“It’s not even the leaders out here who have any say at all in how long they’re gonna have to wait”: A study of waiting time,power,and acceptance

Abstract

Waiting time is an exercise of power. When citizens such as welfare clients, asylum seekers, or inmates encounter the state, they experience lengthy waiting time. Their cases are often delayed; their appointments are postponed or canceled. This creates uncertainty, and studies on the lived experiences of waiting time show that this makes citizens accept that they have to wait. In this study, I argue that citizens accept that they have to wait because they believe that frontline workers have no power to reduce waiting time. I explore this through an ethnographic study of citizens on social assistance at an activation site in Denmark where they perform labor to receive their benefits. The study makes three contributions to the existing scholarship on waiting time. First, it combines observations of both frontline workers’ decisions about waiting time and how citizens experience these decisions. I explore how the frontline workers make citizens wait to perform labor and leave at the end of the day. The length of waiting changes daily, and citizens are rarely informed about how long they have to wait. I observe that citizens accept the waiting time even though they associate it with frustration, demotivation, and uncertainty. Second, what engenders this acceptance is the frontline workers’ tendency to deflect “blame away” from their power to impose waiting time. When they justify their decisions, they deflect blame either “upwards” (toward the rules or their management) or “downwards” (toward troublesome citizens). Third, the study shows that waiting time do not only reflect structural asymmetries between the citizens and the frontline workers. Citizens accept that they have to wait, because they build trust with the frontline workers and believe that the reduction of waiting time is beyond their control. This shows that the power of waiting time is also relationally produced.

Keywords

Waiting street-level bureaucracy frontline work activation power

Introduction

“Are we going or what?” a man asks one of the supervisors after he has been waiting a while to be put to work. The supervisor responds, “Oh, so you’re one of the new boys in class. It’s one of the other workers who manages people. But it’s simply because we’re so many people right now, so that’s the reason why we haven’t started yet.” The man, nods, sits down, and awaits further instructions.

The conversation takes place at an activation site for citizens on social assistance in Denmark. The scene illustrates a form of power. When the citizen voices his frustrations, the frontline worker deflects his power away from himself onto something “beyond his control”; in this case, the number of citizens at the activation site. The citizen realizes that there is no point in voicing his frustrations further, so he sits down and waits patiently.

Waiting time is not merely a passage of time but also a form of power (Bourdieu, 2000; Gasparini, 1995; Ozoliņa-Fitzgerald, 2016; Schwartz, 1974). Schwartz (1974: 884) argues that “to make a person wait is, above all, to possess the capacity to modify his conduct in a manner congruent with one’s own interests.” This form of power is particularly apparent when citizens encounter the state, where they are often kept waiting and uninformed of how long it will be (Auyero, 2012). This leaves citizens with little control over their time, and it creates a perception that time is “wasted” (Gasparini, 1995). Studies have investigated how groups such as asylum seekers, inmates, and welfare clients experience this form of “waiting without value” (Bissell, 2009). They find that citizens associate waiting time with frustration, uncertainty, and powerlessness (see e.g., Armstrong, 2015; Griffiths, 2014; Soss, 1999; Turnbull, 2015). Yet, the same groups often accept that they have to wait, and scholars argue that waiting time “molds a particular submissive set of dispossessions” (Auyero, 2012: 9).

In this study, I address this puzzle and elaborate on how waiting time, acceptance, and power are interlinked by analyzing waiting time from the perspective of those who impose waiting time and those who experience it. I argue that citizens often accept waiting time because frontline workers are able to deflect blame away themselves onto something “beyond their control.”

I analyze this based on fieldwork over a period of 12 months at an activation site, officially called “utility jobs” (in Danish, “Nyttejob”) in Denmark where citizens perform labor, such as maintaining public parks or cleaning, to receive their social assistance. However, considering the policy context of the utility scheme, we would not expect to find extensive waiting time here. Introduced in 2014, utility jobs aimed both to include citizens into work in communities and teach them the value of work. Moreover, similar to activation policies in the US and UK (see e.g., Brodkin, 2017; Soss et al., 2011a, 2011b; Sainsbury, 2017), the aim was to solve the “passivity” of the unemployed by imposing work obligations upon them (Nielsen, 2014, 2019). However, citizens and frontline workers encounter each other in a unique organizational and occupational context (see Caswell et al., 2017; Van Berkel, 2020), which makes waiting time a salient feature of the activation. Frontline workers with little formal social work education manage citizens several hours everyday for more than three months. Moreover, unlike other caseworkers in the Danish active welfare service delivery (see Caswell et al., 2017), they face few performance measures. This grants them both discretion in deciding when and how long citizens wait and an opportunity to build trust with citizens.

This study makes three contributions to the existing literature on waiting time. First, it combines observations of both frontline workers’ decisions about waiting time and how citizens experience these decisions. It explores which meanings citizens attach to waiting time, but also how frontline workers’ actions influence these meanings.

