework responses to managerial pressure. By focusing on social insurance-type programs in two countries, we provide evidence that results are consistent across social welfare programs in countries with similar welfare regimes.

The article is organized as follows: We first review earlier research, which leads to a presentation of our theoretical idea and a discussion about case selection and data collection. The empirical section starts by describing the identified problem explanations and continues by expanding on how they combine with role perceptions. In the concluding section, we discuss the theoretical conclusion as well as how far our findings can be generalized to other welfare state regimes.

Previous Research

Since Lipsky (1980) coined the term “street-level bureaucrats,” a broad literature has developed that studies discretion as frontline workers’ latitude to interpret rules when implementing programs (Brodkin, 2011; Keiser, 2010; Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2000; Soss, Fording, & Schram, 2011). Michael Lipsky defined street-level bureaucrats as public employees who directly interact with citizens and exercise discretion over significant aspects of their lives (Lipsky, 1980, p. 5). It is exactly this interface between citizens and the state that accords street–level bureaucrats their discretion (Meyers & Lehman Nielsen, 2012). Originally, two views on discretion were contrasted: a top-down view discussing the problem of controlling street-level bureaucrats and enforcing rule following (Gruber, 1987), and a bottom-up perspective, where discretion was seen as an important way to realize policy goals (Hood, Rothstein, & Baldwin, 2000). More recently, however, Hupe and Hill (2007) applied models of governance to the area of study, emphasizing how the work of street-level bureaucrats proceeds within a “micro cosmos” or a “web” of relations. Whichever perspective is applied, the central problem is focused on the role of street-level bureaucrats in policy implementation (Meyers & Lehman Nielsen, 2012).

As street-level bureaucracy is characterized by complexity, it is not surprising that there are quite contradictory views/perspectives on the subject. There is a normative controversy within the literature over whether discretion is a problem for democratic control through top-down steering or whether the discretion allows for greater democratic control over policy processes. This normative debate covers issues of democratic accountability such as regarding equity, meaning whether services provided ensures equal access to benefits for all citizens and achieves the desired outcome. Related thereto, there is a methodological controversy as to whether implementation research should move toward general administrative research and apply the same, often quantitative methods, which Winter (2003) suggested, or whether, ethnographically oriented qualitative studies close to the subject, which can shed light on mechanisms of the closer dynamics of interaction at the street level, are preferred. Generally, the merits of studies using quantitative analysis reside in the general conclusions that can be drawn from weighing different explanatory factors against each other to assess their relative explanatory power. On the contrary, the more finely tuned ways that meaning is produced among frontline workers are only readily accessible through qualitative analysis.

Lipsky’s seminal study saw the structural position of street-level bureaucrats as important for their reasoning and their choices and behaviors. He argued that frontline workers used coping strategies to handle particular working conditions, which were often experienced as stressful and uncontrollable, for example, strategies of “creaming” and “favoritism” (i.e., selecting preferred clients), “parking” clients, and so on. In a recent study, Tummers, Bekkers, Vink, and Musheno (2015) systemized existing research and reflected on specific caseworkers’ resources and similarly identified three dominating ways of coping among frontline workers: first, moving toward clients, a step often supported by the use of the caseworker’s personal resources; second, moving away from clients, by which the caseworker used his or her rationing (rational) resources; and the third, moving against clients, which involved rigidly following rules (Tummers et al., 2015, p. 11).

Poking deeper into the problem of why frontline workers behave as they do, there are a number of propositions in the literature, but as Meyers and Lehman Nielsen (2012) argued, general conclusions are still largely missing. Building on their summary, and others, we contend that the following factors are often in focus: political influence, personal policy positions and personal characteristics, and organizational factors, which are outlined in more detail below.

Political Influence

A central influence on frontline-level behavior and response is political influence, referring mainly to signals provided by political leaders on different levels. In an early study, Keiser and Soss (1998) examined state’s influence on federal policy of child support enforcement and found that the good-cause exemption varied systematically between states, which, they argued, depended on partisan control, state administrators, funding decisions, and demand. In a more recent article, Moynihan, Herd, and Rigby (2016) argued that states use administrative barriers such as complicated applications procedures to limit access to benefits to, for example, Medicaid, and that democratic control can limit the use of such barriers. Other work stressed the positive consequences of democratic control (Scholz, 1991), whereas other scholars, such as Winter (2003), have been more pessimistic about the possibilities of exercising such control.

Personal Policy Position and Personal Characteristics

Another set of influential factors is anchored in the personal convictions of street-level bureaucrats. Previous research has also shown that frontline workers’ sympathies to specific policy goals may influence their reasoning and behaviors. For example, Brehm and Gates (1999) argued from a public choice perspective that the personal ambition of street-level bureaucrats to “work” was the most important factor affecting performance among law enforcement in the U.S. context. In a recent article, Andersen and Jakobsen (2017) suggested that “policy frames” and cues are embedded in communication of the “professionalism” of frontline workers, which includes their policy positions. Expanding the question of personal conviction into the realm of political and democratic representation, Wilkins and Keiser (2004) found that frontline workers who were sympathetic to the goals of the child supportive agency Temporary Aid to Needy Families made more generous eligibility decisions. They discussed this as a case of “active” representation of the group of women.

In a related strand of research, Stensöta (2012) anchored the policy position of personnel in regard to the level of generosity in social insurance to the local elected representation in the case of Sweden and has shown that if the aggregated political views of the personnel are more conservative, this works to restrict generosity in output, provided the local political environment is also politically bourgeois. This is interpreted as meaning that this “double” conservative orientation, among both personnel and clients, is needed to break the more generous implementation that is interpreted to be the “normal” situation of the encompassing welfare state.

Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2000) distinguished yet another set of street-level personal factors influencing decision making, when they argued that personal moral convictions matter for the way managerial pressure plays out, by discussing frontline bureaucrats who see themselves in a street-level role as either “citizen agent” or “state agent,” where the former exposes a practice of street-level workers bending the rules to improve the ways in which policy may help clients recover and re-enter the labor market. The act of “bending the rules” is based on personal moral considerations, dubbed acting as citizen agent. The authors argued that the presence of the citizen agent represents resistance to neoliberal tendencies, meaning that individual frontline bureaucrats bend the rules to meet clients’ needs. However, as the frontline workers’ reason to do this is based on personal moral considerations, not all clients are likely to get the same favorable treatment, which becomes problematic from a democratic perspective.

Winter and May (2001) found evidence of a multidimensional role for worker beliefs, in which “professional age,” that is, the number of years having worked in the organization, is a variable that pays attention to the individual maturation of a caseworker; however, he also situated this development in a particular work site, that is, in an organizational culture. Stensöta (2009) found in an analysis of the role of the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SSIA) that professional age was the most important factor for enhancing a “care-oriented” approach to handling cases, in contrast to a rule-oriented approach. Oberfield (2010) improved our understanding of bureaucratic behavior by studying how two sets of bureaucrats developed their default rule-following identities during their first years on the job. He found support for continuity theory with respect to the strength of psychological and cognitive predispositions, which provides a counterclaim to the potential for organizational socialization.

Organizational Influence

Another strand of factors addressed by frontline research on street-level bureaucracy is how organizations shape the behavior of welfare professionals and street-level practices (Brodkin, 2011; Caswell & Høybye-Mortensen, 2015; Soss et al., 2011). In a recent study, Epp, Maynard-Moody, and Haider-Markel (2014) used the term “institutionalized agency” as a way to emphasize both the structural side of agency and the agency side of institutions (p. 7). They argued that frontline workers’ agency and their organization’s structure work as interwoven sources of workers’ reflection, categorization, and action. Instead of “favoring one side of this duality,” they suggested another frame of language for describing the dual meaning of agency and structure. Furthermore, in a recent article, Jewell and Glaser (2016) suggested a framework for investigating how the organizational setting mediates between policy goals and frontline behavior, drawing on the notion of “institutional work.” Inspired by March and Olsen (1989), they comprehended institutions as structures of resources that make action possible, by, among other things, providing structures of meaning. They identified different types of work—structural work, conceptual work, and operational work—and argued that these types of work need to be underpinned by relational work to offer chances for successful policy reform.

Sandfort (2000) also examined frontline response by taking account of professional norms and collective beliefs that frontline bureaucrats develop as something influenced by the frontline organization itself. She found an ongoing social process not capitalized upon by existing management approaches explaining variation in policy output as the result of personal characteristics, and she suggested a new explanation for the persistence of certain management challenges at the frontline of bureaucracy.

There is also Foucauldian or poststructuralist-influenced research on frontline-level work that sees practices and understandings of street-level bureaucrats as involving power relations and where the role of organizational practices in shaping categorization of clients is emphasized (Møller & Stone, 2012; Rosenthal & Peccei, 2006). Soss et al. (2011) explicated how the impact of performance management on welfare professionals’ performance works through affecting “organizational routines, tools, norms, incentives, information systems and categories of understanding functions as mechanisms of social control that shape the use of discretion in predictable ways” (Soss et al., 2011, p. 225). This strand of research has concluded that even though frontline workers have room for discretion, the presence of preset measures and targets is likely to shape how agency is nested at the front line (Hupe & Hill, 2007).

Professionalism has a special position in street-level research, and constructivist theories of professionalism view discretion as a process of inference in which knowledge dominates the professional’s reasoning (Abbott, 1988). In contrast to Lipsky, who emphasizes workers’ ties with public administration, Abbott’s concern is to pinpoint the role of scientific and practical knowledge in discretion as an act of diagnostic judgment. Furthermore, Abbott’s theoretical contribution is drawn from empirical studies of doctors and the medical domain, paying little attention to the surrounding public administration. Examining frontline responses to clients in the European context of France, Dubois (2010) analyzed the social conditions of the state–client administrative relationship, concluding that state representatives (i.e., social workers) act and reason as if they had both a social and a state body. Dubois concluded that when frontline workers embody the state, they do this both as rule compliers and as bridge builders between clients and the larger “mental scheme” of society, referring to collective norms about the individual’s rights and duties toward society (Dubois, 2010, p. 183).

The Welfare State Regime Foundation of Frontline Response

The influence that institutions on a higher level of analysis, such as welfare state regimes, have on societal norms has recently been discussed within research into generalized social trust that argues that the boundaries between “us” and “them” are drawn differently in different societies, depending on the level of equality (Larsen, 2013; Rothstein & Uslaner, 2005). It is argued that in more equal societies, people tend to think of others as being “like themselves,” whereas in more unequal societies, people think of others as being “others,” which is detrimental to generalized trust. Sønderskov and Dinesen (2014) presented a similar but empirically more nuanced argument, as they elaborated on why generalized trust has grown in the Danish case but decreased in the U.S. case since World War II. They attributed the growth of trust to better Danish education and to the absence of subsequent experiences of war (i.e., the Vietnam War). Related ideas concerning the relationship between structural patterns and people’s perceptions of “us” and “them” were described by Lamont (2000), who demonstrated that working-class men draw lines of solidarity with other groups differently in the United States and in France, attributing this to the nonpsychological features of larger social structures.

