Social suffering and (mis)recognition: How welfare officials respond to the critical voices of clients

Abstract

Although there is not much attention for the concept of social suffering in studies on welfare policy and frontline work, it offers a valuable perspective for understanding both the harms that welfare clients endure and the ways in which state actors may either mitigate or compound this harm. Based on observations of 172 welfare encounters in the Netherlands, we contribute to the literature by empirically showing how welfare officials respond to the social suffering of clients. Officials most often misrecognized the social suffering of welfare clients by ignoring, reacting indifferently or individualizing it. Moments when they recognized it were more exceptional and took the form of empathising with the feelings of clients or acknowledging the social origin of their suffering. In the context of widespread distrust in institutions following governmental crises such as the Dutch Benefit Scandal, we believe it is important to invest more efforts in examining how and why frontline workers use their discretion to respond to people's social suffering.

Keywords

discretion frontline work recognition social suffering welfare

Introduction

In recent years, a series of public crises has severely undermined trust in governmental institutions in the Netherlands (Kanne and Driessen, 2021). Among these, the Childcare Benefit scandal stands out as a stark example of systemic injustice. In this large-scale scandal, at least 42.955 families – mostly single-parent households with a migration background – were wrongly accused of fraud by the national tax authorities (Uitvoeringsorganisatie Herstel Toeslagen, 2025). Those targeted were forced to repay years of childcare benefits, leading to insurmountable debts and profound poverty. The wellbeing of both parents and children was gravely harmed, as were their attitudes towards state institutions (Konaté and Pali, 2023).

The Dutch Childcare Benefit scandal vividly demonstrates what can happen when the structural causes of suffering are overlooked or actively denied. In this case, an overriding focus on individual responsibility and alleged personal failings – at the expense of recognising institutional injustices and systemic discrimination – resulted in profound harm to thousands of families (Arts and Van den Berg, 2025). By failing to question or resist institutional practices that disregarded the broader social and structural contexts of clients’ lives, frontline workers contributed to making this suffering invisible.

In this article, we focus on the recognition and misrecognition of social suffering in the field of welfare. Following Frost and Hoggett (2008: 441) we define social suffering as ‘the lived experience of inhabiting social structures of oppression and the pain that arises from this’. Various studies on welfare underpin the width of suffering of people inhabiting European welfare structures. Links have been established between prolonged unemployment and (mental) health problems, substance abuse, social isolation and even suicide (Boland and Griffin, 2016). Other studies have shown how the individualisation of unemployment, to be overcome through optimism (Arts and Van den Berg, 2019; Dubois, 2009) is often internalised by welfare recipients and results in feelings of shame and worthlessness (Peterie et al., 2019).

Focusing on the Dutch context, we find compelling accounts of what we refer to as social suffering among welfare clients. Since the early 2000s, the Netherlands has increasingly shifted from a centralised welfare state to a decentralised, activation-oriented model (Van der Veen and Koster, 2024). Responsibilities for delivering working-age social assistance and employment services have been moved from national institutions to municipal governments. This decentralisation was aimed at fostering tailor-made support, reducing long-term dependency, and encouraging labour market participation (Sebrechts and Kampen, 2022). Since 2015, welfare benefits fall under the legal framework of the Participation Act. It merged several earlier schemes and expanded municipal responsibilities, aiming to achieve maximum social and economic participation among people of working age. It has been argued that welfare-to-work schemes of the Participation Act fail to adequately address social rights and exacerbate power imbalances between the state and welfare recipients (Eleveld et al., 2020). Dutch welfare clients experience material hardship (Goderis, 2025) and are subjected to a strict monitoring regime that puts a strong emphasis on duties (Brink and Vonk, 2020), causing experiences of pain and suffering like shame, anger and envy (Sebrechts and Kampen, 2022). The suffering around these issues is ‘social’ because it is fundamentally related to their position as welfare recipients who are dependent on state benefits and subjected to what have been called ‘unjust’ welfare policies (Kampen et al., 2020).

In this article, we shift our attention to welfare officials who, through their day-to-day interactions with clients, effectively embody the face of the state (Lipsky, 2010: 4). These frontline workers are uniquely positioned to either recognise and respond to the suffering of welfare clients, or to contribute to its erasure and intensification. Their discretion – a defining feature of frontline work – plays a central role in these interactions. Yet, within the literature on welfare and frontline work, the concept of social suffering and the ethical dilemmas it raises remain largely underexplored. While the suffering of clients is occasionally acknowledged, it is often treated as just one of many challenges professionals face – alongside high workloads, time constraints, and conflicting responsibilities (e.g., Fuseini, 2024). Moreover, discussions of suffering often focus on its impact on frontline workers themselves – for example, on their mental health and emotional wellbeing (Ropes and de Boer, 2021; Travis et al., 2016) – rather than on how it shapes the interaction between professionals and clients.