Second, whereas previous studies document that citizens often accept waiting time because of the uncertainty of constant delays or changes in, for example, payments of welfare benefits or decisions about their asylum case (Auyero, 2012; Griffiths, 2014; Turnbull, 2015), this study shows how frontline workers at the site make decisions about the citizens’ time that vary significantly from day to day. This creates uncertainty and feelings of frustration and demotivation among citizens. However, as the frontline workers interact face to face with citizens over more than three months, they build a trustful relationship with citizens. They begin to deflect blame away from themselves either “upwards,” toward the rules or their management, or “downward” toward the citizens themselves. These justifications, rather than the uncertainty itself of waiting time, teach citizens to be patient.

Third, the article challenges the idea that waiting time reflects structural power asymmetries between those who wait and those with power to impose the wait (Bourdieu, 2000; Schwartz, 1975). The article shows that the power of waiting time is also relationally produced. Citizens come to accept that they have to wait, because the frontline workers are able to present themselves as powerless in changing the parameters of waiting time. This shows more broadly that to understand the power dynamics of waiting time, we must study how notions of time is a product of social interaction (Sorokin and Merton, 1937: 620, see also Cipriani, 2013).

In what follows, I review the existing literature on waiting time and introduce the ethnographic context and methodology of the article. I then provide an ethnographic account of how frontline workers at the activation site make decisions about waiting time and how they justify them. Moreover, through interviews and participant observations of citizens, I explore how they perceive waiting time.

Waiting time, power, and acceptance: A review

Schwartz (1975) established the basic contours of how waiting time is linked to power arguing how “typical relationships obtain between the individual’s position within a social system and the extent to which he waits for and is waited for (…)” (Schwartz, 1974: 847). The power of waiting time is particularly apparent when citizens are unable to perform meaningful activities. Waiting is then perceived as “interstitial” and as an interruption in one’s actions (Gasparini, 1995: 31). Studies have explored the lived reality of “interstitial” waiting time among different groups across national contexts, including prison inmates (Armstrong, 2015), asylum seekers (Griffiths, 2014; Rotter, 2015; Turnbull, 2015), and welfare citizens (Auyero, 2012; Ozoliņa-Fitzgerald, 2016; Soss, 1999)1. These studies report that citizens associate this with frustration, anger, and powerlessness. Yet, they also find that citizens rarely voice these sentiments. As Turnbull (2015: 76) concludes in her study of asylum seekers in UK detention centers, “Perhaps one of the interesting aspects of waiting in detention is that (…) they wait—albeit with various levels of patience.”

Scholars argue that this acceptance is created through the uncertainty of waiting time, which groups such as asylum seekers and welfare citizens often experience (Auyero, 2012; Griffiths, 2014; Turnbull, 2015). In Schwartz’s words (1974: 862), uncertainty is an extreme form of “punitive sanctioning” because citizens are kept “ignorant as to how long he must wait, or even of what he is waiting for.” Turnbull (2015: 76) argues that the uncertainty of not being informed of the status of their cases restricted detained asylum seekers’ agency to change the “parameters of their waiting.” In a similar study of refused asylum seekers in the UK, Griffiths (2014) argues how they simultaneously experience “sticky time,” where they wait in detention centers for years not knowing the outcome of their case, and “temporal ruptures,” where they are suddenly released or deported. This “keeps deportable migrants in a passive and desperate state of continual transience and uncertainty” (Griffiths, 2014: 2005). Similarly, Auyero (2012) finds that welfare clients in Buenos Aires experience waiting time marked by both “confusion,” such as when the procedures for the eligibility of benefits are changed, and “rushing,” such as when their appointments are suddenly canceled (Auyero, 2012: 73–74). This teaches them to patiently comply with “arbitrary, ambiguous, and always changing state requirements” (p. 9).

However, the direct role of frontline workers has received little attention in the scholarship on waiting time.2 The uncertainty of waiting time is often attributed broadly to slow or confusing bureaucratic procedures that either delay or suddenly speed up citizens’ cases. However, Lipsky (2010) argued that street-level bureaucrats, that is, workers “who interact with and have wide discretion over the dispensation of benefits” (p. xi), convey expectations about public benefits and the status of recipients (p. 11). He argues that waiting time conveys a message to citizens “that workers have little time with them” (Lipsky, 2010: 64). When frontline workers impose waiting time to spend, it is not necessarily a form of “punitive sanctioning” (Schwartz, 1974: 862). Rather, it is often a way of coping with either performance measures, large caseloads, or troublesome citizens (Tummers et al., 2015). In a study of welfare frontline workers in the US, Brodkin (2011) finds that one frontline worker scheduled 10 clients for the same hour to achieve a greater efficiency in his case management. As a result, some clients waited a whole day for their appointment, and if they left in frustration, they received a financial sanction (Brodkin, 2011: 266). Dubois (2010), studying family frontline workers in France, argues that they often separate clients who complain in the waiting room from others in order to prevent chaos. Moreover, frontline workers can also make an “institutional retreat”: if they make a mistake, for example, in the calculation of clients’ benefits that cause them to come to the welfare office to clear it out, frontline workers often blame the computer, the rules, or the “back office” (Dubois, 2010: 141–142). They can also become more personally involved, either by helping clients more or by blaming them for making a mistake.

