Stuck in the Loop of Unemployment

WA clients receive dedicated support to help them secure employment. This paper refers to this support as follow-up. In line with WA’s use of the term, it includes both activation measures such as job-seeking courses and work training, as well as personal support from an advisor who specializes in assisting people to manage their cases and find a suitable job. The level of follow-up required can vary significantly based on individual needs.

WA offers a variety of services to their clients, such as job placement services to help the unemployed make themselves more attractive on the job market, including through career guidance, CV and application courses, interview training, and by trying to match individual skills and interests to available positions on the market. WA also has available services related to skills development, such as vocational courses where clients can learn specific skills.

An essential aspect of the services that the unemployed receive from WA includes being appointed an advisor who serves as the client’s primary contact and is concerned with the client’s progression. The advisors cooperate with the client and internal caseworkers in the WA to achieve the goal for each case: that the client is thoroughly assessed for their medical condition and ability either for a job or disability benefits or a combination of these (Holten et al. 2019; Oskarsen 2020). The advisors within the local WA offices are responsible for effectively managing clients’ cases and offering guidance to navigate the bureaucratic system and obtain employment. The level of follow-up required for each client is contingent upon their specific circumstances. For instance, clients on short-term sick leave generally require minimal follow-up from their advisor. Conversely, unemployed and ill young individuals receive priority, i.e., extensive follow-up from their advisors. Advisors who specialize in working with young individuals generally have a smaller caseload, allowing them to dedicate more time to each individual.

We see the arrangement as a mutual obligation between WA and the client. WA is committed to helping clients find employment, while clients are expected to actively work towards changing their situation and report their efforts. This commitment from clients is crucial, as the welfare system relies on public funds to operate effectively.

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All Norwegian citizens can access WA’s web services (‘ Your WA’) and see their previous and ongoing cases or access documents sent to them from WA. However, it is only when a citizen is registered as a job seeker that they get access to the more comprehensive digital self-services. In this section, we present the digital self-services that are used by WA clients when they are registered as job seekers, i.e., when they receive follow-up from WA.

Our study concerns unemployed youths (ages 18-29) as this segment of WA clients represents a socially and economically marginalized group (Øversveen and Ulla 2018). WA defines “youths” as those clients below the age of 30. Youth unemployment is often presented as a particularly challenging societal problem; thus, WA prioritizes efforts on this group to avoid long-term employment (Strand et al. 2020). Hence, advisors in local WA offices follow up closely with them to support them in their efforts to find employment. While the experiences of this group of users may be similar to those of other welfare clients, the unemployed youths serve as a critical case as they are considered to be digitally literate but may lack an understanding of the bureaucratic processes and working life more generally.

Unemployed youths are a large and varied group of clients, including recent university graduates searching for jobs, managing independently, and those needing more extensive follow-up (Strand et al. 2020). In this paper, we focus on youths who struggle to find and keep employment and thus need closer follow-up from WA and their advisors. These clients typically lack upper-secondary training or higher education. Many have little prior work experience and may not be familiar with the requirements of working life. Additionally, many of these clients struggle with their mental or physical health or other social issues, such as a difficult childhood with problematic family relations. Health- and drug-related problems are often complex and compound and require collaboration between WA and other public instances. Another factor commonly shared amongst unemployed youths in WA is that of ‘social heritage,’ i.e., being a WA client “runs in the family”. Some of the factors brought on by parental influence are poverty, low education, child protection services/foster care, teenage pregnancy, and lack of parental responsibility when the child reaches the age of legal adulthood (18 years old) (Myklebø 2012, p. 56). Kane et al. (2018) have documented the discretionary leeway that advisors working with young clients may have. For young clients who struggle with, e.g., their mental health, everyday activities such as getting up in the morning may be difficult. In such cases, the advisor can call the client in the morning, ensuring they get up in time, or refrain from the prescribed sanctions if they find it detrimental to the progress already achieved. They describe their responsibility to be that the young clients “needs to be picked up where he or she is, and taken along in a manageable tempo, in the direction he or she wants the most” (Kane et al. 2018, section 4.3.2).