Several scholars have also argued that implementing organizations are influenced by institutions at higher levels of analysis such as the political institutional context in which they are embedded (Brodkin, 2011; see also Evans, 2011; Meyers, Glaser, & MacDonald, 1998; Sandfort, 2000). In frontline research, it is especially Jewell (2007) who has argued for introducing the idea of institutions when discussing frontline-level responses. He studied needs assessment in Sweden, Germany, and the United States. In his study of frontline responses to unemployment, he explored the impact of welfare state type on how the state handles unemployment at the street level. He demonstrated persistent diversity among welfare states in how these programmatic trade-offs are made, contrasting a U.S. approach that emphasizes programmatic control via a bureaucratic, flat-grant system with German and Swedish programs in which individualized assessments of need are a core organizational task. In each European case, legal frameworks, expertise, and work arrangements have evolved in nationally specific ways to contend with the challenges frontline discretion poses to program integrity. But, even though this comparative analysis is based on three incidental case studies, the theoretical comparisons to understand more carefully why state structures such as welfare state regime shape frontline responses toward clients are missing. Social assistance as a targeted service is also not a core feature of the social democratic welfare state regime. Instead, it is, according to Esping-Andersen (1990), the general social insurance provisions such as the sick-leave benefits and unemployment insurance that make up the backbone of the model. The individual needs-based assessment is rather an exception to the model.

Study Design

Study Design and Selection of Respondents

We have chosen Denmark and Sweden as sites for data collection. Both countries are commonly considered as belonging to the encompassing welfare state regime type and thereby distinctive from the liberal welfare state type represented by the United States, and the continental type of France or Germany (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Although Korpi (2000) argued that Denmark has moved toward the Netherlands in terms of welfare state type, making it more like a “basic security model,” we contend that most researchers regard both these two countries as different from and more encompassing than the U.S. model. This stance is also defended by the fact that many comparative welfare state studies still consider the two Nordic countries as part of the same welfare state model (cf. Ferrarini, 2006; Nelson, 2007). Both countries are further characterized by low inequality in regard to socioeconomic factors and gender as well as high general trust (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Sønderskov & Dinesen, 2014).

An important institutional characteristic of the encompassing welfare state lies in its universal inclusion of all citizens in, for example, health care programs and schooling on elementary and secondary levels. It was the social insurance provisions that Esping-Andersen (1990) considered to be the backbone of the encompassing welfare state, even though the service provision of the encompassing welfare state has become an additional important characteristic. Social insurance provisions such as unemployment, sick leave, and pension plans typically allow for compensation of lost wages on occasions when a person is unable to work for reasons defined under these benefits. In the comparative state literature, the term universal refers to the degree of targeting (Nelson, 2007). Although the actual eligibility for social programs such as social insurance is often based on combinations of universality and eligibility criteria, we follow the common procedure in the comparative welfare state literature of making a distinction between universally based social provisions and means-tested benefits, where the latter are part of a targeted system. In the encompassing welfare state, the threshold for eligibility for social insurance is low—in this case, previous attachment to the labor market—and its general design is intended to include all citizens in the program and to show fairly high reimbursement levels, as a percentage of previous earnings up to approximately the median income for at least a year.

The extra leverage that we received by collecting data from both Denmark and Sweden is that we increased the likelihood that these findings are related to the overall welfare state regime, which is similar, and not to national characteristics. We defend this strategy through the goal of exploring possible differences in the narratives provided by previous literature and predominantly collected within the United States. We also diminished the likelihood that the findings are country specific and increased the likelihood that the findings are related to the features shared by the two countries, for example, some features of the encompassing welfare state. Hence, our goal is to explore whether results are consistent across social welfare programs in countries with similar welfare regimes.

We studied caseworkers determining sick leave eligibility. Sick leave policy is, in both Sweden and Denmark, a social insurance program that every person who has been engaged in the labor market has basic access to. For a client to be eligible for monetary assistance from the insurance program, the working capacity of the particular client in relation to that person’s work needs to be assessed, which requires discretion. The main task of all the caseworkers interviewed was to determine whether citizens were eligible for sick-leave benefits and to help clients return to work. There is a division of tasks, so that some caseworkers are more specialized in early contact with clients, whereas others are more specialized in later phases, such as return to work. However, most caseworkers had changed work tasks during their careers and had experience in several areas, except for those new to the profession. The ability to return to work must be assessed individually by the caseworker in relation to the work-related circumstances of the particular client, which demands that situational circumstances be taken into consideration. If the client is not likely to return to his or her former work, the caseworker should help the client to find other assignments with the same employer or be rehabilitated to perform other types of work. Two differences between the Danish and the Swedish systems emerge: In Denmark, the system is organized on the municipal level, whereas in Sweden, it is organized on the state level; and another difference is in the training, where Danish caseworkers predominantly are trained as social workers at university colleges, whereas the Swedish training is more varied and includes human resource (HR) specialists, behavioral scientists, and social workers.

The selection of respondents was made according to two different principles in the two countries, due to data collection being originally conducted for two separate projects. In the Swedish case, the interviewees represent a total sample of frontline workers handling sick-leave benefits in counties with extreme (i.e., the lowest and highest) levels of sick-leave benefits. In the Danish case, one caseworker from each medium-sized municipality with an average level of sick-leave costs was interviewed. They were all selected from job centers with average sick-leave costs compared with the whole population of job centers in Denmark, as well as being selected from municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants, to avoid local bias in terms of industry, geography, and other external factors influencing frontline bureaucrats’ responses to clients. As both principles for selection are standard, we find it defensible to collapse them into a common data pool. Nevertheless, there are potential biases in both strategies of selection. The strategy in Denmark is potentially biased toward individual variation, whereas the strategy in Sweden is potentially biased toward local external pressure influencing the frontline personnel.

