Clienthood and institutional identities

Following the new management strategies, the power imbalances implicit in the worker – client relationship contribute to the emergence of a new idea of clienthood. The term 'clienthood' is used by Hall et al. (2003) to question the simplistic view of social work as either good or bad omitting the side of the client and including negative connotations negating the autonomy of the client. A new

emphasis is suggested on clienthood that is determined by cultural, economic and social contexts thus leading to the view of the fact of becoming and being a client as socially constructed. What matters then is the whole life history of the individual and other significant roles the individual might possess:

'Clienthood is not accepted as given, but as situational and narrative states and interpretations, and being so, they may be subject to change. Thus, the client is multiple, not something that can be reduced to a single abstract category' (Hall et al. 2003:

12)

The concept of client is related to the categories of client and social worker based on features that all the institutional actors share including rules that the clients acknowledge as expectations to be respected (Juhila 2003). Therefore, clienthood includes self-identification through the reality of the institution, including the expectations of the welfare actors for role identification. Institutional realities support the development of 'institutional selves' as the construction of identities through the realities of the 'social institutions that increasingly shape the discursive contours of subjectivity' (Gubrium and Holstein 2000: 95).

These developments are in line with the current labor market changes that re-formulate the processes through which work and institutions are integrated in identities. By the developments towards individualization and the erosion of traditional pathways, identity is transformed from 'given' to a 'task' assigning this identity work and the consequences of it to the individuals. At the same time, the achievement of a 'social standing' and self-determination receives a compulsive character (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002). Consequently, the life course turns into a 'biography of choice' or 'do-it-yourself' biography for which the individuals need to construct their own frame of options by weighting the benefits and costs of their choices (Beck 1992, 2000). The personal identity work, thus, becomes a 'project of the self', which should be seen as a process rather than an outcome enabled by individual choice making from wide array of opportunities and discourses (Chouliaraki 2003). As a consequence of this obligatory 'reflexive self-development' within the notion of socialization, issues such as agency and biography should be integrated in a new manner (Settersten and Owens 2002).

From the individual's perspective, then, the challenge is to keep the narrative going and integrate the reconstruction of the past events to the anticipation of the possible future scenarios (Giddens 1991). In the social work context when accepting the contract, the individuals face the obligation of choosing whether to be the subject or the sovereign; to choose between being the subject of intervention within a specific discourse or, additionally, wanting to become one.

Thereby, individuals face double expectations: those from social workers and their own expectations resulting from the former. The obligation, then, includes the commitment to self-improvement and the need to translate this obligation into freedom, of transforming oneself from responsible to responsibility seeking (Åkerstrøm Andersen 2007). This choice process refers to Foucault's (1988) self-technologies aiming at self-control by informing the individuals on the direction and the ways to manage their identities.

Tonkens (2011) sees these developments as a co-occurrence of responsibilization and de-responsibilization: in the social work practices she observes more instances of control and intervention in people's lives suggesting the treatment of individuals as irresponsible and implying a lack of trust from the side of the government. On the other hand, there is an evident development towards attribution of responsibility for the individuals to take control of their own lives. Åkerstrøm Andersen (2007) goes a step further by describing how social policies first produce social service clients as disempowered, whose task is then to empower themselves. The maintenance of self-empowerment becomes possible through unconscious cognitive processes that identify the self from an outsiders' position. Gubrium and Holstein (2001) illustrate the self-identification processes by the use of 'I' and 'me' as two separate entities interacting with each other like individuals. The 'me' is being evaluated by the 'I' as a part of an institutional routine that brings the individuals to govern themselves.

Increasingly, self-construction is exposed to the supply of troubled identities by institutions providing, reformulating and assembling different identities. This may take place even without the individuals identifying themselves as troubled;

however, the process requires a discursive environment providing a meaningful context to set the 'condition of possibility' (Foucault 2002) for such identification.

Therefore, the identities need to be recognized in order to make sense to others and this increasingly takes place in the institutional frame by creation of troubled identities (Gubrium and Holstein 2001).

3.4 Conclusions

This chapter has attempted to link the two levels introduced in the beginning of the dissertation: international and federal employment and welfare policies and the individual level, where the young people are constructed as clients subjected to institutional intervention. These two levels meet at the intersection of social policy implementation at the local institution, in the interactions between clients and social work professionals. Along with the social political changes, the street-level interventions acquire new ways of working and dealing with clients, which naturally have an impact on the client-agent relationship. The young people as service-users are taken in by institutional targeting, and their trajectories are shaped by the changes that become evident in issues such as the space for discretion and thus power is given to the local agents as well as issues related to client control and sanctioning procedures.

Increasing efficiency has taken over as a high priority target since the New Public Management strategies have been introduced to a wide variety of social work. These policies focus on performance of public institutions while measuring output by indicators and increasingly introduce contracts between institutional actors as well as privatization strategies by promoting the competitiveness of public services. The NPM strategies have received a wide amount of critique ranging from the worsened working conditions of the civil servants (Emery and Giauque 2003) to the weakened public responsibility in society (Newman 2011).

Thereby, in addition to having practical consequences the NPM principles represent an ideology or set of beliefs, which have an effect on the general attitudes and perceptions of individuals with a weaker base for solidarity and compassion initiated by marketization and competitiveness.

At the institutional level, the welfare reforms naturally have an impact on the work of the street-level-workers. In addition to increased workload (Lipsky 2010) and accountability (Bonvin 2008) of the civil servants, the clients get a share of the changed circumstances due to the power that the former possess in the client-agent relationship. In particular, the young clients have limited opportunities to influence the categorization and typification practices, which is a necessary part of the work done by the social workers. While a space for negotiation does exist in the relationship, young people are more prone than other age groups to internalize the indicated category (Gestsdóttir and Lerner 2007), thus affecting the individual's self-evaluation (Lipsky 2010). The notion of clienthood illustrates the expectations of the institutional actors towards the client and the following self-identification through the institutional reality. The social political changes then take a part in shaping the individual biographies as the meanings given to the welfare client are formulated by the institutional discourses and interventions.

The NPM strategies followed by activation policies have some contradictory results when taking into consideration the actual aims of these reforms. The evidence from Switzerland, for instance, shows that while the decentralization aims include increasing autonomy and responsibility for the administrative unit, the local staff instead of being empowered, are subject to even more control (Emery and Giauque 2003). According to Bonvin (2008), such a model brings forward a management by objectives type of public administration, whereby the state has a high control over local practices imposing demands for the street-level workers to be accountable and responsible for unsatisfactory results.

Viewed against the capability approach, the local actors lack the freedom of choice to be held responsible for their actions. By the pressures related to performance targets left for local agents, the welfare clients' individual needs are also not sufficiently taken into consideration, which calls for the need to integrate capability-enhancing strategies (Bonvin and Farvaque 2007). Such a state model would introduce a bottom-up approach by ensuring local actors' active participation in the implementation of social policies and the capabilities of the citizens guaranteeing the rights of the beneficiaries (Bonvin 2008).

4 Overview of Swiss labor market, welfare and