Hence, while WA seeks to help youths find employment, they are often in need of a variety of other services and follow-up in a different manner than adults (Kane et al. 2018; Myklebø 2012; Ose and Chris 2017; Strand et al. 2020). While online public self-services can make information and application forms more accessible for more people, research indicates that young unemployed clients often get their applications for financial benefits rejected, possibly due to their lack of knowledge about public administration, e.g., what financial benefits they are entitled to Larsson (2022).

This paper reports on two studies concerning unemployed youth’s experiences with WA. As our main focus here has been to understand how young unemployed WA clients experience the services and follow-up they receive and their use of the digital self-services, we chose to conduct semi-structured interviews, which is a suitable method for accessing the interpretations of informants (Walsham 2006, p. 322). We prepared an interview guide with questions but let the interviewees contribute to shaping the conversation. Our questions focused on the participants’ experiences with WA, their services and their digital self-service, and the experience of being young and unemployed more generally. Moreover, some participants logged into their ‘Your WA’ portal during the interviews to show us how digital self-services were used.

The studies we report on were carried out between 2018 and 2021 and bear the stamp of restrictions linked to COVID-19. Hence, most interviews were conducted via a digital tool for video conferencing (Zoom), while a few were conducted face-to-face. Each interview lasted approximately one hour. All interviews were recorded, either with the University of Oslo’s Dictaphone Application or with a dictaphone. All the interviews were transcribed before the analysis.

The data gathered are mainly qualitative data in the form of experiential knowledge (Stake 2005). Our data has been analyzed following an inductive approach where themes, categories, and constructs are derived bottom-up from the empirical material, guided by the focus of our study. Throughout the process of gathering data, we continuously familiarized ourselves with the data as part of an ongoing analysis. According to Walsham (2006), “the researcher’s best tool for analysis is his or her own mind, supplemented by the minds of others when work and ideas are exposed to them” (Walsham 2006, p. 325). Hence, after each interview, the researcher took notes of first impressions and thoughts that further contributed to shaping the next. After we had conducted all the interviews, they were transcribed. Our initial analysis followed (Clarke and Virginia 2017)’s six steps for thematic analysis and focused on how the informants experienced being supported or challenged as WA clients, i.e., their user experience.

The data on which this paper is based are primarily interviews conducted with young citizens (\(n=7\)) who receive or have previously received financial benefits from WA while being labeled as ‘youth’ within WA. As such, not all participants fit the segment described in Section 3 at the time of the interview. In these cases, we focused on their experiences with WA while being part of this segment. The participants in our study have received various types of financial benefits from WA during their time as clients, e.g., social welfare benefits and work clarification benefits. The latter requires the client to be assessed as having their ‘work ability’ reduced, meaning they suffer from an illness that prevents them from having a full-time job. At times, they have also held part-time jobs while receiving follow-up from the WA.

The young clients were recruited through the extended network of one of the authors, first via direct acquaintances, who then asked other acquaintances if they would like to participate (snowballing). We have interviewed seven youths who all were or had recently been WA clients. All had extensive experience using WA’s services, including digital self-services, and received financial benefits over an extended period. They first encountered the WA between the ages of 16-25 due to either being unemployed or ill. While there are differences within the group of participants concerning their backgrounds, health challenges, and experiences, all the participants fit with the characteristics of unemployed youths as described in Section 3. See Table 1 for more information about the informants.

