Citizens with complex problems are often in touch with different welfare services and administrative systems in order to receive the help, they need. Sometimes these services overlap and sometimes they conflict. The lack of ready-made services to match the complex, multiple, and often shifting needs of citizens with complex problems presents a challenge to caseworkers in the welfare system. In this article, we zoom in on the management of a single user´s case, in order to examine in detail how caseworkers nevertheless make casework ‘work’. We employ the concept of ‘tinkering’ to highlight the ad hoc and experimental way in which caseworkers work towards adjusting services to the unique case of such citizens. Tinkering has previously been used in studies of human-technology relations, among others in studies of care-work in the welfare system. In this paper, we employ the concept to capture and describe a style of working that, although not a formally recognized method, might be recognizable to many caseworkers in the welfare system. We show how tinkering involves the negotiation of three topics of concern, namely the availability of services, the potentials of services to be adjusted to the particular problems of the citizen, and finally, the potential for interpreting these problems and the citizen’s needs in a way that they match the service. We further demonstrate that casework tinkering involves both short-term and long-term negotiation of services. Firstly, tinkering is involved in the continual adjustment and tailoring of services to the immediate needs of the citizen, but secondly, it also speaks to a more proactive process of working towards a more long-term goal.
This article examines the aesthetics and contestations surrounding the planning of a farreaching petroleum infrastructure and development scheme on the south coast of Timor-Leste. The scheme, known as the Tasi Mane project, is symptomatic of the central role that oil and gas revenues have come to play in the country's development. The article explores how promises of prosperity mobilise visions of societal improvement that were once associated with independence and examines some of the social and political effects that the anticipation of petroleum wealth and infrastructure engenders. While the availability of revenues from oil and gas generate modernist imaginaries of prosperity, the Tasi Mane project can itself be seen as a technology of state building. This process is, however, fraught with contradictions, since a state's legitimacy and autonomy are dependent on recognition by others.
This paper examines the emergence of ‘socially marginalized Greenlanders’ as a distinct target category in Danish welfare policy and practice. It builds on analysis of policies targeting Greenlandic minorities in Denmark and interviews with welfare professionals in charge of implementing these. The paper shows how Greenlandic minorities are represented as characterized by markers of difference viewed to set them apart from other socially marginalized citizens. These relate to 1) structural differences that impact on the ability to receive and benefit from welfare services, 2) to the perceived cultural origins of the problems that socially marginalised Greenlanders face, and, finally, 3) to the excessive social problems associated in policies and by professionals with an upbringing in Greenland. The paper shows how policies and welfare professionals both reject and continuously resort to the notion of the target group as distinct from other socially marginalized citizens. In continuation of this, the analysis further shows how ambivalences and contradictions are not so much found between the levels of policy and practice, as other studies of policy implementation processes have demonstrated, as they are inherent within all policy and considerations about how to understand the target group they articulate.
Denne artikel undersøger nogle af de strategier, brugere af varmestuer og herberger brugte for at klare sig igennem COVID-19-pandemiens første bølge i Danmark. Socialt udsatte borgere blev kort efter nedlukningen i marts 2011 kategoriseret som særligt sårbare i forhold til smitterisiko og muligheder for isolation i tilfælde af smitte. Der er imidlertid mangel på viden om de strategier, socialt udsatte borgere, såsom hjemløse eller borgere med problematisk rusmiddelbrug, benytter til at klare sig i krisebegivenheder. Ofte beskrives de primært som ofre for, nærmere end nogle, der aktivt handler og agerer i krisesituationer som den, COVID-19-pandemien udgør. Med udgangspunkt i kvalitative interviews og etnografisk feltarbejde viser artiklen imidlertid, hvordan brugere trak på erfaringer, man ofte ville forbinde med centrale dimensioner af et udsat liv – fængselsophold eller et liv på gaden – som ressourcer i forhold til den aktuelle krisehåndtering. Dermed udfordres dominerende ideer om socialt udsathed i brugerperspektiver på pandemiens første bølge i fortællinger, der ligeledes genforhandler ideer om relationen mellem socialt udsatte og majoritetsbefolkningen.
Aim: This article traces recent developments in Danish cannabis policy, by exploring how “cannabis use” is problematised and governed within different co-existing policy areas. Background: Recently, many countries have changed their cannabis policy by introducing medical cannabis and/or by moving toward legalisation or decriminalisation. Researchers have thus argued that traditional notions of cannabis as a singular and coherent object, are being replaced by perspectives that highlight the multiple ontological character of cannabis. At the same time, there is growing recognition that drug policy is not a unitary phenomenon, but rather composed by multiple “policy areas”, each defined by particular notions of what constitutes the relevant policy “problem”. Design: We draw on existing research, government reports, policy papers and media accounts of policy and policing developments. Results: We demonstrate how Danish cannabis policy is composed of different co-existing framings of cannabis use; as respectively a social problem, a problem of deviance, an organised crime problem, a health- and risk problem and as a medical problem. Conclusion: While the international trend seems to be that law-and-order approaches are increasingly being replaced by more liberal approaches, Denmark, on an overall level, seems to be moving in the opposite direction: Away from a lenient decriminalisation policy and towards more repressive approaches. We conclude that the prominence of discursive framings of cannabis use as a “problem of deviance” and as “a driver of organised crime”, has been key to this process.
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