Theoretically, this article contributes to the growing body of literature on social suffering within welfare policy implementation by examining how welfare officials use their discretionary space to either address – or fail to address – clients’ suffering. Our central research question is: How do welfare officials respond to the social suffering of welfare recipients during welfare encounters? In a context where public trust in institutions has been severely undermined by crises such as the Childcare Benefit scandal, understanding how frontline workers engage with the social suffering of welfare clients is both timely and urgent. This article seeks to take a further step in that direction.

Welfare and social suffering

The concept of social suffering gained prominence in the 1990s, when scholars began to examine the social and cultural origins of individual suffering, particularly among marginalised communities (Bourdieu, 1999; Kleinman et al., 1997). Following Frost and Hoggett, we define social suffering as ‘the lived experience of inhabiting social structures of oppression and the pain that arises from this’ (2008: 441).

In The Weight of the World (1999), Bourdieu and colleagues presented stories of loneliness, exclusion, substance abuse, poverty, physical and mental illness, and unemployment, interpreting these experiences in light of broader institutional and social forces – such as post-industrialisation, European integration, immigration, and shifting gender and ethnic relations in late twentieth-century France. At its core, the concept of social suffering highlights the unequal distribution of suffering within and across societies. Factors such as poverty, gender, ethnicity, and welfare dependency increase people's exposure to more intense or chronic forms of suffering (Farmer, 2004; Kleinman et al., 1997).

In one of the most comprehensive theoretical accounts, Renault (2017) argues that social suffering refers specifically to “abnormal” suffering – that is, suffering that exceeds the ordinary pain and hardship of human life. This contrasts with what is sometimes termed ‘biographical suffering’: that which arises from major personal disruptions, such as illness, divorce, or death (Bury, 1982; Charmaz, 1991). While scholars working on biographical disruption acknowledge its social dimensions, we maintain a conceptual distinction in this article between suffering that stems from primarily personal causes (‘biographical suffering’) and suffering that is produced or intensified by structural or institutional forces (“social suffering”).

Despite a few notable exceptions (Frost and Hoggett, 2008; Soldatic and St Guillaume, 2022), the concept of social suffering remains largely absent in the literature on welfare policy and welfare policy implementation. Where suffering is acknowledged, the focus typically lies on its impact on frontline workers themselves. For example, studies have shown that exposure to clients’ suffering, in combination with high workloads and time pressure, contributes to emotional labour (Fuseini, 2024), burnout (Ropes and de Boer, 2021; Travis et al., 2016), and moral suffering (Harper and Karypidou, 2024). While these studies offer valuable insights into the experiences of frontline workers, they largely overlook the implications for client-worker interactions.

In studies using other, comparable concepts of social suffering, like institutional violence (Redman and Fletcher, 2022) or institutional neglect (Kiely and Warnock, 2023), the implications for client-worker interactions are more articulated. These studies show how in a context of budget cuts, managerial oversight, and performance targets, frontline workers may become compelled to enforce policies that undermine claimants’ wellbeing, and how institutions meant to offer care and assistance simultaneously generate suffering (Kiely and Warnock, 2023; Redman and Fletcher, 2022). Yet, we know little about how frontline workers respond when welfare recipients critically express their experiences of social suffering during welfare encounters. We found one similar study by Flick (2016) who examines how psychotherapists respond to patients’ work-related social suffering. Flick demonstrates that therapists often ‘de-thematised’ the social dimension of suffering, transforming it into a problem of the individual self. When patients attributed their burnout to exploitative work conditions, therapists frequently responded by reframing or sidelining the social causes, treating them as either irrelevant or unsuitable for therapeutic intervention (Flick, 2016).

Discretion and (mis)recognition

Frontline work, or street-level bureaucracy, is widely discussed across disciplines such as social policy, social work, and public administration. Since Lipsky's influential work (2010 [1980]), scholars have examined how frontline workers interpret, negotiate, and implement state policies (Stray et al., 2023; Tummers et al., 2015; van Berkel, 2020). A central theme in this body of work is discretion – the autonomy granted to frontline workers in making decisions and implementing policy. Discretion is vital because these workers must reconcile competing roles and values while navigating complex individual cases in environments characterised by limited resources.

The literature highlights both the positive (Tummers et al., 2015; Zacka, 2017) and negative consequences of discretion (Brodkin and Majmundar, 2010; van Berkel, 2020). On the one hand, discretion allows for flexibility and the adaptation of policy to the unique circumstances of individual clients. On the other hand, it can lead to highly individualised, unpredictable, and opaque practices. Zacka (2017) argues that these risks cannot be addressed simply by imposing additional rules. Instead, he advocates for cultivating an organisational culture of accountability in which frontline workers are encouraged to engage in peer deliberation and challenge each other's assumptions.

