Volume 63, Issue 1

Within the infrastructure of the modern welfare state, networking and collaboration across organizational and professional boundaries are far and wide considered as being deficient. At the same time, many experts refer to them as a silver bullet for overcoming institutional fragmentation and recent movements towards exacerbated social disintegration, even as governments tend to enforce collaboration formally. Using the example of child protection in Germany, this article draws on a mix of theories of government technologies in order to elucidate reasons for problems with actual collaborative arrangements in the social welfare sector, suggesting that, due to certain bottom-up dynamics, enforced networking in this sector is unlikely to be achieved by the policies under study. The analysis is based on evidence from case studies in five local settings, illustrating how major professional groups and organizations are dealing with evolving regulation and related challenges.

Employment counselors are street-level bureaucrats; they do not simply execute government’s social policy, but have considerable room for discretionary decision-making. The article examines, on the one hand, whether the organizational conditions of their work make it easier or more difficult to act professionally, that is, to link current findings with knowledge acquired through training and work experience and thus develop action strategies that suit best a client’s individual situation – and to pursue them together with him or her. For only the orientation on professional counseling standards seems to safeguard against street-level activation policy that is based on coercion rather than on challenge. On the other hand, we discuss problems of recognizing the work of these specialists in a controlling and control system which is essentially based on outcome-based performance indicators.

This study examines a core service of the German Federal Employment Agency for young people: the vocational counseling interview. The leading research questions are as follows: Which expectations do young people have of the counseling session? Which are the most important topics of the interview? What effects could be found after the counseling session? The study uses a pre-post design and is based on a survey of counselees and counselors.