Data Collection

A total of 51 interviews were conducted, 16 in Denmark and 35 in Sweden. We asked respondents similar questions, which is a standard in qualitative data analysis that allowed us to compare and interpret reactions across the two selections. For all respondents, we used semistructured interview guides to collect the data, addressing questions about the interviewed caseworkers’ daily work tasks related to the judgments on sick-leave benefits. To capture how administrative features may affect behavior, we used questions probing for the intentional meaning (Wagenaar, 2011, p. 15) underlying concrete acts and exercised discretion, about easy and difficult cases, and caseworkers’ perceptions of clients and of themselves as caseworkers. The data analysis was based on open content coding followed by a deductive coding strategy (Lofland, Snow, Andersen, & Lofland, 2006).¹ As a way to complete the deductive coding of data, we further applied a within-case and across-case analytical strategy (Miles, Huberman, & Saldana, 2014).² We selected illustrative quotations from our coding and shared preliminary interpretations of them between us to ensure that we had not misunderstood the context of the expressions. We shared a coding framework as we combed the data for content and classification of dominant dimensions related to “problem explanation” and “caseworker role.”

Admittedly, what caseworkers say they do and what they actually do are not necessarily the same. Drawing from the literature on the importance of problem definition, we can increase our confidence that what is said also has bearing on what is done. Our study has, however, no way to empirically back up how actions are based in problem definitions and role perceptions.

Table 1.

Coding Frame.

Code	Description	Subcode	Description	Subcode	Description	Code	Description	Subcode	Description
Caseworker role	Contains role perceptions of caseworkers administering sick-leave benefits	Encompassing role	Contains role perception expressions of solidarity in a societal encompassing way to assess clients	Statesman	Contains expressions of solidarity as a societal encompassing endeavor, using reasoning leaning closely on rules	Problem explanation	Contains expressions of reasons for clients’ health problems	Structural	Contains expressions where reasons for sickness and unemployment are found in macrorelations
		Encompassing role		Professional	Contains expressions of solidarity as a societal encompassing endeavor, using reasoning leaning closely on clients			Structural
		Moral role	Contains role perception expressions of private standards to assess clients	Aversive	Contains expressions of private standards to create a distance from the client, using value-laden reasoning			Individual	Contains expressions where reasons for sickness and unemployment are found within the individual
		Moral role		Identification	Contains expressions of private standards to create an identification toward the client, using value-laden reasoning
		Technocratic role	Contains role perception expressions based on rules, but without apprehension of the goals beyond the rules, to assess clients, as well as expressions of a technical understanding of rules as basis for reasoning

Empirical Material

The empirical section is organized as follows: We first describe the content of the dimension of problem explanation, followed by a description of the dimensions in role perception. We then discuss how the dimensions are associated, and this is also the section where we provide quotations as examples of the dimensions. By association, we simply mean that a caseworker whom we have identified as using a particular problem definition is also assigned a dominating feature of the caseworker role. All reasoning is summarized in a classification sheet displaying both coding results and caseworker characteristics.

Problem Explanations

Our analyses regarded caseworkers’ reasoning about the causes of sick-leave benefits as expressions of problem explanations (code: problem explanation). In our interview material, caseworkers sometimes reasoned about the cause of client problems beyond the specific case to understand the general problem of sick-leave benefits and incapacity for work in society. We interpreted this as a difference between structural and individual problem explanations. Structural explanations regard the reasons underlying sick leave as embedded in macro relationships that can involve changing labor market structures, the system of sick-leave benefit entitlement, and what people in general think about receiving sick-leave benefits, for example, whether it is shameful or not. Individual explanations perceive the reasons for sickness and unemployment as situated within the individual, who may lack a work identity or become locked in a sick role, for example, when caseworkers blame clients for “being unorganized” or for problematic personal lifestyle choices.

Structural problem explanations are found in both the Swedish and Danish material, and they occur among those who have worked longer and shorter times as caseworkers, and among both women and men. The most common structural explanation refers to changes in “the system,” such as the standardization of production to the degree that impaired workers no longer match any job functions: “There are no ‘easy’ job tasks left in society because of efficiency improvement and demands for high work ability all over the labor market” (S22). This quotation clearly does not refer to a specific individual’s personal qualifications in relation to the labor market, but notes that the changing system no longer provides opportunities for individuals without education or who perform below average (code: structural problem explanation).

From the perspective of structural problem explanations, sick leave patterns can also be seen as being caused by the presence of people in the labor market who are actually not fit enough to work. Caseworkers referred to systemic changes that have incentivized sick people to enter the labor market instead of receiving a pension; they cannot cope with the work and ultimately end up applying for sick leave in the end, anyway: “. . .the labor market, which by now has absorbed anyone fit for work. This is the reason why they are not out there [but are applying for sick leave]. This is how I think about it” (DK14).

Individual problem explanations were also found in both Denmark and Sweden, but they were slightly more common among caseworkers who were comparatively new to the work and among caseworkers whose contact with clients was somewhat restricted, either through heavy workloads or through task assignments precluding face-to-face contact with clients (see Table 2).

Table 2.

Caseworker Characteristics and Coding Results.