However, when and how frontline workers use these tactics depends on the context of the frontline work (Caswell et al., 2017; Van Berkel, 2020). In contexts where frontline workers have to enforce vaguely specified rules, or when they share socioeconomic characteristics with citizens, studies show that they use their discretion to make decisions that vary on a case-by-case basis (Dubois, 2010; Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2003; Schram et al., 2009). In contexts where frontline workers face strict performance measures, or when their work involves little social work expertise, studies show that their actions are highly rule bound (Caswell and Larsen, 2017; Soss et al., 2011a, 2011b). In describing the ethnographic context, I will draw upon the work of Caswell et al. (2017), which theorizes how frontline work in the welfare-to-work context is shaped by policy and organizational contexts. Based on this, I argue that the activation site is a unique bureaucratic context where frontline workers have the discretion to control waiting time. This allows them both to build rapport and trust with citizens and to create an acceptance of their decisions. Studies of the delivery of welfare-to-work services show that trust is a key tool that frontline workers use to assure citizens’ compliance with their activation obligations (Senghaas et al., 2019). In this study, I show that when citizens develop a trustful relationship with frontline workers, they also come to accept that they have to wait.

Ethnographic context: Activation policies in Denmark

Unemployment services in Denmark are delivered through a two-tier system (Van Berkel, 2010: 22). Cash assistance (In Danish, “kontanthjælp”) is provided to insured unemployed, whereas social security (In Danish, “dagpenge”) is provided to the insured unemployed3. Citizens with physical and mental disabilities are assigned to other social assistance benefits. With the adoption of a welfare-to-work approach4 in the 1980s and 1990s, activation has become the primary tool in the Danish unemployment policy. Originally, activation was dominated by a “human capital approach,” and it consisted mainly of education and internships. (Larsen et al., 2001; Torfing, 1999). However, since the early 2000s in particular, the cash assistance scheme has been characterized by a work-first approach (Caswell and Larsen, 2017: 166) that resembles the approach used in the UK and US5. This approach aims to get recipients back to work as soon as possible, with less emphasis on improving the qualifications of citizens.

As part of this policy context, the social democratic–led government at the time introduced a reform of the cash assistance scheme in 2014 (The Government 2013) that introduced “utility jobs” as a new activation tool6. It emphasized that cash assistance recipients now, “get the right and duty to work and make themselves useful for their benefits” (The Government 2013: 10), for example, through manual outdoor labor or helping out in public nursing homes. It is targeted at the most resourceful cash assistance groups closest to the labor market7, while the more disadvantaged groups are offered other forms of activation.

The political objective of the scheme was threefold. First, it signaled a break with job searching courses provided by private contractors, which were criticized for being ineffective in terms of improving claimants’ work capabilities (Breidahl and Larsen, 2015: 510–511). Instead, cash assistance recipients should perform “meaningful” labor assignments, such as maintaining parks. Second, the scheme reflected a social democratic vision of teaching the unemployed the value of work and including them into work communities (see e.g., Peterson, 2014). Finally, it was designed to solve the, at the time, high youth unemployment and create a disincentive for applying for assistance (Nielsen, 2014).

In terms of the organizational context, the local municipalities manage the utility scheme. Within the municipality, there is a typical division between, first, a job center (in Danish, “Jobcenter”) where workers make assessments of clients’ employability and, second, a social assistance office where workers manage payments and impose economic sanctions and, finally, one or several activation sites.8 Once a cash assistance recipient has been sent to a utility job site, the workers at the site report the clients’ absence, which the social assistance office tracks, but without physical contact with the recipients (Caswell and Larsen, 2017: 174).

While frontline workers at the jobcentre and the social assistance office have to comply with nationally set performance measures and benchmarks (Caswell and Larsen, 2017; Larsen, 2013), this is different from the workers at the activation site. Each municipality has freedom in choosing how to organize their utility job site (Danish Agency for Labor Market and Recruitment, 2015: 13–14, 2017). They can arrange them as “project places,” where groups of recipients are sent to municipal workplaces organized by a group of frontline workers. Another solution is to send recipients to existing public or private workplaces (“single projects”), such as nursing homes or libraries.9 In both places, recipients are obliged to work between 20–37 h a week for up to 13 weeks1.

