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This article explores how caseworkers are re-constructing disability in the Danish welfare system and disciplining themselves and clients according to the active labour policy paradigm. Combining Foucault's ideas about discipline with Maynard-Moody and Musheno's method of interpreting street-level bureaucrats' stories (Foucault 1977;Maynard-Moody and Musheno 2003), we analyze caseworkers' stories about their clients, fellow caseworkers and themselves to understand how they practice the ideology behind active labour policy. Our analysis uses Møller's (2009) interviews with 24 Danish caseworkers who administer social welfare and sick leave benefits based on disability as the primary eligibility criterion. We selected stories told by caseworkers that exemplify archetypes of good and bad citizens, good and bad clients, and good and bad caseworkers. Through interpretative analysis, we elucidate how caseworkers make sense of active labour policy and internalize the pressures of managerial reforms to discipline both citizens and each other.

Abstract:What drives frontline workers' categorization of clients in rule-based settings with a large room for discretion? The literature on street-level bureaucracy offers a structural description of discretion that emphasizes working conditions, policy goals, personal preferences, client pressure and professional norms. However, in order to explain why frontline workers with the same room for discretion categorize clients differently, a theory of an epistemic understanding of discretion may contribute to this literature. Based on a vignette study of 24 interviews with Danish caseworkers, the analysis shows how professional reasoning, rules, and social stereotypes inform categorization and discretion. The findings indicate that caseworkers' categorizations of clients are less responsive to clients' needs and more sensitive to administrative reasoning when clients are associated with stereotypes of need. In addition, the analysis contributes to the theory of categorization and discretion in lower levels of government.

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

This article presents a comprehensive framework for the study of categories and categorization. Sociological studies of the classic theme 'categorization' seem to have faded in favor of psychological research and -most recently -policy studies, and we argue that present theories lack an adequate conception of the distinction between political and social categories as well as an adequate conceptualization of the different social contexts for categorization. Concerning the first point, we suggest separating an understanding of the political as legitimate use of state power and performative and dislocative practices, corresponding to a conception of the social as that which is beyond political institutions and that which is sedimented and stable. Drawing mainly on French epistemology, the article further discusses three important contexts for social (i.e. beyond political institutions) categories and categorization, namely systems of exchange, symbolic lifestyles and bodily schemes, and moral boundaries and perceptions of normality. These contexts are complementary and each presents an autonomous arena for processes of categorization and construction of social categories. In conclusion, we suggest that much can be gained from addressing political categories in the sociological study of categorization.