Case	Background information							Coding results (number of coded words)
	Caseworker characteristics							Caseworker role					Problem explanation
	Country	Education	Experience in years	Gap to client	Gender	Region	Caseload	Professional	Statesman	Aversion	Identification	Technocratic	Individual	Structural
DK1	DK	SWL	>10	Close	M	Middle	50-64	578	377	105	338	1,567	140	262
DK2	DK	SWL	0-1	Close	F	Capital	65-80	716	199	0	0	452	452	230
DK3	DK	SWS	>10	Far	M	South	<50	740	1,017	84	412	135	533	0
DK4	DK	SWS	6-9	Close	F	South	50-64	192	652	0	347	605	464	695
DK5	DK	SWL	>10	Close	F	South	<50	1,853	77	67	145	0	0	354
DK6	DK	SWL	>10	Far	F	Capital	50-64	376	285	315	0	1,170	451	137
DK7	DK	SWL	6-9	Close	F	South	65-80	539	513	85	246	883	223	191
DK8	DK	SWS	6-9	Far	M	Middle	<50	0	170	0	0	1,623	121	184
DK9	DK	SWL	>10	Close	F	South	<50	723	183	472	537	699	1,658	0
DK10	DK	SWS	>10	Far	F	Capital	<50	298	185	186	0	1,444	0	437
DK11	DK	SWS	>10	Close	F	North	<50	149	426	0	0	1,521	255	0
DK12	DK	SWS	>10	Close	F	Middle	50-64	593	0	107	1,115	105	135	319
DK13	DK	SWL	2-5	Close	F	North	<50	523	0	106	328	704	350	0
DK14	DK	SWS	>10	Close	F	Middle	<50	417	0	324	1,083	1,014	657	82
DK15	DK	SWL	>10	Far	F	Capital	50-64	0	0	867	129	1,038	1,043	0
DK16	DK	SWL	>10	Close	F	Capital	<50	0	139	192	243	1,044	555	0
S1	S	HR	0-1	Far	F	South	High	498	0	92	142	224	0	0
S2	S	HR	2-5	Far	M	Middle	High	377	113	28	262	169	41	88
S3	S	HS	>10	Close	F	Middle	Low	565	34	172	711	81	0	0
S4	S	HS	>10	Medium	F	South	Mid	104	0	0	409	89	0	93
S5	S	PL	2-5	Far	F	Middle	High	166	81	285	136	65	167	0
S6	S	DS	0-1	Medium	F	South	Mid	53	0	0	138	0	0	74
S7	S	Rec	6-9	Close	F	Middle	Low	839	393	211	838	221	0	228
S8	S	HS	>10	Close	F	South	Low	69	0	123	135	0	0	247
S9	S	HR	6-9	Close	F	Middle	Low	445	316	88	156	0	0	95
S10	S	HS	>10	Close	F	South	Low	166	0	92	312	62	0	133
S11	S	WT	2-5	Close	F	South	Low	213	0	49	263	0	0	0
S12	S	HR	2-5	Medium	F	Middle	Mid	597	343	1,021	257	273	35	295
S13	S	HR	2-5	Close	F	Middle	Low	1,565	87	0	1,506	0	0	164
S14	S	HS	>10	Middle	F	Middle	Low	1,711	194	129	667	123	67	460
S15	S	N	>10	Close	F	Middle	Low	172	149	607	391	23	356	72
S16	S	HS	2-5	Close	M	Middle	Low	980	369	0	131	0	0	229
S17	S	HR	0-1	Medium	F	South	Mid	0	0	0	101	153	0	0
S18	S	HS	>10	Medium	F	South	Mid	0	0	38	66	294	0	0
S19	S	HS	>10	Medium	F	South	Mid	0	0	0	0	68	0	5
S20	S	HS	6-9	Close	M	Middle	Low	409	387	277	0	33	0	0
S21	S	HS	>10	Far	M	Middle	Mid	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
S22	S	SW	>10	Medium	M	South	—	421	88	168	0	115	77	77
S23	S	HR	2-5	Close	F	South	Low	0	0	0	0	0	312	123
S24	S	HS	>10	Close	F	South	Low	430	0	101	0	0	0	0
S25	S	HS	>10	Close	F	South	Mid	150	0	0	0	242	0	76
S26	S	HR	6-9	Close	F	Middle	Low	1,588	0	0	598	119	0	291
S27	S	N	>10	Far	M	South	High	250	0	71	0	116	276	391
S28	S	HS	>10	Medium	M	South	Mid	0	0	318	0	0	0	88
S29	S	HS	>10	Far	M	South	High	0	0	0	0	0	147	139
S30	S	PS	2-5	Medium	M	Middle	Mid	1,578	271	537	0	0	0	0
S31	S	HR	2-5	Medium	F	Middle	Mid	1,682	0	0	0	0	0	289
S32	S	HS	>10	Close	M	Middle	Low	1,115	0	673	0	0	0	0
S33	S	HR	6-9	Medium	M	Middle	Mid	0	0	0	572	334	0	0
S34	S	DS	10	Far	F	South	High	568	139	0	154	0	0	218
S35	S	HS	>10	Medium	F	South	Mid	0	21	35	294	325	196	196

Note. DK = Denmark; S = Sweden. Educational descriptions have been shortened as follows: SWL = social worker with 4 years of education; SWS = social worker with 1 to 2 years of education; HR = human resources college degree, 3 years; HS = high school (no college degree); PL = project leadership college degree, 3 years; DS = medical secretarial college degree, 3 years; Rec = receptionist; WT = work therapist college degree, 3 years; N = nursing college degree, 3 years; PS = political science college degree, 3 years.

The most common individual explanation for the seeking of sick-leave benefits was that the debilitating sickness was caused by an individual’s loss of work identity (code: individual problem explanation). In response to a question about a particular client who suffered from chronic pain, a caseworker explained her main problem as follows:

We cannot do anything . . . and we must say that there is a somatization condition and a lack of work identity, there are no social competences, and then we draw a line and say, well there is no work identity. (DK6)

This caseworker saw the individual’s lack of intrinsic motivation as the cause of her disability. Individual explanations were also applied when caseworkers did not believe in their clients’ inability to work: “You have people who are totally paralyzed who can work, but then you have people with an injured knee who are totally incapable of working.” Although this caseworker perceived it as difficult to understand, she recognized that the experience of being sick can differ between people: “I guess they experience themselves as very sick” (S25).

In sum, the analysis identified two types of problem explanations in the material, namely, structural and individual problem explanations. Individual problem explanations have been discussed in previous research into frontline solidarity, whereas structural problem explanations have been less often discussed. Although there seems to be some pattern whereby individual problem explanations are connected with greater distance from clients and less work experience, we conclude that structural problem explanations are found in both Sweden and Denmark.