I gathered ethnographic data at a project place in a municipality in one of the four largest cities in Denmark. The project place is one of three project places in the municipality, and it manages between 20 and 40 people 25 h a week for 13 weeks. The site consists of a staff room, a dressing room for citizens, and a meeting room where citizens are informed about each day’s labor assignments.

Considering the occupational context of the utility scheme, three work supervisors11, with backgrounds as artisans and gardeners, are employed. Two of them direct the work assignments while the third register citizens’ attendance.12 In addition, four caseworkers, two of which have a social work education, are employed to help citizens with their job searches. While they only have three meetings with the citizens, the supervisors have the main responsibility and contact with the citizens for 20 h a week.

In the morning, citizens must announce their arrival. The first team is there from 08:00 to 12:30 (“the eight o’clock team”), and the second team, from 09:00 to 13:3013 (“the nine o’clock team”). The labor tasks include picking up trash, cleaning, and nature conservation at a nearby park.

Data generation and processing

I conducted 370 h of fieldwork from December 2018 until December 2019.14 The original aim was to study citizens’ lived reality of work-first activation. To capture this, I performed an “enactive” form of fieldwork (Wacquant, 2015), where I wore the same clothes, performed the same work assignments, and came and left at the same time as the citizens15. Considering the policy context of utility jobs, I expected to find a strong focus on conducting the work assignments effectively. However, I discovered that the majority of the day consisted of waiting time. Citizens waited during all parts of the day and unknowing of how long. Unaware of this routine, I both observed and shared their frustrations of having to wait. However, after one month of fieldwork, I noticed that citizens rarely voiced these frustrations toward the supervisors. In the recorded interviews16, I therefore began to ask citizens which meanings they attributed to waiting time and how they viewed the supervisors’ time management. I collected 42 recorded interviews with citizens of an average length of 1.5 h. I developed a trustful relationship with eight of these interviewees and interviewed them once at the beginning of their activation and once at the end.

Most of the interviewees fitted the administrative category of “job ready.” The majority of the interviewees had both some form of education, from master degrees to short vocational degrees, and previous work experience. However, some were also long-term unemployed (up to 12 years). The interview group consisted of 22 men and 12 women17, and except for six interviewees18, all were ethnic Danes. All field notes and interviews were transcribed and coded in NVivo. I initially did an across-case reading of the all interviews and sorted the interview data into broad themes. After that, I coded the themes relating to waiting time by using grounded theory guidelines (Charmaz, 2006). Waiting along with the citizens in the park or in the meeting room, I would also interview them by comment (Snow et al., 1982). I would make a comment to one or several of citizens that we had been waiting for a while to explore which meanings they attributed to these situations.

Although I initially planned to observe mainly the citizens, I discovered how the amount of waiting time seemed largely to be based on the supervisors’ will. I therefore documented how long citizens had to wait to be allowed to work, change into their private clothes, and leave whether these decisions varied across weather conditions or the number of citizens at the site. Moreover, as their decisions were often not aligned with the official objective of utility jobs, I observed how they justified and explained their decisions. I discussed their decisions with them weekly over lunch or during the workday. I also conducted nine interviews with the members of the staff in the utility scheme, four of which were with supervisors.

How supervisors impose waiting time and deflect blame away from themselves

One day, we are about to leave to work in the park. I suddenly remember that I have forgotten my work gloves. I ask Ole (supervisor) if there is time to go and get them19. “Of course. We’ve got plenty of time,” he says and laughs. “In fact, we’ve got nothing but time, and we just need that time to pass (…).”

Although the supervisors have wide discretion in terms of organizing work assignments, they told me that there were often not enough work assignments for a whole day. As a result, they had to make “time pass,” as indicated by Ole. They made citizens wait in the morning between 10 min and up to one hour before they were put to work. During this time, citizens were rarely informed about each day’s work assignments or how long they were going to wait. As there was a limited number of computers, they could rarely use this time to apply for jobs. Moreover, the supervisors encouraged citizens to take multiple breaks, which ranged from 10 min up to one hour. The supervisors further encouraged them to “take a walk” instead of working. As Ole told me and a group of other citizens, “You can just go and cut some trees or pick up some trash … or just go for a long walk … just do whatever the hell you wanna do.” At one point, when citizens complained that they were working in an inefficient way, Arne (supervisor) said “This is a utility job. We don’t have to get anything done. We have to occupy people.” At the end of the day, citizens were often sent back early from work to the meeting room, where they sat down and waited from 10 min up to one and a half hours to be allowed to change clothes and leave.

However, when and how long citizens had to wait often varied with no consistent pattern. I summarize this in Table 1. This shows how the time for leaving varied considerably across both caseload and weather conditions. It also indicates that the supervisors’ decisions about when and how long citizens wait are based on their will.

Table 1.

Time for leaving for the nine o’clock team across weather and caseload20.

