Officials in welfare state bureaucracies face the challenge of negotiating their role identities in the context of changeable organizational priorities and managerial styles. Previous studies have found that the professional values may mediate top-down demands and enable the preservation of professional autonomy also under public management reforms. But how do street-level bureaucrats who lack a common professional or occupational training respond to shifting organizational demands? Based on comparative ethnography, the present article investigates how caseworkers’ role identities are conceived and practised in two of the largest state bureaucracies in Sweden, the Social Insurance Agency (SIA) and the Public Employment Service (PES). The article identifies two radically different agency cultures, resulting in rather opposite caseworker role identities. These role identities affect how front-line staff respond to organizational demands, either by focusing externally on client-related outcomes (PES) or internally on organizational output (SIA). The analysis suggests that agency culture may shape caseworker responses to governance in patterned ways, also in the absence of joint professional training or strong occupational communities.

The political discussion on intra-European mobility differentiates between mobile, interna- tionally employable individuals and immobile, locally employed ones. Mobile EU citizens, in turn, are subdivided into “attractive” highly skilled workers and “unwanted” lower skil- led workers. Transnational labour mobility among the highly skilled often results from an individual’s free will to move, disregarding structural reasons. This article examines the expectations and experiences of highly skilled Swedish labour migrants seeking qualified employment in Germany and the UK, exploring their strategies and modes of handling the mismatch between expectations and actual experiences. The findings demonstrate that the vulnerability migrants experience while working abroad does not seem to affect their self-understanding of being independent, flexible and highly mobile European citizens. The interviewees’ self-understanding is therefore conceptualised as an imagined independence, and one that stands in sharp contrast to their experiences of vulnerability and unexpected dif- ficulty in the host country.

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Drawing on ethnography in the Swedish Public Employment Service, this article compares caseworkers' and local managers' perceptions of changes towards increasing digital self-services for clients. Findings reflect a conflict of interest between different service ideals: vulnerable subjects in need of personalized guidance (caseworkers) versus competent subjects ready to manage their own unemployment via digital self-services (local managers). As we argue, the dislocation of responsibility via digital self-services serves to reinforce responsibilization, thus turning the client into her own caseworker. This development runs the risk of pushing vulnerable groups even further away from employment than they already are. Zusammenfassung: Wenn die Klientin ihre eigene Sachbearbeiterin wird: Verlagerung von Verantwortung durch digitale Selbsthilfe in der schwedischen öffentlichen ArbeitsverwaltungMit einem ethnographischen Ansatz werden Erfahrungen von Vermittlungsfachkräften und Managern der öffentlichen Arbeitsvermittlung in Schweden untersucht, die sich im Zuge einer Umstellung auf digitalisierte Dienstleistungen gesammelt haben. Die Ergebnisse deuten auf einen Interessekonflikt zwischen unterschiedlichen Serviceidealen und ihnen zugrunde liegenden Bildern von den Personen hin, an die sich die öffentliche Arbeitsvermittlung richtet: dem verletzlichen Subjekt, welches persönliche Betreuung braucht (Vermittlungsfachkräfte), im Gegensatz zum kompetenten Individuum, welches bereit

This article investigates the subjective prospects of job mobility via the perceived employability for different groups of employees. Based on comparative data from 2004 and 2010 for 16 European countries, the study explores whether perceived employability varies depending on country of birth. Furthermore, this study examines the influence of country-level factors on perceived employability. The analyses show that compared to native-born employees, foreign-born employees generally demonstrate a more positive view of their possibilities to find a new position that is similar to or better than the current one. Given that previous research indicates a rather negative de facto labour market outcome for foreign-borns compared to native-borns, the results of this study show that the foreign-borns’ self-estimation most likely differs from their expected labour market outcomes. Furthermore, these overall results are influenced by the strictness of employment protection legislation, the level of competition for qualified positions, and the general economic conditions.