Frontline workers must continuously navigate a landscape of often conflicting values, including efficiency, fairness, responsiveness and respect, while operating under resource constraints and ambiguous mandates (Stray et al., 2023; Zacka, 2017). This requires frontline workers to engage in ongoing moral reasoning and judgement. Far from being passive implementers of policy, street-level bureaucrats are better understood as moral mediators (Stray et al., 2023) or as actors embedded within a moral ecosystem (Zacka, 2017: 246).

The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest in the moral dimensions of frontline work (Stensöta, 2010; Zacka, 2017). In this article, we contribute to this discussion by exploring how welfare officials (mis)recognise the social suffering of clients. Rosanvallon (2011: 179) argues that without engaging in a politics of recognition, democratic institutions are bound to fail: ‘in an age defined by the quest for recognition, power is recognized as legitimate if it is attentive to individual situations and makes the language of recognition its own’. In other words, people are more willing to accept decisions from institutions when they feel close to them and are treated with recognition and respect. This makes recognition a particularly important phenomenon to study in a context of widespread distrust (Kanne and Driessen, 2021).

Theories of recognition and misrecognition have been developed primarily within political-philosophical approaches to social justice (Fraser and Honneth, 2003). These theoretical contributions offer limited insight into how recognition is enacted or denied in concrete interactions between state actors and citizens. Social work scholarship helps to bridge this gap: it draws on these political-philosophical foundations but translates them into concepts that speak to everyday professional practice (Garrett, 2010; Houston, 2016). At the same time, critics note that much of this literature foregrounds interpersonal elements of recognition, such as connection, closeness and dialogue, while neglecting its material and discursive dimensions (Boone et al., 2020; Timor-Shlevin, 2023). This concern resonates with Fraser's tripartite understanding of justice as involving representation (discursive), recognition (relational) and redistribution (institutional) (2007).

For empirical analysis, Timor-Shlevin's study of frontline workers in an Israeli welfare agency (2023) is one of the few contributions that operationalises (mis)recognition in state-citizen interactions while retaining this tripartite perspective. In social policy research more broadly, explicit engagement with recognition is rare, yet several comparable concepts – such as responsiveness (Lipsky, 2010; Stivers, 1994; Zacka, 2017), respect (Zacka, 2017), an ethics of care (Stensöta, 2010), and (critical) empathy (Nguyen and Velayutham, 2018) – address similar concerns. Drawing on Timor-Shlevin (2023), we integrate these contributions into three empirically useful forms of recognition: emotional, discursive and material.

Emotional recognition refers to acknowledging and validating clients’ feelings (Nguyen and Velayutham, 2018), demonstrating empathy (Lipsky, 2010), and treating people as unique individuals deserving dignity and compassion (Zacka, 2017: 105). Discursive recognition involves listening attentively to clients’ narratives (Stivers, 1994), trusting and seeking to understand their perspectives (Nguyen and Velayutham, 2018; Stensöta, 2010). Material recognition concerns responsiveness to clients’ needs (Zacka, 2017) and taking practical action – such as providing support or addressing their complaints (Nguyen and Velayutham, 2018; Timor-Shlevin, 2023). Following Fraser, Timor-Shlevin (2023: 659) argues that transformative recognition requires attention to all three dimensions. Yet he also shows that emotional recognition can be offered without accompanying discursive or institutional recognition, thereby ‘reinforcing the current social order while presenting a façade of relational empathy’ (p. 659).

Methods

The study employed a qualitative, ethnographic approach to explore frontline interactions between welfare officials and welfare clients in the Netherlands. Using ‘shadowing’ (e.g., McDonald, 2005) as our main method, we followed 19 welfare officials for an average of four working days over the course of two years, in their interactions with 172 welfare recipients (2022–2024). This resulted in a total of 61 days of shadowing, with observations of 172 welfare encounters, including notes of debriefing and welfare officials’ reflections on the encounter.

The 19 welfare officials worked in three different Dutch municipalities, including one of the four major Dutch cities and two smaller cities, selected to capture variation in local administrative practices and demographic contexts. Welfare officials were selected in consultation with colleagues to ensure variation in work styles and work experience. Welfare officials worked in both benefit administration or employment services. In all three municipalities, these departments were separated from each other with some welfare officials focusing on the administration of benefits (sometimes in combination with a focus on activation services), and others working in employment services. In our selection, we made sure to include teams from both departments.