Decision	Count	Example
Citizens leave early
Supervisors allow citizens to leave early when the weather conditions are poor	10	March 5th. At 09:33 in the meeting room, Ole says to people from the nine o’clock team, “Should we throw in the towel and call it the day? I guess we have to realize that it won’t stop raining today”
Supervisors allow citizens to leave early when the weather conditions are good	24	February 18th. At 12:00 in the park while we are working, Ole appears and says to a group from the nine o’clock, “should we call it a day so you can get away from the utility scheme and go enjoy the sunny weather instead?”
Supervisors allow citizens to leave early when there are many citizens at the site	19	April 11th. At approximately 09:10 outside of the meeting room, I observe how the entire area is filled with people. There are several groups of people standing at different places at the site. It is a chaos, and everyone is just waiting to be put to work. The same day at 12:00, citizens from both teams are allowed to leave
Supervisors allow citizens to leave early when there are few citizens at the site	15	February 1st. At 11:50, four people, from the nine o’clock team, are sitting inside the meeting room. At 12:00, Ole says, “shouldn’t we change into more festive ‘weekend’ clothes?”
Citizens leave late
Supervisors let citizens stay late when the weather conditions are poor	4	April 25th. At 09:05, it begins to rain heavily. Two citizens, from the nine o’clock team, ask Ole whether they will be sent out to work. “If I were you guys, I would put on a rain coat,” indicating that they will not be sent home. We work until 13:29 when one of the men asks Sebastian: “Are we allowed to leave now?” “Well, it’s the first time you’ve stayed this long,” Sebastian says while he laughs and puts his hand on his shoulder
Supervisors let citizens stay late when the weather conditions are good	24	April 29th. At 08:48, the sun is shining, and the weather forecast says 18 degree Celsius. At 13:23, the nine o’clock team are allowed to leave
Supervisors let citizens stay late when there are many citizens at the site	15	May 2nd. Today there are 19 people at the site from the nine o’clock team. There is a lot of noise, and I only know half of the citizens present. At 09:12, Ole tries to get people out of the meeting room, saying, “we just need you to go outside so we can get an overview.” At 13:33, Ole allows the nine o’clock to leave
Supervisors let citizens stay late when there few citizens at the site	13	February 11th. At 12:57, nine people are in the meeting room. They have been waiting for an hour to be allowed to leave, since they came home from the park. One of the women is frustrated and asks Torben (supervisor), “Are we allowed to leave?” “Not until 13:30,” he answers. “Nooo!” the woman yells in a frustrated tone of voice. At 13:17, Ole (supervisor) appears in the meeting room and says “should we call it a day?”

Existing studies argue that constant changes in waiting time explain why citizens often accept that they have to wait (Auyero, 2012; Griffiths, 2014; Turnbull, 2015). In this section, I show how the supervisors shift blame away from these changes and how citizens experience it. One day, it is raining heavily. At 09:05, 13 people are waiting in the meeting room. The eight o’clock team have been allowed to leave because of the rain, but the nine o’clock team have not. The supervisors continuously leave the room and come back. After 15 min, a man from the nine o’clock team ask a woman from the eight o’clock team who is still present, “Were you told you could leave?” She replies, “Yes, people from the eight o’clock team are allowed to leave.” “But why haven’t we been allowed to leave, then?” the man asks. “I don’t know. All I know is that people from the eight o’clock team are allowed to leave, but people from the nine o’clock team have to wait.” The man who asked addresses the man next to him and says, “This is forced labor, you know!” At 09:30, all supervisors are back in the meeting room. Openly, they discuss different assignments that they have the time to take care of because they do not have to manage the citizens today. Yet, the nine o’clock team have still not been informed about whether or not they are allowed to leave. At 09:40, a woman asks the supervisors, “Are we allowed to leave?” Arne replies, “Well, I don’t know. That’s Sebastian’s (supervisor) decision.” Sebastian responds, “Way to pass responsibility to me, huh?” However, after a little while, he gets up and says, “We are waiting for a lot of people who are supposed to arrive here at 10:00, so the nine o’clock team are allowed to leave. But normally, we don’t do this.”

The situation exemplifies how waiting time, power, and acceptance are interlinked at the activation site. One of the women asks if they are allowed to leave. The question works as a “secondary adjustment” (Goffman, 1961). It reproduces her inferior position as the one who has to ask the supervisors for permission to leave. At the same time, it reinforces the supervisors’ position as the ones in power to allow them to leave. This forces one of the supervisors to justify his decision, transposing the power that she has just granted him onto something “beyond his control.” He emphasizes how their decisions about waiting are bound by official rules when he says, “We normally don’t do this” (deflecting blame upwards). At the same time, he justifies why his decisions deviate from the rules: “We are waiting for a lot of people” (deflecting blame downwards). This conveys an impression that they have to manage many people, which prevents them from speeding up their decisions.

