“She isn’t Someone I Associate with Pension”—a Vignette Study of Professional Reasoning

Administrative reasoning

A significant characteristic of caseworkers’ administrative reasoning is the use of references to administrative categories, that is, to match groups or target groups. An extract from interview 16, in which the caseworker predominately used administrative reasoning, is presented below. Here the caseworker explains her general approach to clients:

The quote illustrates a high degree of accountability to “the system,” as well as a commitment to management.

The caseworker perceives the willingness of clients to internalize the values of assuming responsibility for oneself and active citizenship based on a desire to be responsible as a precondition for her practicing of what Evetts (1999) describes as organizational professionalism. The caseworker appears to be more concerned about upholding the rules than occupational criteria for exploring the client’s reasons for requesting assistance.

She presents the client with a number of concrete activation opportunities and evaluation strategies. In doing this, she expresses both loyalty with regard to upholding the intention of the policy as well as loyalty to the concrete rules. However, she does not mention any occupational perspectives on the client’s capacity to work. This is interpreted as an example of a caseworker who identifies more with being part of a professional organization than with the role of being an occupational professional.

The following quote provides an example from another interview of how administrative reasoning entails identification with the existing rules, instead of with the particular problems of the client. Here the caseworker responds to the vignette A describing a woman with fibromyalgia:

The above quote is selected to illustrate how accountability sometimes comes before client responsiveness when caseworkers draw on organizational professionalism to reason about clients’ needs. Here, the caseworker chooses to initiate the interaction with the client by clarifying the criteria for granting an early retirement pension instead of starting by clarifying the extent of the problem. The following quote provides a similar example of rule-based reasoning. The caseworker responds to a question about how they deal with chronic pain patients in general and not to the specific contested vignette case in question. She sees herself as administering a set of rules instead of utilizing a set of tools for client-assistance:

This caseworker emphasizes how clients first and foremost have to adapt to the new rules in order to continue to be eligible for social welfare, rather than this being based on their capacity to work. This client approach also demonstrates an example of coping with working conditions by “moving away from clients” and hiding behind rules instead of using them to be client-responsive (as described in Tummers et al., 2015).

As exemplified by the quote above, there were often hints of resistance against clients when caseworkers used an administrative reasoning about casework. The reason seems to be that when a caseworker draws on professional principles concerning how well (s)he follows the letter of the law and the principles of management and organization, (s)he then sees any case in which (s)he has to deviate from management policy as an attack on her professional integrity. (S)he copes by moving away from or going against clients to avoid what she interprets as bending the rules in favor of client responsiveness. This seems to cause a lot of frustration towards clients, who are perceived as not showing the required level of cooperation and motivation to get better. In this sense, the more ardently the caseworker endeavors to follow the rules, the less room there is for exercising comprehensive discretion. The following analysis illustrates an example of categorization, where administrative reasoning shapes a curtailed discretion of clients. The quote is from a caseworker responding to a question about what she imagines she would do in the case of a woman with fibromyalgia described in vignette A. The quote exemplifies how the rules for documentation reduce discretion as a room of maneuver for the caseworker, though not the act of actually making an assessment. The first line is also the quote used in the title of the article.

If you follow the letter of the law, there are no exceptions as to when treatments and work testing should stop, because the law states that all options must be exhausted before a supportive effort is even considered. In practice, there will always be another job and another treatment to try. The initiation of supportive efforts, therefore, depends on the caseworker’s discretion as to when “enough is enough.” Determining when that is, however, is far from an objective, clear-cut decision. On the contrary, and as explained by Stone’s (2002) notion of categorization as an ambiguous process, there are different interpretations of where this boundary lies, and one of these differences seems to be reflected in different symbolic contexts, as we will see in the next analysis.

It appears that when caseworkers draw on the administrative reasoning in a categorization, they let “common sense knowledge” influence their discretion regarding when to make exceptions from the rule. The categorization thus becomes a matter of identification with clients based on personal feelings and commonalities regarding social stereotypes rather than a comprehensive discretion of the specific case. In other words, the material suggests that when caseworkers primarily draw on organizational professionalism and use administrative reasoning they lack principles for a responsive client approach, and discretion as to when “enough is enough” is based on what associations they have with the particular client. What ultimately becomes the defining source of influence in discretion is the symbolic context of the client rather than a professional occupational principle.