In our notes, we focused on verbal and non-verbal communication, the content and tone of interactions, and the institutional setting in which encounters took place. In most instances, this meant ‘transcription’ (Clifford, 1990) was possible and we could write down what people said and did while they did it. All other observations (e.g., about the room, contact with colleagues, etc.) were jotted down as keywords first (‘inscriptions’) and turned into elaborate ‘descriptions’ with attention for detail and context (‘descriptions’) at the end of each shadowing day (Clifford, 1990).

Data were coded by the two authors in Atlas.ti and analysed thematically (Braun and Clarke, 2006). In the first round of data collection, we took an inductive approach to code the data. This resulted in a large number of codes, ranging from clients’ backgrounds to their activities, and ranging from welfare officials’ interventions during the encounter to communication styles. What struck us in this first round of analysis were clients’ stories of suffering, the difference between biographical forms and more social forms of suffering, and the various ways in which officials responded to this. In the second round of coding, we conducted a more ‘theoretical’ thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006: 83–84), focusing on the two forms of suffering and on the responses of welfare officials, e.g., ignoring, downplaying, doubting, or acknowledging, legitimising.

After each cycle of fieldwork, approx. a quarter of the data set was analysed jointly with other researchers involved in the project and an expert by experience. After both cycles of data collection, we organised ‘learning sessions’ in each of the three municipalities to discuss preliminary findings with the involved welfare officials, quality managers of welfare departments, and experts by experience. The learning sessions were not part of our formal data collection, and we therefore do not draw on them in our analysis. We do, however, note in the discussion that these sessions reinforced our sense that there is little shared understanding of how welfare officials should address clients’ social suffering.

The research was conducted in accordance with ethical guidelines for qualitative research and approved by the Ethics Review Committee of the authors’ university. The presence of the researchers was explained to welfare officials and clients in written form, and written informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to each observation. All names and identifying details have been anonymized in the reporting of findings.

Responding to social suffering

In what follows, we offer empirical insights into how welfare officials responded to clients who were critical of the social and institutional contexts that generate or exacerbate their suffering. Three themes were recurrent throughout our findings. First, we noticed a vast difference between frontline workers’ responses towards biographical versus social suffering. Second, the predominant way of dealing with the social suffering of welfare clients was by ‘misrecognising’ it: ignoring and individualising the social origins of their suffering or reacting indifferently to it. Third, clients’ social suffering was occasionally recognised, either emotionally, discursively and/or materially.

Recognising biographical suffering

In interactions with welfare officials, many welfare clients recounted profound negative experiences that can be linked to their personal lives. They spoke about divorce, illness, death, mental health problems, etc. This kind of ‘biographical suffering’ (Bury, 1982) played a big role in welfare encounters. Welfare officials mapped the often-painful life-stories of recipients in detail and asked questions to deepen their understanding of clients’ circumstances. Upon hearing about the biographical suffering of clients, most welfare officials reacted with a considerable degree of emotional recognition:

When the welfare official asks Esra how she is doing, Esra says the worries about her daughter are getting worse. The welfare official leans forward and listens attentively to Esra. It strikes me that the welfare official continuously looks her into the eyes, except for the moments in which she takes notes about the situation. Esra tells how her daughter's baby (only a few weeks old) was taken away from her by her ex-husband – the father – during twelve days. He enforced guardianship by threatening Esra's daughter minutes after giving birth. Because of that, nobody could do anything (police, child protection services). The welfare official responds: ‘oh my, that's terrible that nobody could do anything’. During Esra's story, the welfare official continuously makes small approving noises (‘hm..’, ‘yes’) and nods in understanding. ‘So sad, all of this’, reacts the welfare official. Esra wipes away a tear. The welfare official leans forward and takes Esra's hand to comfort her. (19 January 2023, RSN3)

The welfare official in this example takes time to listen to Esra's experiences suffering and engages in verbal and bodily cues that signal to the client that she is listened to. We could see this as an example of emotional and discursive recognition: the welfare official shows empathy (Lipsky, 2010: 230), acknowledges and believes what the welfare client says and feels (Nguyen and Velayutham, 2018: 165). In touching Esra's hand, the welfare official shows the ultimate example of responding with care and trying to comfort her (Stensöta, 2010: 298). While this ‘bodily’ engagement was an exception, it is illustrative for a more general observation: that most welfare officials took the time to actively listen to clients’ grievances and use their discretion for providing them with (emotional, discursive) recognition.

Misrecognising social suffering

As we will see in what follows, the ways in which welfare officials made use of their discretionary space when confronted with social suffering fundamentally differed from how they dealt with biographical suffering. In the next part, we provide empirical material that attests to two of the ways in which the social suffering of welfare clients was misrecognised.