Role Perceptions

We found three dominant role perceptions among caseworkers in our material, calling them the encompassing, technocratic, and moral roles. Whereas the moral role clearly recalls role perceptions identified in previous research and a technocratic role has also tentatively been discussed by scholars, the encompassing welfare state role is a new role perception we identified.

The encompassing role is fulfilled by caseworkers who express an understanding of solidarity that relates to the principle of universalism (code: encompassing role). They see the goal of their work (or their work role) in relation to the benefit it creates for the “whole,” and not just in relation to particular individuals. This also means that clients are seen not only in their role as clients but also as taxpaying citizens. This reference further gives a special function to the state, understood as a site where solidarity and not red tape is exercised. In addition, although the encompassing role may greatly rely on rules or a client orientation to achieve its goals, neither a rule nor client orientation is seen as a goal in itself, but rather as means to achieve a greater good that benefits society “as a whole.”

Caseworkers endorsing an encompassing role saw “equality before the law” as an important goal (or value):

People are different, but they should be treated as equals. They must be given an equal starting point and the same rules to follow. . . I find that very important. In this sense, I may be seen as a stickler for the letter of the law. (DK7)

The importance of fairness in the sense of treating similar cases equally was seen as central to the attraction of working in the public sector:

I think it is challenging to work in the public sector. Everything should be very equal, not only throughout the county but also throughout the country. It should not matter whether you live up here in the north, or in the south, or in Stockholm. Those kinds of targets are not present in the private sector. (S13)

By closer examination, we detected two subdivisions of this role, which we labeled the statesperson and the professional.

The statesperson is largely concerned with the power inherent in being a public employee (code: statesperson role), as expressed by a caseworker in the following:

I’m very humble about my job. I can give a citizen permanent support with the stroke of a pen . . . I think this deserves serious case handling as a solid basis for making the decision . . . therefore everybody must undergo work testing, no matter what. (DK3)

This caseworker connected daily job tasks to abstract principles, as was characteristic of caseworkers who perceived themselves as servants of state power. However, this does not mean that people exercising a statesperson role followed the rules slavishly, but rather that they used the rules to benefit the whole: “If you cannot explain why a certain decision has to be made without blaming the rules, I think you are in the wrong place. You are hiding behind the rules, and that is not good” (S15).

As illustrated in the quotations above and observed as a general tendency in the material, terms and expressions were remarkably similar across countries, ages, genders, educational backgrounds, workloads, and work experience. Otherwise, although we found indications that frontline worker characteristics influenced the professional, technocratic, and moral roles, we did not observe this in relation to the statesperson role. Our material suggests that the statesperson role was associated with a deep layer of cultural conventions in which the reasoning became very similar in the two national contexts and across caseworker characteristics, even at the discursive level of the choice of words and of examples to illustrate meaning, as the quotes above illustrate.

The professional has a slightly more liberal relationship with the rules and emphasizes that they need to be interpreted (code: professional role): “It is all about justifying your decisions. If you can do that you can interpret the rules fairly liberally. I have never had any problems, anyway” (S13). Rules were seen as pragmatic tools, for example, when a Danish caseworker talked about the work test:

Sometimes we ask [a doctor] if a client is capable of a work test without affecting the client’s general health . . . and if the clinical reasoning is clear, then I wouldn’t initiate a work test . . . so there is discretion in each case. (DK4)

This caseworker was willing to slightly bend the rules, without transgressing them, if this was assumed to be best for the client’s ability to recover and return to the labor market in the long run. Furthermore, caseworkers embodying the professional role prioritized practice over abstract rules. Practice was not associated with subjectivity, as in the technocratic role described below, but rather with knowledge that informed discretion as to what should be done to make the right decision. This echoes Abbott’s (1988) understanding of knowledge as both something practical, related to the particular individual, and scientific, related to general knowledge and laws.

We found the professional role in both the Swedish and Danish contexts. This indicates that education cannot explain the professional role, as caseworkers in Sweden and Denmark are trained differently. We further found the professional role among caseworkers with both more and less work experience, though it was slightly more common among caseworkers who had worked longer. We also found that it was slightly more prevalent among caseworkers with more involved client contact, facilitated either by a lighter caseload or by work tasks that let them meet clients face to face.

The technocratic role is emphasized by social workers who understand following rules as an important end in itself (code: technocratic role). We regarded caseworkers who expressed attentiveness only to the regulative aspect of policy as articulating a technocratic role. They drew their pride in work from how well they could organize and follow rules efficiently and without mistakes. The technocratic role is concerned with “putting up the shutters” and “reducing noise,” which facilitates following the rules without paying much attention to situational circumstances. This role includes understanding the rules as a set of inflexible laws forced on the client rather than used as a set of tools for examining the client’s situation.

Caseworkers who fulfilled technocratic roles saw themselves in the role of technocrats following rules and pursuing management goals. This means that they paid great attention to the managerial tools introduced in the last decade in both Sweden and Denmark. The managerial tool of testing clients’ workability was used as a goal for some. This is also known as constitutive effects of goal management, and we interpreted this as indicating a technocratic role. When the goal of contacting the client and administering labor market testing was met, some caseworkers perceived the case as closed and the task well done. Here, the goal of helping the client return to the labor market or recover while on sick-leave benefits was secondary or even absent as a quality outcome:

Then the problems stop here, because actually we have an easy job here. . . We can give sick-leave benefits for a year as a rule, and if their eligibility for early retirement pension is not yet clarified . . . well, then we stop the sick-leave benefits and they [the clients] are transferred to another system . . . and then they become someone else’s problem. (DK16)

When a caseworker was technocratic in the role as caseworker it seemed to offer a way to make cases (clients) more straightforward by reducing what qualifies as a problem (code: technocratic). This was linked to a less ambivalent view of work-related dilemmas than is predicted in conventional frontline bureaucracy research: “I like that it is black and white. There are not many ‘in-betweens.’ I like that it is black or white, right or wrong. I think it is simple. You have the rulebook and everything is in it” (S5). In general, one expects caseworkers to express frustration over conflicting goals and expectations, but this was not the case for caseworkers enacting the technocratic role. The technocratic role protected them from what Lipsky described as individual dilemmas at the frontline, for example, using rules as a checklist that replaces the mandatory individual discretion regarding clients (Lipsky, 1980).

