Vincent Dubois: Welfare work as bureaucratic work: how state agents state individual cases

Public lecture at University of Copenhagen Thursday 26 May, 2016.
Room 23.0.49 (Auditorium)

Welfare reform over the last two decades has taken on various forms of individualization and contractualization. It has also brought about a “behavioural turn”: decisions of welfare provision or sanctions are increasingly based on the assessment of welfare clients’ attitudes, and aimed at correcting these attitudes when they are deemed unsatisfactory, with regards to official policy criteria (autonomy, active job search, and “decent” attitude towards the administration). These evolutions have led to multiple changes. I focus on two of them. First, I analyze how one-on-one interactions, during which state agents state on the situations and behaviors of welfare clients, have become crucial in the implementation of welfare programs. Second, I expose how this function of evaluation, traditionally fulfilled by social workers, is now carried out by low-ranking welfare clerks. As a result, welfare work has come to revolve, perhaps surprisingly, around both moral evaluation and bureaucracy. To illustrate these assertions, I mainly draw on research I have been developing on French welfare offices, and on the enforcement of welfare control in their midst.