The political meaning of user involvement – Consensus, individualization, and de-politicization in the national policy discourseDuring the last 25 years ”user involvement” has emerged as a prominent concept within the welfare sector, and the aim of the article is to review the Swedish national policy on ”user involvement”. Through a policy discourse analysis inspired by Carol Bacchi, the constitutive effects of the policy are revealed. Three distinctive features of the policy discourse are (1) its open and imprecise formulation, (2) its dominating consensus perspective, and (3) the tendency to focus the argumentation on the service users as individuals, rather than the service users as a collective. The policy has several discursive consequences, such as constructing the service users as subjects responsible for their own well-being; that potential value conflicts are avoided; and that the service users’ ambitions to influence are directed towards welfare organizations rather than political decision-making.
The article draws on a three-year ethnographical study investigating how “service user involvement” was constructed (i.e. understood, implemented, and performed) within two large Swedish welfare organizations – a county-based psychiatric organization and a municipal social service administration (see Eriksson 2015). When analyzing the interactions between the user movement and the welfare organizations, a relationship much like cooptation (Selznick, 1949) was revealed. The article outlines four characteristic features of this coopting relationship: (1) The bonding between the parties, incorporating the user representatives in the organizations and their institutional logic; (2) The organizational framing of the user involvement activities; setting the initial rule for how to act/speak, where to act/speak, when to act/speak as well as what to speak about; (3) The organizational control exercised as the activities took place, directing the discussions and interaction to align with the interests of the welfare organizations; and (4) The resistance exercised by user representatives, enabling them to influence the organizations and contribute to change. Together, these four features disclose service user involvement as a “sanctioned resistance”: At the same time as the institutionalized service user involvement controls and constrains the way service user representatives act and pursue their goals, it gives them a possibility to challenge the welfare organizations from within. However, the influence that is permitted can be understood as adjustments within the prevailing institutional logic, rather than changes that transformed the organizations in more profound ways.
‘Service user involvement’ is a widespread and well-known phenomenon within welfare policy and practice in Western countries and is usually perceived as a way of improving welfare services to better aid service users in managing their predicaments. However, the presented ethnographical study of service user involvement within a Swedish psychiatry organization shows that user involvement initiatives might also result in unintended and undesired effects on the collective user movement (i.e. the service user organizations involved in the activities). The analysis suggests that initiatives on user involvement might affect both the constitution of the user movement as well as the way the movement operates. Theoretically co-optation theory informs the analysis.
Syftet med rapporten är att via en genomgång av det svenska forskningsläget belysa centrala erfarenheter från tidigare integrationsarbete. Dessa erfarenheter är viktiga att ha i åtanke för att utforma ett ändamålsenligt och strategiskt arbete med integration och stödinsatser till nyanlända. I följande sammanfattning lyfts några av rapportens viktigaste slutsatser och policyimplikationer fram. Alla de punkter som tas upp här diskuteras på ett fördjupat sätt genom kapitel fyra, fem och sex i rapporten.
Recent research on user involvement in welfare services suggests that involvement practices are increasingly individualized and driven by market logics. This article is based on an ethnographic study within a public psychiatry organization, applying the concept of commodification to examine this trend in contemporary user involvement. By showing how public user involvement takes the form of a market where individuals narratives and experiences of mental health and psychiatric treatment are bought and sold as a commodity, the analysis illuminates how market logics manifests in practice. One of the consequences of this commodification is that the user movement and its representatives are limited in their role as independent actors pursuing their own agenda, instead acting increasingly on behalf of the public and as a supplier of personal experiences.
This ethnographic case study examines how knowledge was produced in collaboration between a welfare organization and its target group. The study investigated the Swedish Public Employment Service (PES), which is responsible for the integration of newly arrived migrants through the ‘introduction programme’. To explore how migrants perceived its services, the PES initiated a six-month project in which three employee-researchers and four participant-researchers (migrants participating in the introduction programme) conducted an interview study together. I followed the project as an independent researcher, making observations and conducting interviews with the members of the research group on several occasions.
The study shows the participant-researchers were enabled to obtain quite extensive control over the project. The study also suggests that organizational leadership on practical and methodological matters does not necessarily conflict with the user perspective of the study. The project produced knowledge that revealed the migrants’ perceptions in a relatively unedited way. The knowledge produced was ‘radical’ as it differed considerably from the typical knowledge produced by the organization, which made it unfamiliar and difficult to handle. Not until the final report of the project included an organizational perspective was it made official, and even so the PES made no efforts to publicly present or disseminate the report.
Citizen dialogues and other participatory practices are basically the norm in contemporary spatial planning. Nonetheless, what happens to citizen input after it has been collected – how it is handled and utilized by planners in the continuation of the planning process – has been described as a ‘black box’, where most stakeholders lack insight. The aim of this explorative study is to open this black box and examine how citizen input is handled by local planning professionals. This practice lacks a common language and form among the studied municipalities, but the analysis reveals that it takes the form of a ‘sorting process’ in which input is categorized, evaluated and structured in preparation for its integration into final plans. The paper outlines the basic logics and considerations that guide this sorting process, and distinguishes between two modes, which have been termed ‘inclusive’ and ‘selective’ sorting. These modes determine how input is categorized and assessed. The analysis indicates that multiple micro-decisions are made throughout the sorting process, and that these decisions influence the input that reaches formal decision-making bodies, and in what form. The results reveal the power exercised by municipal planning actors and how they affect the destiny of the received citizen input.
Departing from the theory of street-level bureaucracy, this article usesa qualitative approach to examine employment officers’ perceptions of workingin the Swedish introduction programme for newly arrived migrants. Theprogramme is managed by the Swedish Public Employment Service, and theaim of the study is to illuminate how street-level bureaucrats perceive theprerequisites of implementing integration policy within the introductionprogramme, and how they respond to these prerequisites. The study showsthat the interviewees perceive the working conditions as difficult, characterizedby a pronounced tension between organizational demands andmigrants’ needs. To manage this dilemma, the street-level bureaucratsapply several coping strategies, and we highlight two broad patterns ofpractice. Within the client-centred pattern, attempts were made to use discretionto assist the participants in accordance with their needs. Within theauthority-centred pattern, the street-level bureaucrats applied a formal andrule-oriented understanding of their assignment, concentrating their effortson maintaining the functionality of the introduction programme. The mostimportant implication of the study is that it reveals a mismatch between thepolitically formulated integration policy and the actual needs of the migrants,as perceived by the interviewees. The current integration policy is heavilyinfluenced by a workfare logic, causing the introduction programme to befocussed on providing support connected to labour-market matching.However the programme lacks adequate structures to support its participantsto handle e.g. practical, health-related and psychosocial issues that wouldindirectly facilitate labour-market participation. Thus, this study encouragespoliticians and policymakers to formulate a more holistic integration policy.