Public Defense: Talieh Sadeghi

Activation policies, understood as mandatory activation of clients outside the labour market, have affected citizens’ lives and altered the frontline work in welfare offices dramatically. In effect, there are new requirements of worker competencies, raising important questions regarding the qualification and socialisation of these workers. To date, there is rather scant research on the occupational context of activation work. There is an overarching citizen expectation that frontline workers, “holding the keys to a dimension of citizenship”, are dedicated to their work and conduct their tasks in competent ways, which presumably contributes to promote the overall service quality. Moreover, a sustainable welfare state are assumed to be partly contingent upon the quality of services provided in the frontlines.

Research aims

With this as a backdrop, and a particular focus on social workers representing the largest occupational group in the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV), this PhD. project sets out to explore the relative role of educational background and workplace factors for activation workers’ perceived competency and dedication. This question relates to the important and potentially policy relevant query of what matters the most in qualifying and socialising activation workers; educational background or workplace factors?

Results

Although unable to directly address the question of work performance, articles 2 and 4 explore the differences between social workers and co-workers with respect to perceived competency and dedication. As informed by previous research, the underlying premise here is that both self-reported competency and dedication to work can be regarded as indicators of work performance and in turn service quality. The results indicated few and rather unsubstantial differences between social workers and other workers. Thus, I did not find considerable support for educational background being a predictor for neither dedication, nor perceived competency.

Given the relevance social work education has been assumed to have for activation work, one would expect them to differ positively from co-workers with regard to the desirable outcomes competency and dedication. However, potential conflicts between social work values and activation policies might serve as an explanation for the non-differences found in this thesis. 

In order to conceptualise the study, the first article showed that frontline managers in the Norwegian welfare offices perceive the policy objectives and implementation practices of activation policies as mild, with few disciplinary elements in which the aims are related to an overall social inclusion of clients. This conceptualisation agrees well with social work values and competency repertoire, perhaps more so than any other educational curricula represented among frontline workers in NAV. Thus, the explanation for why social workers did not differ significantly from colleagues cannot solely be attributed potential conflicts between social work values and the values underpinning activation policies.

Whereas educational background did not have an impact on workers’ perceived competency and dedication, workplace factors did indeed yield explanatory power. Articles 3 and 4 showed relatively strong associations between workplace factors in terms of learning types and job demands and resources on the one hand, and self-reported competency and dedication on the other. More specifically, frequent participation in the non-formal learning pattern workplace courses was associated with higher degrees of self-reported competency. In contrast, the informal learning patterns did not reveal significant associations with perceived competency among workers. Moreover, whereas the perception of high job demands was related to lower dedication, control and support were positively associated with dedication. The latter finding applied to all educational groups represented among activation workers.

Findings

The findings of the present thesis raises the general important question regarding the actual differences between and value of differentiated educational structures. More specifically, and in relation to activation work, despite the finding of relative compatibility between Norwegian activation work and social work repertoire, I find little support for the superiority of social workers, nor any other educational groups. Furthermore, this study emphasises the significance of the workplace as a qualifying, socialising and learning environment. Thus, ultimately, the findings of this thesis imply that in fostering adequate activation workers, the important question is less concerned with educational background, but rather how to facilitate learning and socialisation on the work site. These findings imply that the concept of occupational context of activation work would benefit from an analytical broadening by including workplace factors in the understanding of the qualification and socialisation processes.