Ignoring and downplaying

Glen is in his thirties, has Moluccan roots and is a single father of a young child. When the welfare official asks him about his job-search efforts, Glenn mentions he looked for jobs, among others at a call-centre and a bakery, but that it is difficult because of his limited availability as a single parent. Glen tells the welfare official he became insecure and lost faith: ‘I continuously stood in front of a closed door [metaphorically] and was constantly rejected’. During the encounter, Glen is critical of the labour market. He recalls his negative experiences with temporary contracts in the past. The welfare official remains silent. Glen continues: ‘I have a son, I am not cannon fodder! How can I invest in a company that does not want to invest in me’? The welfare official remains silent, except for mentioning that ‘things went a little crazy during corona’. She says she will think about a job that could be a good fit for him. A few minutes later in the conversation, she suggests him to work at a food-stall during the upcoming festival in town, because this would be great for his ‘network’. (13 August 2024, ATS6)

The welfare official does not react to Glen's story about successive insecure contracts, the stress of raising his son alone on precarious sources of income, and the lack of esteem from companies who do not want to invest in him. She remains silent for most of Glen's story. There are no approving noises, no signs of emotional recognition.

The welfare official also does not acknowledge Glen's critique of the labour market. There is no ‘discursive recognition’. By contrast, through mentioning covid-19, she downplays his critique, suggesting that temporary contracts were a specific phenomenon of those years, even though we know that in the Netherlands this has been a consistent trend since a few decades (CBS, 2019), and that many welfare clients are led to accept unstable and insecure employment (Arts and van den Berg, 2019; Kampen et al., 2020). In addition, she individualises his critique by suggesting that by strengthening his network and accepting yet another (extremely) short-term employment opportunity at a one-weekend festival, he might find stable employment in the future (cf. Flick, 2016).

Reacting indifferently

Roy is a 30-year-old, black, welfare client who has been unemployed for five years and has a criminal history. The welfare official asks him about his experiences with the welfare-to-work trajectory he recently enrolled in. Roy expresses critique about his employer and the poor work conditions: his job was to fill large 20kg bags with sand. He tells about the back aches after each day of work, his dirty hands, the cold and lack of heating in the middle of winter. The welfare official leans backwards with a neutral face and poses a few questions: ‘who were your bosses? ‘Where did you do this work’? ‘How was your attendance’? She registers Roy's answers in the digital dossier, often moving her gaze towards the computer. At the end of the encounter, the welfare official informs Roy that she will enrol him in a new trajectory to become more ‘work fit’. (22 February 2023, RSB1)

The welfare official reacts ‘indifferently’ to Roy's language of suffering (back aches, cold): the absence of words of acknowledgement (yes, hm, okay), body language and facial expressions show a limited level of emotional recognition. Her questions are strictly factual and informative and draw the focus away from Roy's experiences of suffering. She registers his responses in the client file and thereby follows administrative guidelines at the expense of showing empathy (Lipsky, 2010: 230).

Reflecting on the encounter afterwards, the welfare official individualises Roy's complaints about the harsh work conditions. According to her, the problem is Roy's addiction, his criminal history, and his supposed problem with authorities. Not the poor work conditions, but his lack of being ‘work fit’, are the main problem. She disregards the structural nature of Roy's suffering which can be linked to poor work environments for people without diplomas, the lack of available work opportunities for people with a criminal record, and the compulsory nature of trajectories like the one he enrolled in. In other words, there is neither emotional nor discursive recognition, as his perspective is dismissed and not trusted by the welfare official.

The above two examples show how welfare officials respond to the social suffering of clients by misrecognising it, either by ignoring, downplaying or reacting indifferently to it. There are no verbal or physical signs of recognition. The ‘social’ dimension of their suffering is de-thematised (cf. Flick, 2016), instead turning it into an issue that welfare clients can and should solve individually. Misrecognition most often appeared as passive resistance to clients’ interpretations of their suffering as structurally produced, as in the two examples above. More rarely, officials engaged in active resistance. This included the use of humour (e.g., responding to a 55-year-old client's experience of age discrimination with “old man? young god!”), offering success stories to counter clients’ critiques (as when a caseworker emphasised his own positive experience with temporary employment agencies), or directly challenging clients’ accounts (such as questioning whether a client's difficulties accessing mental healthcare stemmed from his own refusal to accept diagnoses rather than systemic barriers).

A red thread throughout all these examples is that the ‘social’ dimension of suffering, is misrecognised and individualised. Welfare clients are shown, in various ways, how they are either ‘wrong’ in their critical capacities, and/or how they can and should be resilient and undertake actions to change their situation of unemployment (cf. Arts and van den Berg, 2019).