Being a WA client can be experienced as burdensome. Both in the public and in research environments, citizens who receive financial benefits from welfare agencies have been described in negative terms (Boulus-Rødje 2019), partly because the state spends considerable financial resources on citizens who, for various reasons, do not have a paid job. We, therefore, recognize the sensitivity that must be exercised when interviewing WA clients, particularly young people who may have less life experience than older clients. In this way, there is a perceived skewed balance of power between the young informants and WA, which became visible when some informants, e.g., did not feel they should express negative experiences about the treatment they received from WA because they were so dependent on the financial benefits they received. The interviews showed that the young clients wanted to give a complete picture of what it feels like to be a WA client and explain why they find themselves in their situation. For the clients we interviewed, this meant discussing complex topics such as physical and mental illness, social and economic challenges, challenging conditions in their upbringing, and crime. Although we did not plan to ask about these topics directly, they became a natural part of the interviews as the interviewees raised them themselves.

Several of these topics are regarded by law as extra sensitive topics and require the researcher to hold a higher standard when handling, storing, and using this type of data in their research. To comply with this, keys were used instead of names in data processing (transcription) as early as possible. The type of financial benefit an informant received could reveal whether they were experiencing medical issues, which to some extent was deemed relevant information in providing descriptions about the clients. However, besides simple classifications, further questions and deeper inquiry into potential topics of health, crime, or financial situations were avoided. If the informants chose to discuss these topics in detail, the accounts were thoroughly anonymized and keyed. Furthermore, according to research best practices (Stake 2005, p. 459), the informants who have participated in the data-gathering activities have received drafts of the write-up and a chance to raise possible concerns about how they are presented, quoted, and interpreted. Lastly, we acknowledge that the researchers must follow ethical research practices and protect the participants from inherent risks, especially when the research involves those with limited resources (Stake 2005, p. 462) . All the interviewees signed a consent declaration describing the study and the informants’ rights. The study was reported to the Norwegian Center for Research Data (NSD) for ethical clearance.

We find that citizens who are receiving financial benefits from welfare agencies carry out work when using digital self-services. They must use the digital self-services described in Section 3 to fulfill their obligations to WA. The Report card is mainly considered necessary for WA to disburse the correct amount of financial benefits, while the CV is intended to help WA match the client to suitable jobs. The Activity Planner is meant to function as a tool to help the clients plan and follow up on their activities and give the advisors a better overview of the case. In addition, the Digital Dialogue feature is used for short interactions between the client and their advisor.

Through all of these activities, we find that the clients contribute to the arc of work (Strauss 1985) for reaching employment by carrying out administrative tasks related to their cases. We argue that they carry out “ordinary work" (Schmidt 2011) without being formally employed. The relationship between the client and WA thus has some similarities to the relationship between employee and employer. In the following, we elaborate on the work that clients carry out when using digital self-services and how they experience doing these tasks.

We have identified a second category of work that the clients participate in, which is experienced as particularly helpful for moving forward with their case and managing their current situation. As we have mentioned, young WA clients typically struggle with a variety of both social and medical issues that maintain the difficulties of finding and keeping a job. We find that the activities that the clients experience as particularly helpful and motivating can be characterized as relational work. The clients engage in meetings and social settings where their issues and current circumstances are validated by advisors who seek to help the clients untangle their issues and thus uncover what they need. Similarly, in social settings with other clients, they can connect with people in similar life situations and get the experience of belonging to a community.

With regard to our focus on work, we find that these activities are similar to what Corbin and Anselm (1985) describe as biographical work, i.e., “coming to terms with one’s illness or impairment" and “learning to manage one’s life in the face of impairments" (Bratteteig and Ina 2013, p. 146). We find that work done in conversations with one’s advisor is productive for the clients regarding moving forward on their path toward assessing their needs and work ability. In meetings with their advisors, the clients seem to experience the cooperative aspects of the aforementioned mutual obligation between the WA and themselves as being more productive for their case’s progression.

