Sending an Active Message

Abstract: This thesis analyses how social policy in the form of benefit sanctions targeted at the long-term unemployed is made by case workers within the Swedish Public Employment Agency (Arbetsförmedlingen). Since the 1990s, rising unemployment and fiscal pressures on the welfare states made countries more oriented towards policies of “activation”. In 2007, the Job and Development Programme (JOB), was initiated as the Labour Market Programme specially designed to activate the long-term unemployed in Sweden. In March 2015, a system for benefit sanctions was introduced within Activity Support, the form of economic compensation participants in a Labour Market Programme are entitled to. This thesis adopts a theoretical framework of street-level bureaucracy, in which the case workers’ practice of discretion in their professional interaction with clients, becomes the actual policies. The analysis was conducted through semi-structured interviews with case workers within JOB in local offices in Skåne, Sweden during the spring of 2017. The results from this analysis provide examples of how case workers practice discretion in order to handle issues regarding how they perceive, for example, resource constraints and clients’ various degrees of deservingness. Discretion took forms of, for example, creaming, client differentiation and protection of those clients considered to be deserving.