Recognising social suffering

More occasionally, welfare officials responded with recognition when confronted with the social suffering of welfare clients. A major difference was observed between moments in which welfare officials recognised the feelings of social suffering, but not the social origin of that suffering. We also note a difference between emotional and discursive recognition with and without material recognition (Timor-Shlevin, 2023).

Emotional recognition

Morris is a 51-year old white man, suffering from heart problems. In the encounter with the welfare official, he says that he mistrusts people and that he has been cheated many times. He refers to his court-appointed administrator: for the past six or seven years he has not helped Morris with debt restructuring, and now in less than two years’ time he is debt-free. He voices his frustration about the fact that this could have been done eight years ago and that he would have had an easier life, financially speaking. The welfare official listens attentively to Morris’ story. He responds ‘yes, you have a burdened past… I understand that you became distrustful of other people’. The welfare official then moves on to explain to Morris how the debt-counselling system works and that there is a difference between court-appointed administrators and debt-counsellors. (19 June 2024, OMJ10)

The example above shows a welfare official who acknowledges the client's negative feelings arising from his criticism of the debt-counselling system. Morris's experience – years under court-appointed administration with little progress – is far from unique; research by the Ombudsman (2020) documents widespread structural obstacles in debt-relief trajectories. In this interaction, the official listens attentively, allows Morris to express his frustrations (Stensöta, 2010; Stivers, 1994), and offers verbal cues signalling understanding. This stands in contrast to the misrecognition examples, where such feelings were routinely ignored, downplayed or reacted to indifferently. Yet the official does not recognise the social origins of Morris's suffering, i.e., his critique of the administrator and the debt-counselling system. After listening, he shifts to explaining how the system works, implicitly suggesting that Morris has misunderstood its procedures. In doing so, he offers emotional but not discursive recognition. The literature warns that such partial recognition – empathy without engagement with structural issues – can reinforce existing power relations while projecting a façade of relational care (Fraser and Honneth, 2003; Timor-Shlevin, 2023: 659).

Emotional and discursive recognition

Nouria is a woman from Togo wearing a headscarf. She fled to the Netherlands when she was 15 years old. Now 37, she is a single mother of five children. Upon arriving in the Netherlands, she did not get the opportunity to enrol in secondary education. During the welfare encounter, Nouria says she fears that without an educational degree she won’t stand a chance to find stable employment on the labour market and that she will be easily dismissed. She adds that it would be better if she obtained an educational degree. The welfare official takes the time to listen to Nouria. She looks Nouria in the eyes, and with a nod of the head tells her ‘I understand that you think like that […] if you really want to be responsible for the care of elderly people, then it is true you need a diploma’. She then goes on to say ‘on the other hand, there are always types of work you can do. But it might not always be what you want’. (22 April 2024, RSN12)

The welfare official, as in the previous example, creates a moment of connection by listening attentively to Nouria's grievances – maintaining eye contact, nodding, and signalling understanding (emotional recognition). By affirming that ‘it is true you need a diploma’, she acknowledges the structural importance of educational credentials. Her follow-up – that other forms of work are possible but may not align with Nouria's wishes – implicitly recognises the limited and often unattractive labour-market options available to people without formal qualifications. Unlike many other instances in which officials downplayed clients’ critiques of the labour market, this official partly shares Nouria's diagnosis of the situation and thus offers some degree of discursive recognition.

At the same time, the official shifts responsibility back to Nouria by stressing that ‘there are always types of work you can do’. Despite acknowledging her social suffering, the proposed solution rests on individual adaptation to poor-quality work, thereby individualising part of the problem. In recognition terms, the official provides emotional and discursive but not material recognition (Timor-Shlevin, 2023): she makes no attempt to support Nouria in accessing education that could improve her labour-market position. In a follow-up conversation with the researcher, the official expressed disappointment that colleagues had not enrolled Nouria in secondary education upon her arrival in the Netherlands – which she believed would have been relatively easy – but noted that she could no longer assist her with this now.

Emotional, discursive and material recognition

In this last part of the findings, we pay attention to moments in which recognition of social suffering also implied that welfare officials acted on the complaints of clients. In other words, when emotional or discursive recognition were accompanied by material recognition (Timor-Shlevin, 2023):

Fatima is a middle-aged woman with a headscarf and migration background. Fatima is critical of the welfare sanction she received. She complains to her welfare official about the monthly 75 euros she must pay to the welfare office because she bought groceries for her daughter and the daughter repaid the money to her mother (welfare clients are not allowed to receive payments on their bank account, and Fatima did not have the receipt to prove where the money came from). During the welfare encounter with her welfare official, Fatima calls this sanction ‘unjust’. She does not know how to pay for it and says she wants to file an objection. The welfare official responds empathetically, saying ‘yes, and you are doing so well right now [referring to her financial situation], we can also present it as ignorance’. The welfare official, sounding apologetic, tells Fatima that the rules are ‘really strict, I know’. She then picks up the phone and makes an appointment with the social advisors who will help Fatima file an objection. (14 February 2023, RME6)