When clients are categorized based on administrative reasoning, caseworkers tend to associate the client with a stereotype even before the assessment of ability to work begins. This exemplifies a curtailed discretion because clients are perceived as not meeting the criteria for assistance beforehand. Moreover, those who do not meet such criteria are typically regarded as the main target group of a more strict evaluation compared to a more lenient evaluation, namely those believed mainly to have an attitude problem. This contrast between strict and lenient evaluation is the center of attention in the next analysis.

Comprehensive reasoning

As opposed to the administrative reasoning about casework, some caseworkers draw on more occupational knowledge as a source of reasoning. One important aspect was when clients’ actions and motives were interpreted without adding an administrative layer to the discretion. However, the strongest signifier of occupational reasoning was the tendency to use an assistance-based principle to justify the actions taken in relation to clients. The following quote from a caseworker responding to one of the opening questions about her main work tasks illustrates this: “They may have a hard time returning to something similar. And then you have to help them get started with something else” (Interview 14). In contrast to caseworkers’ administrative reasoning, she refers to “help” instead of to a “rule.” These differences in types of reasoning resonate with Grimen and Molander’s (2008) emphasis on discretion as also epistemic and never just fixed by the structure. Even though some caseworkers insist on understanding their discretion as fixed by rules, the differences between administrative and comprehensive reasoning demonstrate why this is not the case.

The question of who is perceived as being responsible for solving “the situation” is another aspect that distinguishes organizational from occupational professionalism (Evetts, 1999). In the former, the tendency for the caseworker was to adapt to a discourse of “self-responsibility” embedded in decision-making. Within this discursive framing of social problems, the client was perceived as being responsible for solving the problem of disability and unemployment with the exception of highly specific situations in which clients have a detailed diagnosis and prognosis for the development of their disability (e.g. terminal cancer patients or patients with specified recovery plans). Caseworkers drawing on occupational principles about social work appear to hold an expanded view of who and what can be responsible for “solving the case,” in the sense of helping a client return to the labor market or apply for appropriate social insurance. They see the client from a bottom-up perspective in the sense that they prioritize “treating” the client before complying with management goals, as described both by Schott et al. (2015), and also in Maynard-Moody and Musheno’s description of what constitutes the difference between state-agency and citizen-agency (2003).

Resistance was also a significant trait of occupational reasoning, which is when a caseworker expressed resistance against the formal rule of social welfare. The resistance against the rule was against the purpose of assessing only labor-related aspects of clients. This kind of resistance is not surprising because ignoring the client’s non-labor-related conditions beforehand contradicts the perception embedded in social work professionalism. One caseworker, when describing his work in general terms in relation to one of the opening questions, expresses his resistance as follows:

Here, the caseworker expresses a comprehensive reasoning regarding what (s)he believes influences the ability of the client to perform in the labor market. Moreover, the quote illustrates a categorization where the functional reasons for unemployment are examined before any conclusion about eligibility for social insurance is made.

In general, the pattern in the material shows how occupational reasoning leads to comprehensive categorization. In the following quote, a caseworker presents his reasoning when asked to compare the non-contested vignette describing a woman with Multiple Sclerosis (vignette B) and the vignette portraying a woman who has lost her arm in a car accident (vignette C):

For this caseworker, the relationship between professional reasoning and discretion is not a matter of making an exception from the general rules for some deserving clients as much as it is a question of treating individuals in relation to their problems, in order to be able to have the same requirements. In this case, (s)he is bound to the greater purpose of the rule and not to its technocratic dimensions that characterize caseworkers’ administrative reasoning.