Generally, the youths struggle with aspects of their lives that have contributed to them seeking out WA for help in the first place and being long-term benefit receivers. The clients we have interviewed suffer from a range of physical and mental conditions and may not have previously sought help for their struggles. Additionally, a shared experience is challenging relationships with their caretakers at a young age or other social issues such as bullying. The clients praised how certain people they connected with either in WA or through WA had helped them untangle their struggles and seek help for, e.g., social anxiety. Close relations with advisors and other people also contributed to their overall experience with, e.g., activation measures. For instance, if they developed good relationships with the organisers or the other participants, the measures were overall experienced as better. For example, Dan highly valued the experience of the advisor helping him untangle his issues:

Those are the ones that I’ve gotten the most help out of [...] The best WA advisor that I’ve had... she got it out of me, she understood it, asked me if I thought I struggled with social anxiety and then we had a long conversation and I was just like; yeah I think I need to go to the doctor because I have social anxiety, that’s what’s happening. So, it’s only been like 6-7 years that I’ve been aware of that... It was the same thing I struggled with when I was 16 actually... [Dan]

Consequently, the clients generally have negative experiences with the WA if they do not experience a good relationship with their advisor, or that the advisor is incapable of helping them understand and handle their personal struggles. The clients reported that, over time, they had had many different advisors, which did not contribute to them progressing in their case. Clients have to change advisors in situations where either the advisor’s circumstances change (e.g., parental leave or a new position) or if the client temporarily gets a job, followed by re-entering WA later. The clients found it burdening to retell their story every time they got a new advisor and continuously start over by building trust and understanding with them. Dan expressed that it gets tiring “to give that pitch every time [...] I feel like I always play poker with the person listening" because their case’s progression may depend on how the advisor assesses it. Charlotte emphasized that a close and stable relationship with the advisor was important for clients who struggle:

It’s probably OK to change advisors for some. But for those who struggle a bit with ‘normal’ life, like to fit in or just to manage things that might be completely normal for other people, then it’s not optimal when they switch that person because you have to retell so much in order for the next advisor to understand you. It’s really hard to remember everything that has happened from the beginning as well. [Charlotte]

Along the same lines, the youths value their face-to-face encounters with WA advisors. Meeting the advisors physically and face-to-face in meetings was expressed as contributing to the feeling of increased understanding between the advisors and the clients. The clients had the experience that it is easier to create a shared understanding of their situation and their opportunities within WA if they engage in face-to-face interactions with their advisors. For instance, the clients mentioned that advisors could more easily pick up on mental health or addiction issues when interacting in meetings. Furthermore, meetings in the WA office were experienced to build trust between the advisor and the client. A vocal conversation with the advisor could, for example, increase the client’s understanding of the advisor’s job and actions when following up on their case. One client said of having face-to-face meetings, “You understand that they are humans trying to help you and not just some random person sending you a message" [Adrian]. The clients generally preferred face-to-face meetings with their advisors to digital interaction, as they deemed it essential for their case’s treatment that the advisor had some empathy for their situation.

I think that often advisors understand you better if you can meet physically so they might see how you behave, and as such maybe get an increased understanding of your case. I mean, I have really heavy social anxiety, I didn’t really like meeting my advisors. However, when they met me I think that they really understood my case better. ‘Ahh I see he’s really shy, now we understand why he can’t take on normal work. He’s not just pretending’. [Adrian]

The clients also spoke warmly about participating in various activation measures and thus getting to know others in similar life situations. The social aspect of the activities they participated in could strongly impact their experience. They found it motivating to talk to and share experiences with other clients, and the sense of community that came from this made it easier to get up in the morning. An important aspect of participation in activation measures is encouraging young people to get out of the house and create a structure in their everyday lives. A good collegial community motivated the young clients to participate beyond what was required to receive financial benefits:

We just met in the mornings and there wasn’t any work-talk in the beginning. We just sat there for half an hour, had a coffee, ate cookies, and just talked (...) and the setting was in a house, so it was very cozy. [Dan]

I think it’s also very healthy, because you wake up every day and make a plan. Which was really nice as well. Similarly to my recent job course also, because you did not need to motivate yourself so hard alone. [Billy]

In recent years, many digitalization efforts in WA have focused on offering several digital self-services to make citizens more self-sufficient. Citizens can find information, send applications for financial benefits, and provide documentation by themselves at home without the help of a front-line worker. Hence, the design of online self-services usually focuses on simplicity: the tools must be easy to use for citizens who cannot be expected to possess much system understanding (Verne 2015; Breit and Robert 2015) or domain knowledge of the welfare areas in question (Skaarup 2020).