Fatima's case shows a welfare official who listens and reacts empathetically to her story of social suffering. In addition to this ‘emotional recognition’, the welfare official also actively legitimises the social dimension of her suffering. Admitting that welfare fraud policies are ‘really strict’ is a way of providing Fatima with ‘discursive recognition’. Following this, the welfare official helps her prepare and file an objection. She supports her in finding a narrative (of ignorance) and actively plans and organises the meeting with social advisors.

Discussion

In examining welfare encounters, we observed that welfare officials most often ignored, individualised, or downplayed the social dimension of clients’ suffering. The structural or institutional roots of that suffering were rarely investigated, acknowledged, or addressed. In most cases, officials appeared to ‘de-thematise’ the social (cf. Flick, 2016). Across Europe, decades of restructuring and austerity have shifted welfare policy – including in the Netherlands – from providing a broad safety net toward promoting labour-market participation and tightening access to welfare rights (Brink and Vonk, 2020; van der Veen and Koster, 2024). Policy discourses increasingly emphasise individual responsibility and personalise both the causes of and solutions to poverty. Within such a policy environment, it is unsurprising that frontline practice more readily acknowledges biographical suffering than social suffering. Biographical suffering can be framed as individual misfortune – something that might happen to anyone – whereas recognising social suffering would imply confronting structural inequalities and questioning the very policy logics that frontline agencies are tasked with implementing.

This policy context also helps explain why emotional and discursive forms of recognition appear more frequently than material recognition. As resources for substantive support have become scarcer – such as more restrictive rules and reduced funding for education or training – workers may be able to offer empathy, listening, and validation, but lack the institutional means to translate this into material assistance. In this sense, emotional and discursive recognition can operate as ‘low-cost’ forms of support that fit within the constraints of an austerity-driven welfare state. In a few instances, we observed welfare officials expressing their wish to be able to provide material support but were unable to do so because of institutional limitations. Given the common shift toward activation, conditionality, and resource tightening across Europe, it is plausible that the pattern we observe – greater recognition of biographical than social suffering, and more emotional or discursive than material recognition – may also characterise frontline encounters elsewhere. Further research is needed to explore this possibility.

In some cases, welfare officials did recognise and even act upon clients’ accounts of social suffering. This variation raises the question of why some narratives are legitimised while others are dismissed. We propose two tentative explanations: the institutional proximity of the suffering and the credibility attributed to clients’ narratives. These reflections are exploratory but offer a starting point for further research.

A first explanation concerns the institutional proximity of the suffering. In our material, officials more readily recognised social suffering when its source lay outside their own domain – such as debt counselling (Morris). This mirrors the strong recognition of biographical suffering, which is furthest removed from their professional responsibilities. The further the cause of suffering is from officials’ own tasks or policy frameworks, the easier it becomes to acknowledge. Yet this pattern is not absolute. In the cases of Fatima and Nouria, officials recognised suffering rooted directly in labour market dynamics or welfare policy itself, showing that institutional distance alone cannot explain all variation.

A second explanation relates to credibility. Clients’ accounts of social suffering were more readily recognised when supported by an external expert or broader public debate, e.g., media attention to issues like the Benefits scandal or the housing crisis appeared to bolster their claims. Drawing on Fricker (2007), we suggest that welfare clients often face testimonial injustice: they are not automatically regarded as credible knowers. Low social status and persistent stereotypes – such as being seen as ‘scroungers’ (Boland and Griffin, 2016) may undermine trust in their accounts, and intersecting inequalities related to gender, race, or education can deepen this epistemic disadvantage.

Discretion allows welfare officials to respond differently to varying cases of social suffering. In some situations, it may be appropriate to offer only emotional recognition, while in others, discursive or material recognition may be warranted. However, during fieldwork, researchers observed few instances where welfare officials engaged in peer discussions about the rationale behind their responses to clients’ suffering. When this topic was raised in ‘learning sessions’ with professionals and quality officers of welfare agencies, it became clear that there was a lack of shared understanding or collective agreement on how to address the social suffering experienced by welfare clients.