Supervisors deflect blame upwards

The supervisors deflect blame upwards in two ways. First, when citizens had to wait longer than usual, the supervisors explained that they were only following official rules. If the citizens pointed out that they had previously made an exemption from the rules, the supervisors explained that the rules were constantly changing or that they did not understand the rules themselves. As one woman, who just started at the site, asks Brian (supervisor) “who are you?” He replies, “I’m a supervisor here, but I’ve been working with this for a lifetime. But that doesn’t mean that I know what’s going on.” The woman nods and does not ask any further questions. Yet, more often, the supervisors expressed their disagreements with the rules. When they registered citizens in the morning, Arne at one point said, “Now we have to do all this name bullshit again.” In other instances, they appeal to higher/superior authorities. As Arne allows a group who have been waiting for a while to leave, he says, “The Lord Mayor just called me and said that you’re allowed to leave.” This reminds citizens how the supervisors’ are also willing to circumvent higher authorities for the citizens’ sake.

The supervisors also told citizens that their management is watching their decisions. They directly call upon citizens who attempt to leave early by saying, “Hey, you are not allowed to leave yet! If my boss saw that you had already left, I would get into some serious trouble” (Arne, supervisor). They also refer to their management in more subtle ways. As we are out working, at 11:30, I ask one of the men from the nine o’clock team when we are going home. “I heard Arne talking about how their management is visiting today, so we have to stay here longer,” he replies. An hour later, Ole appears and decides that we should head home. “But what about the boss?” the same man whom I talked to earlier asks. “When there is no more work, there’s no more work. We can’t do anything about that” he replies. This indicates that he will not please his management and let the citizens work until the official point of time. Yet, as we head toward the car, Ole says, “Do you want go up on one of those hills and have a look at the city?” We climb one of the hills and spend 20 min watching the view. Back at the meeting room, we wait for 15–20 min and are allowed to leave. This occurred multiple times. The supervisors would take citizens for a walk or a drive around the area to “draw out the time.” This both informs citizens that their management monitors the supervisors’ decisions and decouples the supervisors from their management. This enables supervisors to establish trust with citizens, which redirects citizens’ frustrations away from them and toward their management instead.

Supervisors deflect blame downwards

I also found that supervisors deflected blame downwards upon citizens in two ways. First, when the supervisors drove citizens home, they often left citizens alone in the meeting room without informing them how long they had to wait. When the supervisors finally appeared, they would ask, “Why are you still here?” or, “You are allowed to leave, but you can also stay if you like.” One day in late April 2019, I am taking trash to the recycling site along with four other men at the nine o’clock team. At 11:45, one of the men and I head back to the meeting room. Ole comes out. He says, “The others have already left, so you can just go back, pick up the tools and the others, and then head home.” The man I am working with says, “That’s up to you, Ole.” “No, that’s a choice I’m giving you guys. So if you want to, you can go and get one more load, and then we will do the rest on Monday.”, Ole Replies. We decide to head back, and we end up leaving the site one hour later than the rest.

Second, the supervisors often referred to some of the citizens as “the negative” and the “troublesome,” who often complained and asked too many critical questions. The supervisors talked about them during lunch, over interviews, but also in front of all other citizens in the meeting room. The supervisors also had open confrontations with these groups in the meeting room. Citizens therefore directly witnessed how these groups caused stress among the supervisors and prevented them from reducing the waiting time. The supervisors also openly discussed how the number of citizens at the site prevented them from attending to their individual needs.

Citizens accept that they have to wait and use blame avoidance themselves

A majority of the interviewees viewed activation both as a hindrance for them to reintegrate into the labor market, because they had less time to write job applications, and meaningful, because they were beautifying public areas. However, when asked particularly about waiting time, they associated it with frustration, demotivation, and uncertainty. Johnny (aged 61), who had been unemployed since 2009, expressed the demotivation of, in his words, “killing time.” “It feels demotivating … I don’t know how to express it. It is like, you’re just there.” Waiting without knowing how long also created great frustration among citizens. Morten (aged 32), a graduate from media studies and unemployed for about four months, explains the frustration of waiting time on those days when it is raining:

You know, I’m just sitting there, getting frustrated as hell. I’m sitting there thinking, “What the hell is going on? What’s the point of all this?” also because, often, they [the supervisors] are sitting with those computers. We have no idea what’s happening on those computers they are sitting behind. We have no idea what’s going on, and we don’t know whether it’s because it’s badly organized or …

These frustrations are reinforced by the uncertainty of the constant changes in waiting time. Before citizens arrive at the activation site, they have been carefully informed about the consequences of noncompliance. In the first weeks of activation, the majority arrived five-10 min earlier than the official starting time. This gave them time to change into their work clothes and report their arrival to the supervisors at the official point of time. However, they soon noticed that the official timetable was rarely enforced. In fear of receiving a financial penalty, citizens would therefore double-check with the supervisors whether they had been registered in the morning. Occasionally, citizens also chose to stay and wait in the afternoon even though they had in fact been allowed to leave by the supervisors.