In line with Dyngeland (2023), we argue that self-services can be seen as an example of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) technology. Building on DIY research, we, therefore, emphasize that the point of DIY technologies is to make amateurs without expertise able to carry out an activity by using tools that compensate for the lack of knowledge (Watson and Elizabeth 2008). Watson and Elizabeth (2008) illustrate this point with painting as a craft, where the properties of modern paint make it possible for DIY amateurs to paint surfaces that will look good. Hence, technology for self-services should not require much competence from their users, and the solution needs to be designed to support amateurs in carrying out their tasks (Dyngeland 2023). In our case, the unemployed youths are amateurs in working life as well as in the rights and duties of the welfare state and need a solution that compensates for their lack of knowledge.

Building on Schmidt (2011), we argue that the WA clients’ (compulsory) activities can be characterized as work. The work line policy implemented in Norway (and other countries) aims to prevent long-term unemployment by having clients participate in work-like activities that are qualifying for working life. The clients should actively seek to change their current situation through participating in activation measures, courses, and training. In WA, actively using online self-services is also a part of the mutual obligation: clients should use the Activity Planner to plan and document their job-seeking activities and continuously update their online CV. They do not receive financial benefits if they do not send in their Report Card bi-weekly. We argue that these tasks are “purposeful and work-like and require a rule-based approach and a rationalistic cognitive effort to be carried out" (Verne and Tone 2016, p. 519) and should be conceived of as work. Kane et al. (2018) report similar findings quoting one of the welfare advisors they interviewed: “looking for work is a full-time job" (Kane et al. 2018, p. 24).

Our analysis reveals that unemployed clients engage in work-like tasks when using digital self-services. These tasks are small and fragmented, leading clients to perceive minimal connection between the various services they use and the work they perform. This perceived lack of coherence results in the work being seen as not particularly meaningful. Moreover, clients often feel that they are fulfilling these tasks primarily for the benefit of the WA, driven by concerns about the potential consequences of non-compliance. While some tasks are recognized for their direct benefits — such as completing and submitting the Report Card, which results in financial benefits being disbursed — other tasks appear less beneficial to the clients. For instance, the requirement to create a digital CV is met with confusion, as clients already possess personal CVs that they include with job applications. Similarly, the Activity Planner is perceived more as a tool for WA to monitor their compliance with the activity requirement than as an aid to their job search efforts. Despite these issues, our findings indicate that the digital self-service solutions provided are generally easy and effective to use. Clients appreciate the convenience and accessibility of information and documentation related to their cases, which these digital self-services and platforms offer. This ease of access is highly valued, even if the overall perception of the meaningfulness of the work remains low.

Building on Parker and Gudela (2022), we argue that for work to be experienced as meaningful and useful, the tasks should be varied, complex, and appropriately challenging, enabling people to use their skills to carry out work tasks. Furthermore, they argue that the work tasks should be experienced as holistic and meaningful to the work process. Our interpretation is, therefore, that the young clients do not experience their work tasks as meaningful. Furthermore, they do not see their different tasks as a coherent set of work tasks (Parker and Gudela 2022). For example, the design of the Activity Planner is, in essence, a Kanban board, which is designed to make visible the activities of team members in a project group and provide all team members with an overview of which work tasks are currently being carried out, which are already done and which are planned for the future (Ahmad et al. 2018). Our findings show that young clients experience the Activity Planner mainly as a tool for advisors to gain control over their activities, and few have used the Kanban-like functionality the way it is intended. Seen as a means for their advisors to keep track of their activities, the clients make sure to use it if they are directly instructed to because they fear sanctions such as WA discontinuing their financial benefits. However, the clients might have benefited from digital support in organizing their job-seeking activities — and perhaps also have learned digital skills they could benefit from in other contexts, such as reporting, planning, and coordination.

