2022/09/01 by Michael McGann, Siobhán O’Sullivan, Siobhan O’Sullivan +1 · 1 citation
Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Employment and Welfare Studies #Labor Movements and Unions #Social Policy and Reform Studies
paper · doi:10.1086/721056
crossref issued 2022/09/01 · crossref published 2022/09/01 · crossref published-print 2022/09/01 · openalex publication_date 2022/09/01 · crossref created 2022/10/03 · crossref deposited 2022/10/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/29 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Frontline staff play a critical role in welfare-to-work delivery, making decisions about who gets selected for which supports and sanctions. Research on these street-level bureaucrats shows them rarely implementing policy exactly as written. Instead, they bring differing valuation frames and identity assessments to this work, resulting in different implementations of policy. Central to this selectivity is the way they type and classify different clients’ characteristics. Using case data from four Australian employment services sites collected over 18 months of fieldwork, we explore how frontline staff members sort clients according to two important dimensions of their perceived conduct: job readiness as workers and trustworthiness as people. We examine the staff’s rationale and the implications of these categorization practices for how clients are treated.