Yet, I found that the same interviewees seemed to accept that waiting time was a part of their activation. Later in the same interview with Johnny, we talk about whether the supervisors could minimize the waiting time in the morning:

#I: So, why do you think they are not [ready]? I guess they could plan ahead?

#R (sighs) I don’t know … I don’t know. As long as we are here for the number of hours we are supposed to (…). It’s “utility jobs” [makes quotation marks with his fingers], so what the hell.

This acceptance developed over the course of the 13 weeks. In January 2019, I interviewed Monica (aged 53) at the beginning of her activation. Although she had previously been on cash assistance for a short while, she had had a long career as an independent salesperson. In the first interview, she stresses her reluctance to stay at the activation: “I chose to turn up, right. But … 13 weeks? I don’t bloody hope so. I will go dead then, right?” After the interview, we are sent out to work. When we arrive, a group of citizens are taking a break. We join them. After 10 min, Monica addresses the supervisor impatiently and says, “Are we not supposed to do something or what?” In early March 2019, I ask her again about the waiting time. She explains how activation is a state of “limbo” that you get used to:

(…) the first week when I arrived and saw how people were just sitting there and were completely fine with having to wait … you know, not that many were complaining, and I thought, “That’s weird.” But because you quickly get into this rhythm, or because you know that you have to be here anyway until you find another job or whatever. Then that it is just how it is, you know.

This shows how citizens learn to accept that waiting time is an integral part of their activation. Lisbeth (aged 59), who had a similar career path and experience with welfare, said in the first interview in January when I asked her about the waiting time: “I literally feel that being here makes me more stupid.” In late February 2019, I asked her again: “Yeah … It doesn’t really bother me. Because what good does it do me that I have to stand at attention at a specific time? But yeah, things could be more effective.” For the ones I only interviewed once, I observed how they adjusted themselves to waiting time through secondary adjustments (Goffman, 1961). Citizens began to arrive in the morning at the lasts minute to register themselves. Afterward, they went into the dressing room to change their clothes and came back 10 min later. This reduced the amount of waiting time in the morning. Citizens also occasionally stayed out in the park longer to avoid having to come back and wait in the meeting room.

Despite the way the supervisors made constant changes in how long they had to wait, the majority of citizens developed sympathetic feelings toward them. This is in stark contrast to Auyero’s study (2012) where the majority of the welfare clients blamed the frontline workers for being “sloppy” and taking “too many breaks” (p. 121). Among the 34 citizens I interviewed, only six interviewees described their relationship to supervisors in a negative way. One of them was Lisbeth. When I asked her in the first interview about her relationship with the supervisors, she replied “I think some of them are outright patronizing in how they treat people.” Two months after, she said, “I’ve gotten a better impression of the supervisors along the way, because I thought they were pretty tough in the beginning.” The remaining five interviewees were mainly long-term unemployed who had been at the activation site before or had experienced personal confrontations with the supervisors.

Why do citizens refrain from blaming the supervisors? First, given the organizational and occupational context of the activation site (Caswell et al., 2017), citizens engage with supervisors many hours each day. Unlike other caseworkers at the job center (Caswell and Larsen, 2017: 170), the supervisors have time to listen to their individual problems and are less concerned about reminding them of their obligations (e.g., job searches).21 Moreover, as the supervisors had backgrounds as artisans and gardeners, they rarely used a legal language, which made citizens feel equal to the supervisors. Second, citizens always waited in the presence of others. Sellerberg (2008) argues that this enables organizations to convey messages to citizens about their expectations about waiting time. For example, when nurses move around patients in front of other patients who are waiting, this informs them that the staff are busy and unable to reduce the waiting time. At the activation site, citizens experience firsthand how frustrations from citizens often extend the amount of waiting time. Moreover, the supervisors often discuss the nature of their work in front of everyone. This creates appropriate ways of waiting, such as avoiding to voice your frustrations. When I asked Bo (aged 32), a programmer who had been unemployed on and off for four years, whether he would voice his frustrations about waiting time, he replied, “I don’t know how much they care about people expressing their opinions. You know, I don’t want to sound like I’m ‘interfering on behalf of others,’ you know.”