This type was found in both the Swedish and Danish contexts, among both male and female caseworkers, and among those who had worked both longer and shorter times. Among the Swedish caseworkers, it was correlated slightly with how close the frontline workers were to the clients, being more common among those with less face-to-face contact. In the Danish context, it was more common among caseworkers with high workloads (>50 clients) than among caseworkers with low workloads. This corresponds to the results of classic studies of how frontline workers develop coping strategies such as “queening” and “creaming” in an environment with no workload control (Lipsky, 1980).

The moral role characterizes caseworkers who consciously see it as their role to use their own private standards at work (code: moral role). The moral role is concerned with “the right attitude” toward clients as well as “being nice and not bureaucratic.” We found that the moral role was likely to arise in response to perceived threats from clients or from finding out that clients had lied to them. When a caseworker uses a moral role, he or she has no resilience toward letting clients’ personal values interfere with the reasoning about eligibility.

In our coding of the moral role, we noted expressions of caseworker sensitivity in line with private standards requiring that caseworkers should like their clients and with statements establishing identification with clients, using value-laden reasoning. This sensitivity was often connected to empathy with the client: “It is always easier to help someone who is motivated and more difficult to help someone who puts their life in the hands of SSIA and wants us to help them with everything” (S9). Here, the caseworker identified with clients who expressed the “right” attitude, but not with clients who simply asked “the system” for help. A Danish caseworker expressed a similar view pertaining to the Danish context: “[It is easy to help] those who are highly motivated to find a job and who seek recovery, but have been asked by their doctor to apply for early retirement pension” (DK3).

Caseworkers who expressed moral roles typically drew on a perceived moral role and used individual problem explanations to explain client problems by seeking reasons for disability within the individual (code: moral role). When caseworkers expressed a moral role, assessing client needs became an important goal in itself, and rules were reduced to a tool for making what they saw as the right decision. Looking at this more closely, the role splits into two different types of role.

Those endorsing identification with clients perceived being a “nice” caseworker as the opposite of being a bureaucratic caseworker: “I often prolong periods of rehabilitation if I can find a loophole without breaking the rules” (S33). Many of these caseworkers used what Lamont (2000) called moral boundary drawing to establish their role; for example, they drew a moral boundary between “old-school” caseworkers whom they portrayed as passive public servants and themselves as actively engaged in clients’ problems (code: identification role). Identification with clients was also present when caseworkers said that they did not see themselves as bureaucrats and did not want to be seen as such: “I can get so angry at those registration forms we are required to fill out where there is no empathy for the client as a person and everything is just production and statistics” (S26). The quotation illustrates how caseworkers expressed solidarity with their clients’ circumstances, which also hints at particular actions or behaviors, such as prolonging periods of testing clients’ workability and seeing their solidarity as depending on private engagement with clients. This is very similar to the citizen agent described by Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003) in the U.S. context with reference to caseworkers who associated good casework with going “the extra mile” for clients.

Aversion to clients also entailed applying private standards to clients, leading to the establishment of distance from and dislike of clients with reference to value-laden reasoning (code: aversive role). Caseworkers could respond with aversion to threats from clients or when they felt they had been lied to: “I saw in an advertisement the other day that a person I had given an early retirement pension was advertising to attract clients to his private firm. That made me a bit sad. I think I will report him” (S7). The aversive role could also be a reaction to the caseworker’s perception of the clients’ private morality, for example, to clients being disorganized: “Zero-rated client status [i.e., when a person receives no sick-leave benefits] is self-inflicted in most cases. You quit a job and do not report to the unemployment roll but loaf about” (S5).

The moral role and its associated type of role were found in both the Danish and Swedish material, and among caseworkers with more and less work experience as well as among both women and men. The moral role was found among caseworkers with more and less intense client interaction as well as among caseworkers working within strong and weak managerial routines. However, it was more common among caseworkers whose client contact was restricted, whether through greater workloads or through work tasks allowing them to interact with clients over the phone (see Table 2). Table 3 below sums up how caseworker roles and problem explanations were combined by caseworkers.

Table 3.

Caseworker Roles Related to Problem Explanations Across Cases.

			Problem explanation
			Individual	Structural
Caseworker role	Encompassing	Professional	DK2, S22	DK5, S2, S7, S9, S13, S14, S16, S31, S34
	Encompassing	Statesman		DK4, S26, S27
	Moral	Aversion	DK15, S5, S15	S12, S28
	Moral	Identification	DK3, DK12, DK14,	S4, S6, S8, S10, S35
	Technocratic		DK6, DK7, DK9, DK11, DK13, DK16	DK1, DK8, DK10, S19, S25

Note. DK = Denmark; S = Sweden. Not classified on one dimension and therefore not applicable in the table: S1, S3, S11, S17, S18, S20, S21, S23, S24, S29, S30, S32, and S33.

Table 3 shows that the encompassing role is associated with structural problem explanations, whereas moral and technocratic roles are associated with both individual and structural problem explanations. Just as the encompassing role sees solidarity with clients as an encompassing societal phenomenon, so too are the causes of health problems seen in societal, that is, structural terms. The technocratic role, distinguished by “technical” rule following, sometimes as an end in itself, is in a sense predisposed to individual problem explanations, as there has been an increase in administrative tools prescribing individual responsibility for returning to work from sick leave in both Denmark and Sweden, and a caseworker following rules on a narrow basis would respond to this. The moral role also builds on an individual concept of solidarity, as it is the private engagement that forms the basis for coherence among caseworkers fulfilling this role.

