User involvement has become an explicit goal within social service provision. Even so, the term remains ambiguous, and its implementation troublesome. Implementation theory lists a number of factors influencing bureaucratic behaviour; in this paper we investigate the 'human factor'. Our ambition is to provide a framework for analysis of user influence in activation programmes that includes the individual characteristics of both service users and service providers. Building on theoretical insights from the literature on activation and agency, we develop a framework that distinguishes between two ideal types of service users: Pawns and Queens, and two types of service providers: care-oriented Carers and rule-oriented Clerks. This framework is then applied to identify key challenges for the interaction between users and caseworkers in two challenging situations: when service users express little or no agency and when they express agency that is incompatible with the overall goals of the programme. We find that Carers show pronounced reluctance to overrule the choices made by service users even when they have conflicting views -and tend to postpone decisions when they interact with Pawns. Clerks tend to overrule the decisions of Queens when they have conflicting views, and to make decisions on behalf of Pawns. The analysis draws on data collected from 126 qualitative interviews with service providers and participants in the Norwegian Introductory Programme for immigrants and a survey of 320 caseworkers.
Integrating non-Western refugees into the highly specialised Scandinavian labour markets has proven difficult. This highly ideological policy field is an interesting case for the study of policy learning versus ideas as drivers for institutional change or continuity. Using the Norwegian Introductory Programme as a case study, we show that the application of core programme measures remains largely unaffected by evaluations that show that such measures tend to have very modest effects on the labour market integration of refugees. Concurrently, incremental changes in the disciplining elements of the programme have resulted in an increasingly controlling activation regime. Our interpretation is that a major driver behind the intensification of disciplinary elements has been the assumption that participants lack the motivation to integrate into the labour market. Moreover, we find that this assumption presents an obstacle to policy learning with regard to programme quality. Within activation, policy ideas seem to function simultaneously as path-reinforcing cognitive locks and as drivers for political change.
following the trend of most western European countries, norwegian social policy is moving in the direction of activation and conditionality. The reform studied here, the Introductory Act for newly arrived immigrants, is one of the most prominent examples of a series of reforms following the same pattern. The main topic in the debate over activation is whether conditionality is imposed in order to qualify and enable, or rather is motivated by an intention to control and deter -in other words, empowerment or neoliberalism. The topic calls for a closer look at the measures within the activation regime in question, and their ideological anchoring. The UK activation discourse provides a contrastive case for the analysis. This paper argues that the Norwegian reform rests on an ideological cocktail of empowerment, gender/political equality, and neoliberalism. The reform was preceded by considerable changes in the political and academic discourses on citizenship, and the new discourses on empowerment and gender/political equality are clearly reflected in the act. The paper also places the changes in discourse within the context for policy change created by interests and social learning.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.