What is it about?
Public employment services are expected to help people who face barriers in the labour market. However, frontline workers often have to decide how much effort, attention and support different clients should receive. This article focuses on the practical judgements behind such decisions. It asks whether workers respond mainly to objective indicators of need, such as labour market disadvantage, or whether their decisions are also shaped by how clients behave and how deserving or cooperative they appear.
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Why is it important?
Activation policies often assume that support is targeted according to need. Yet in everyday practice, frontline workers must interpret clients’ situations under conditions of limited time, limited resources and institutional pressure. If perceived conduct matters more than objective need, then clients with substantial barriers may receive less support simply because they are seen as difficult, unmotivated or insufficiently cooperative. This has important implications for fairness, service quality and the design of activation systems.
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This page is a summary of: Who Is Worth Investing in? Need, Conduct and Frontline Diagnosis in Activation Services, Social Policy and Administration, June 2026, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/spol.70089.
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