As seen in Table 3, the encompassing role, predominantly based on structural problem explanations, has two subdivisions, which lean in different ways to realize their perspective. The statesperson role is oriented more toward rules, whereas the professional role is oriented more toward clients. Both, however, incorporate what was described above as the encompassing role as well as a propensity for structural problem explanations. Caseworkers exercising a statesperson or professional role respond to client problems by seeking macro reasons for disability and see clients as part of society’s larger macro relationships. Here, it is noticeable that we do not identify any examples of caseworkers combining a statesperson role with an individual problem explanation of a client, and this is true for both the Danish and the Swedish contexts. Whether this reflects a protective mechanism against “blaming the client” is important; however, further studies on a greater empirical dataset are required to test this hypothesis. There are no systematic indications that the differences between Denmark and Sweden in terms of organization of sick leave benefit handling as well as the education of sick leave benefit workers can account for the variation in problem explanation. This also indicates that the different selection mechanisms of respondents did not pose a severe problem with drawing conclusions.

Conclusion

Our analysis has described role perceptions found in the context of the Scandinavian welfare state type, as exemplified by Denmark and Sweden. Our theoretical model sees a connection between the logics of the welfare state regime, in terms of an underlying distinction between individualistic or structural views on solidarity and blame. We have further argued that this overall structure is reflected in the problem explanations that frontline workers develop in relation to clients, and that this in turn is related to the roles available to frontline workers. By focusing on social insurance–type programs in two countries, we provide evidence that results are consistent across social welfare programs in countries with similar welfare regimes.

The contribution of this article has been to provide a description of roles of solidarity with clients that have not been shown before in the frontline literature. The statesperson sees solidarity as originating from a view of citizens as clients and taxpayers. This role presupposes that the state is an important arena for organizing and exercising a solidarity that encompasses “the whole” of society. The professional develops his or her “own” guidelines for the work, not through bending the rules, as in the narrative by Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2000), but within the framework of the rules. From this perspective, rules are important, not as ends in themselves but as means to include “the whole.” We see these roles as responses toward managerial pressure, in an overall way, in the form of the discussion on the problems of increasing sick leave beneficiaries that has been high on the political agenda in both countries during several decades. The roles differ from roles previously identified in frontline-level research, as the roles found in our material do not draw on the personal moral judgments of the frontline worker, such as in the “moral role,” nor do they use the technocratic system as an end in itself.

Previous literature on front-level perceptions of caseworker roles is based largely on analyses of Anglo-Saxon countries, which are in many ways unrepresentative. Anglo-Saxon countries have a more limited idea of the role of the state than is found in many other countries. Regardless of whether we consult the comparative welfare state literature regarding conservative versus encompassing welfare states, or whether we consult the coordinated/uncoordinated market literature, Anglo-Saxon countries are outliers.

Our study suggests that the expectation that the limited Anglo-Saxon welfare state has no social bridging stance of its own is not generalizable to other types of states. Our analysis demonstrates that a certain solidarity foundation can be associated with and embodied by the state. Although this lies beyond the scope of our empirical investigation, we can hypothesize that the encompassing caseworker role and structural problem explanations, as well as statesperson and professional types of roles, may be present in states other than Denmark and Sweden that do not represent the limited Anglo-Saxon model. This role, with its associated problem explanations and role types, does not only have to be limited to the Scandinavian encompassing welfare state but could also be present in, for example, conservative welfare states that also coordinate their markets.

Finally, frontline research emphasizes coping as a way to describe frontline responses toward citizens, a concept that suggests that frontline worker agency is primarily motivated by dealing with work pressure in different ways. However, our analysis suggests that frontline responses are also grounded in the problem conceptions provided by the welfare state regime and its organization of solidarity.

To conclude, our analysis has demonstrated that managerial policy pressure is filtered through institutional characteristics that play out at the frontline level as different types of reasoning about eligibility for sick-leave benefits. Through this process, understandings of how solidarity with clients can be realized are shown to have an institutional basis. The encompassing caseworker role, which embodies several characteristics of the encompassing welfare state identified in earlier research, such as trust in government as a tool for solving common problems, is enacted even when the frontline worker works under managerial pressure to address individual problem explanations. Consequently, we note the resilience of general welfare state characteristics even at the frontline level and even when we can discern the clear impact of managerial policy in terms of individual problem explanations.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Marie Østergaard Møller, PhD, is a senior research associate, Danish Institute of Local and Regional Government Research, KORA, Denmark. Her research interests include social and political categories, categorization, frontline work, welfare state research, classic social theory of solidarity, and qualitative methods. Her work “Prevention at the Front Line” (2014) has appeared in Public Management Review, “Constructing at-risk target groups” (2013) in Critical Policy Studies, “Disciplining Disability” (2012) in Social Policy and Administration, and “Categories and Categorization: Toward a Comprehensive Sociological Framework” (2011) in Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory.

Helena Olofsdotter Stensöta is an associate professor (PhD) of political science at the University of Gothenburg. Her research centers on issues of gender, ethics, public policy, and administration, and most recently gender, institutions, and corruption. Her research involves theoretical elaborations on how ethics of care contributes to public administrating research (Public Administration Review, ), as well as on how the perspective of public administration contributes to the ethics of care discussion (Ethics and Social Welfare, 2015). She has further disclosed how interactions between local norms and frontline bureaucratic attitudes may affect policy output. It is only when conservative-oriented political views in the community, interacting with conservative political views among frontline workers, that the inherent generosity of the sick insurance welfare system may be broken (Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory: J-Part, 2012). Her most recent research is on the topic of gender and corruption, forwarding the argument that the curbing impact of women on corruption is stronger in the electoral arena than in the bureaucracy, hence, depends on institutions (with Lena Wängnerud) (Governance, 2015).

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