Moreover, this way of reasoning about having the same requirements, while simultaneously extending individual consideration, also defines what can be interpreted as “comprehensive categorization”, which the caseworker demonstrates by stating that: “Under such conditions, I think this could matter.” Here the client’s “other” conditions become part of the categorization though these are usually excluded from administrative reasoning. “Conditions” are perceived as being circumstances that remove focus from the labor-directed effort, which causes the caseworker to focus on the client’s problems instead of “rigid rule-following.”

Another caseworker explains, with reference to her own client experience how she justifies making an extra effort even though it contradicts the exact letter—but, according to her, not the spirit—of the law:

This quote provides an example of how the caseworker follows the “spirit” of the law rather than following it literally. In the quote, there is no trace of resistance against the spirit of the law. On the contrary, the caseworker uses the law as a tool to empower the client to re-enter the labor market, though does not follow the terms of it literally. This exemplifies how categorizing clients comprehensively draws on reasoning grounded in occupational professionalism about social work, as also emphasized by Evetts (1999). In other words, the crucial justification in this type of argument is based on a long-term perspective of satisfying the intention of the policy instead of a short-term perspective. This is crucial because, in the short-term perspective, the exemption from, for example, the “duration rule” is considered rule-bending, while in a long-term perspective, the exception work is regarded as a precondition for actually empowering a client to get back into the labor market.

In general, the analysis shows how caseworkers think professionally about their discretions. However, they do so in very different ways. Some caseworkers curtail discretion by reducing what Grimen and Molander (2008) refer to as the epistemic dimension of discretion to rigid rule following while others exercise discretion based on comprehensive assessments of needs. When caseworkers explained their categorization during the interview, they tended to prefer either to reason according to management and the principles of their organization or according to occupational knowledge about social work. In the case of the former, they used a technocratic and administrative reasoning about clients being more accountable “upwards” than “downwards” than in the case of the latter. Here, they also moved towards the clients using personal resources of engagement and responsiveness, whereas they moved away from, or against, clients to align with management and organizational professionalism.

Table 3 shows that all 24 caseworkers use professional reasoning in their categorization of clients and that many use both organizational and occupational reasoning. However, even though both types of professional reasoning appeared in almost all the interviews, the dominance of these varied, organizational professionalism being the most dominant. Here clients were categorized according to administrative categories, and caseworkers primarily see themselves as gatekeepers of “the system.” In contrast, caseworkers who reasoned according to occupational principles of social work were more inclined to categorize clients according to which economic and social resources conditioned clients’ general well-being, and they perceived themselves more as the citizens’ advocates than promoters of a set of administrative rules.

In the following, the analysis will focus on the caseworkers’ responses to the fictive cases presented as stereotypes of needs. The analysis seeks to specify how the symbolic context of clients shapes how caseworkers reason about clients, and whether this influences their discretion of needs.

Caseworkers’ use of clarification tools and discretion of needs

To specify caseworkers’ categorization and discretion of clients’ needs, the analysis focuses on their use of mandatory tools to clarify clients’ ability to work. First, the range of tools used by caseworkers will be presented, along with the analysis of the purposes that caseworkers use as arguments for choosing to use a particular tool.

Although it is mandatory for the caseworkers to use the work capacity method (arbejdsevnemetode), they can choose among a range of clarification tools. A clarification tool is an activity or treatment that can help the caseworker to assess clients’ need of assistance. In the following, the distribution of their uses of clarification tools is presented, ordered according to a systematic interpretation of whether the tool is used with a “hard” or “soft” purpose. A soft use of a tool corresponds to a positive response to the client’s request for a pension, whereas a hard use of a tool corresponds to a negative response. In the case of the former, the tool is used to document the request’s validity and in the latter to question it.

*Cell content: Number of coding references in 24 interviews.

As Table 4 shows, caseworkers may use the same tools, but with different purposes. When a caseworker uses a tool for a “hard” purpose, the tool is used to question a client’s request for a pension. Here the tool becomes part of the caseworker’s strategy to cope with a client’s claims regarding needs. In general, the coding of what purposes caseworkers use the various tools for shows that “hard” use often corresponds to an attempt to hide behind rules to protect the caseworker from more client contact than desired.