In sum, the distinction between recognising and misrecognising social suffering rarely featured in either individual or collective deliberation, nor was it anchored in peer accountability. This absence of shared frameworks or norms increases the risk of inconsistent and potentially unfair treatment (Zacka, 2017). Although our evidence here is limited, a recent report on Dutch public services identifies a ‘structural risk of discrimination’ across governmental organisations, linked to the wide discretionary space afforded to public servants (State Commission against Discrimination and Racism, 2025). Yet narrowing discretion is not the right course of action: institutional harm in welfare systems is co-produced through the interaction of frontline practices, policy design, and organisational culture (see also Kiely and Warnock, 2023; Redman and Fletcher, 2022). A more effective response requires interventions that address these structural dynamics rather than focusing on limiting discretion.

Conclusion

In our two-year ethnographic study, we observed many moments in which clients shared their suffering with welfare officials, and sometimes critically invoked the social or institutional dimension of their suffering. In the literature on welfare policy and frontline work, the attention for social suffering is minimal. With this article we made a first attempt to empirically bring into view the ways in which welfare officials respond to the social suffering of clients. Both the professional and scientific communities should invest efforts into exploring this issue further.

While we noted many instances of recognition when confronted with ‘biographical suffering’ (Bury, 1982), welfare officials most often misrecognised social suffering: either by responding indifferently, ignoring or individualising it. In both Flick's study (2016) and our study, we see vast amounts of social suffering being transformed into suffering of the ‘self’. This corresponds to literature highlighting the tendencies of individualization and responsibilisation of modern welfare states (Arts and Van den Berg, 2019; Dubois, 2009) and attests to how these tendencies shape the responses of welfare officials towards clients. When recognition of social suffering was observed, it most often remained at the emotional level. As the literature warns, such recognition can become an ‘empty’ form of empathy that leaves existing power structures untouched: officials may validate clients’ feelings yet neither accept their diagnosis of the suffering as structural nor take action to address it. This kind of recognition may help clients feel understood, but it is not transformative (Fraser and Honneth, 2003; Timor-Shlevin, 2023).

Of course, this raises normative questions about the role and responsibilities of frontline workers in welfare institutions. How should welfare officials respond to clients’ critical voices, in an institutional environment that creates and exacerbates social suffering? Can they provide welfare clients with emotional, discursive and material recognition, while simultaneously being loyal to the policies they execute and to other values such as efficiency and fairness?

In the aftermath of the Benefit Scandal in the Netherlands, we deem it even more relevant to think about these questions. It is on the level of frontline work that the consequences of policy and legislation on people's lives become visible. As such, the clients’ stories of social suffering can help sensitize public institutions to wider injustices. Taking this seriously and strengthening the possibilities for frontline workers to be responsive towards clients’ social suffering, e.g., by recognising their feelings, but also investigating the sources of their suffering and talking back to policy, can be an important avenue to prevent future scandals. As such, the question might not be so much about whether welfare officials should recognise the social suffering of clients, but how they can do so within a solid organisational culture of accountability. We do not claim that recognising social suffering will automatically restore public trust in the state. However, ignoring such suffering perpetuates patterns of institutional blindness and can deepen the harm done to already vulnerabilised citizens. Remembering Rosanvallon's work on democratic legitimacy, we might argue that giving recognition to clients’ social suffering is essential for institutions who want to shore up the foundations of democracy and make societies more ‘governable’ (2011: 177). Attending to social suffering is therefore not only an ethical imperative, but also a necessary step towards a more just and responsive welfare state – one that does not reproduce the very forms of oppression and damage it ought to address.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We want to thank all welfare officials, welfare clients and experts by experience for their willingness to participate in the research project. We also gratefully acknowledge the invaluable contribution of Amber Vellinga-Dings in coding, analysing and conducting (part of the) fieldwork.

Ethical considerations

This study was approved by the Ethics Review Committee of the University of Humanistic Studies (approval no. 2022–15) on December 19, 2022. All participants provided written informed consent prior to participating. The authors have obtained written informed consent to publish.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research on which this article is based: This work was supported by ZonMw (Healthcare Research Netherlands Medical Sciences), under grant number 10420012110019.

ORCID iDs

MELISSA SEBRECHTS

THOMAS KAMPEN

Author biographies

Melissa Sebrechts is anthropologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Humanistic Studies. In her research, she focuses on the impact of welfare programmes, participation policies and precarious employment on people's moral emotions and sense of self. Her work is characterised by in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, put at the service of theoretical debates like social justice and recognition. Her recent publications have appeared in The Sociological Review and Work, Employment and Society.

Thomas Kampen is Professor of Social Work at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, The Netherlands. He obtained his PhD from the University of Amsterdam in 2014. His research focuses on social work and social policy, with particular attention to the interaction between policy, professional practice, and the lived experiences of people who rely on public support. His recent publications include an article in Administration & Society and chapter contribution to Welfare to Work in Contemporary European Welfare States (Policy Press, 2020).

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