Citizens deflect blame upwards

When they justified why they had to wait, citizens began to deflect blame upwards. They thought that the supervisors were unable to reduce the waiting time because they had to navigate within a large net of rules that were constantly changing. When I asked citizens why their decisions often deviated from the rules, citizens explained that the supervisors disliked their roles as the “enforcer of the rules.” Citizens similarly thought that the supervisors were constantly under supervision from their management. When I asked Franz (aged 56), a former kitchen assistant who had been unemployed for about two years, if he would be willing to voice his frustrations about waiting, he said, “Well … I can’t, because there is a problem. It is not even the leaders out here who have any say at all in how long they’re [the citizens] gonna wait.” Thus, when citizens justified why they were often sent home early, they explained that the supervisors had called their management to clear it with them. Conversely, if citizens justified that they sometimes had to wait longer than usual, it was because someone from their management was making checks at the activation site. Simon (age: early thirties), who had been unemployed for two and half years, explained it in this way:

#R: If you [the management] show up, and they [the supervisors] are supposed to know where we are, and they look around and are like, “Well, we don’t really know where these people are,” (…). I suppose they’ll get a reprimand or something.

However, I only experienced that their management came by twice, but not to make controls. I never observed that the supervisors consulted their management about when they decided to let citizens leave. Instead, the supervisors often complained to me how their management rarely came out to observe their work.

Citizens deflect blame downwards

When citizens justified why they had to wait, they deflected blame upon the entire group or the ones who threatened the group dynamic. This dynamic was important because it created a sense of community and trust where citizens could share their concerns with each other and the supervisors. Some also incorporated the dilemmas of the supervisors when they talked about waiting time. As Svend, (aged 37), a former truck driver and unemployed for about six months, says:

#R: For me, I’m thinking, “let’s just get going.” (…). Otherwise, I’m not really thinking that much because, as I also said just before, if I was in Ole’s shoes, you know, it’s difficult to make a plan before people arrive in the morning because, as Ole puts it, “One day, ten people show up. Another day, 35 people show up.”

Citizens also believed that the supervisors were not able to reduce the waiting time because people were either complaining or violating the rules. Morten (aged 32) explained it in this way:

#R: Well, I’m really fond of the supervisors out here, so I’m kind of thinking the best about them (…). There are also a lot of people who are very negative about it and who don’t wanna work. And who are like … they have to spend a lot of time on organizing everything, right?

Others distanced themselves from those who complained, and as Bo said about whether he would be willing to voice his frustrations, “I don’t wanna sound like the ‘grumpy guy’ who’s saying, ‘You have to be here at 8 a.m.! (…)’”

Conclusion

It is commonly held that waiting time and acceptance are interlinked through a structural power asymmetry. When we are delayed, we are “dependent upon the disposition of the one whom one is waiting for” (Schwartz, 1974: 844). Analyzing waiting time both from the perspective of those who wait and those who impose waiting time at an activation site in a Danish welfare-to-work context, I argue that the acceptance of waiting time is also relationally produced. The supervisors change their decisions about when and how long citizens have to wait, but they simultaneously establish a trustful relationship with citizens. Thus, although they evidently find themselves in a powerful position, they present themselves as powerless and trapped between both strict rules and conflicting managerial demands, and citizens who complain. This gives citizens an understanding of the dilemmas of their work. As a result, citizens also deflect blame toward either their fellow citizens or toward the rules or the supervisors’ management when they explain why they have to wait. This shows that the uncertainty of waiting time cannot, alone, explain why citizens often wait in patience, as argued by existing studies. When uncertainty is caused by decisions of frontline workers whom citizens trust, it seems that the fear of upsetting their relationship, rather than uncertainty, causes them to wait in patience.

Could we stretch these results to other groups or other national contexts? First, the results are generated in a unique context. Although with notable differences, frontline work in welfare-to-work services in Denmark and across Europe and the US are characterized by performance measures and large caseloads, which leaves frontline workers with little discretion to impose waiting time and ability to develop a trustful relationship with citizens (Caswell et al., 2017). Rather, it often causes frontline workers to prioritize disciplining features, such as sanctions, to assure compliance (Caswell and Larsen, 2017; Soss et al., 2011a, 2011b).

Second, if we look at the particular organizational and occupational context of the activation site, the study is, however, also a case of face-to-face encounters between frontline workers with large discretion and little social work education, and social assistance claimants who often feel that their individual concerns are rarely heard (Caswell et al., 2011; Danneris and Nielsen, 2018). Studies of welfare frontline encounters with similar conditions in the US (Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2003) and France (Dubois, 2010) have shown that such conditions cause frontline workers to change their discretionary decisions on a case-to-case basis and that both clients and frontline workers attempt to establish a trustful relationship. In sum, I believe that in cases with similar characteristics, other scholars will find that citizens accept that they have to wait because of their sympathetic view on those who make them wait.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

A special thanks to the women and men who participated in this study. I would also like to thank the reviewers for their valuable comments and advice. Finally, I am grateful for the comments I received from Vincent Dubois, Lars Thorup Larsen, Kees van Kersbergen, Johan Gøtzsche-Astrup as well as participants at the panel “Policy Practices as Temporal Formations” at the 2019 ECPR General Conference.

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) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project was funded by AUFF Small Grants awarded by Aarhus School of Business and Social Sciences (BSS).

ORCID iD

Lasse S Hansen

Notes

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