In contrast to what I classify as a “hard” use, some caseworkers use tools, even the same tools, in a “soft” manner. A tool being used in a “soft manner” refers to use in which the purpose is to demonstrate how much a client is in need of service, that is, here the tool is used to document a lack of ability to work rather than to question the client’s claim of inability to work. Based on the coding of “soft use,” the material shows that when caseworkers use tools “softly” they bend the rules by using them strategically to document, for instance, no work capacity.

This resembles the difference in coping strategies identified by Tummers et al. (2015) between going against and moving towards clients. In situations where caseworkers use tools with a “soft” purpose, they also move towards clients and their claims by drawing on personal resources, such as empathy.

One issue is the notion that caseworkers reason in particular ways when they talk about their experiences, another issue is whether the flavor and the tendency of professional reasoning are influenced by the symbolic context of the client encountered.

*Cell content: 48 vignette cases (2 vignette cases from each of the 24 interviews).

In response to the contested stereotype of need (vignette A), all caseworkers preferred a hard use of clarification tools, whereas they preferred a soft use of the non-contested stereotype (vignette B). This pattern supports the expectation that symbolic context matters in the discretion of needs because all cases were comparable on all other dimensions than the reputation of the diagnosis of fibromyalgia and Multiple Sclerosis, respectively. In relation to their preferred use of clarification tools towards the vignette describing phantom pain from a lost arm, an interesting pattern appears, namely that this preference is primed by the first vignette. In Table, five quotes from the typical relationships are displayed. In response to the question of what she would do with a client portrayed through a non-contested stereotype, the caseworker from interview 7 narrows it down to being “a diagnosis, which can give a pension.” In contrast, in relation to the one-armed woman portrayed in vignette C, the same caseworker states that: “you don’t get a pension for a one-armed disorder.” Even though both phantom pains and multiple sclerosis involve considerable pain, clarification tools are used very differently. In the case of the former, tools are used for the purpose of documenting the client’s inability to work, and in the latter situation, the caseworker uses the tools to question the client’s service needs. These patterns characterize 24 out of the 48 vignette responses (each interview contains two vignette cases). However, the other majority (8 out of 11) came to a different conclusion regarding this client. They emphasized the loss of the arm as something that goes beyond the loss of the actual arm, as one caseworker puts it: “She has lost a lot, so she may end up receiving a pension” (Interview 11). This group all responded in this way after explaining why they preferred a hard use of clarification in relation to the contested stereotype of need (A), for instance in saying “but she will be refused. No [laughing], it’s just because it’s so difficult today to get a pension. So, even before we get to the clarification” (Interview 9).

So, in terms of examining the effect of symbolic context, the reactions show how socially shared stereotypes of need wander into professional discretion of needs.

As was argued for in the theoretical framework, discretion can be analyzed as an outcome of a social process of categorization, which highlights how caseworkers are influenced not only by rules and professional context but also by client characteristics. The analysis indicates that reasoning and categorization may be conditioned by symbolic context. This points to an impact of symbolic categories, as the vignettes used were comparative functionally but different symbolically. Client characteristics function as a source of influence, the flavor of which depends on which symbolic context the caseworker associated with a particular client.

Caseworkers who responded to the contested stereotype of need (vignette A portraying fibromyalgia) were inclined to cope by going against the client. They preferred using an administrative reasoning to “hide behind rules” to protect them from clients’ claims about being in need of service. The dominant way of using clarification tools were “hard,” as they used them to question clients’ service needs. Caseworkers who responded to a non-contested stereotype (vignette B portraying multiple sclerosis) were inclined to cope by moving towards the client. They preferred using comprehensive reasoning to follow the spirit, rather than the letter, of the law. The dominant way of using clarification tools was “soft”, as they used them to document discretion of needs. Finally, caseworkers who responded to vignette C were inclined to move towards or go against the client, depending on whether they were primed by a contested or a non-contested stereotype. Their interpretation of a case involving the loss of one arm followed the opposite pattern of the priming vignette, which indicates how the symbolic context matters even in cases where the client in question does not represent a typical stereotype.