Along the same lines, Verne and Tone (2016) argue that the tools that citizens use when doing work-like chores should “support an understanding of the larger system so that the single tasks get their meaning and significance" (Verne and Tone 2016, p. 528). A similar argument is made by Parker and Gudela (2022), who contend that jobs should consist of a holistic set of tasks that feel worthwhile, and by Sennett (1998, 2008), emphasizing the importance of meaningful work in order to be motivated to do the work. Research on work design has shown that well-designed jobs make good use of workers’ skills while consisting of “varied, meaningful tasks", i.e., a variety of tasks that balance complexity, variety, and use of skills (Parker and Gudela 2022; Parker 2014). An interesting paradox is that Boulus-Rødje (2018) finds that the digital tools are experienced as fragmented for the case workers as well and that the tools are mostly used for administrative tasks, while they receive little digital support for the content of their work, namely to help unemployed to find work. Similarly, the digital tools for the young unemployed do not give support for the content of their work to find work.

We see our study of unemployed youths doing self-service work as a case of leaving a fragmented set of tasks to the clients, making the work tasks appear incoherent and inconsequential. The clients experience their tasks as part of an agenda set by WA to control and monitor their activities. The digital self-services do not fit the unemployed youths’ current situation, and they find the tasks exhausting and chore-like. Looking for work can be tiresome and feel risky, and is not always as systematic a process as indicated by the design of the Activity Planner. Inspired by Bowker and Susan (2000), our point here is that the categories for activities suggested in the Activity Planner are not stable but fluid, emerging and dynamic, and highly sensitive to timing and circumstance — and luck, in particular for young citizens with little or no work experience. The unemployed youths that we have interviewed need online tools that can support them in learning how to proceed to become employed — if possible — and in understanding enough of the pathway to employment that they recognize that they have some progress and that they also have some space for action and choice. A tool that can lower the threshold of certainty could help stimulate and manage ideas for new workplaces to check out or contact as a process they feel that they own themselves instead of being controlled by the WA.

In studies of similar public digital self-services, Verne (2015) and Verne and Tone (2016) suggest that the citizens should receive brief updates about what the public administration does with their data to foster a better understanding of the public service itself. Learning the process and where one’s case stands in it can help to understand where it will make a difference to provide more information or make an appeal. Verne (2015) suggests that a public administration “ can provide confirmation and receipts that will increase the citizen’s understanding of the processes involved” (Verne 2015, p. 100). We will make a similar suggestion for the WA’s follow-up on the young unemployed. They have little or no previous experience with working life or public administrations and may benefit from learning when they have a choice of activities and a space for action (Bratteteig and Guri 2012a; Bratteteig and Guri 2012b). Understanding how an activity can be a part of the larger pathway or “trajectory” (Strauss 1985) can make the work task more meaningful for the young unemployed. The pathway to employment should show them their progress and increased levels of competence — increasing their motivation to the path forward (Sennett 2008).

We suggest that the notion of “trajectory" developed by Corbin and Anselm (1988) can be useful for thinking about a course of actions and events leading to a different situation. Corbin and Anselm (1988) coined the term to describe illness trajectories, and we can see the idea of a trajectory used, e.g., in hospitals’ presentations of treatment of cancer. We suggest using the concept of trajectory as a way to demonstrate progress and build skills for the unemployed youth. The trajectory has phases and an endpoint, which also could help motivate attending “chore-like" activities. Research on tools that can support disadvantaged job-seekers similarly highlights the need for people to understand their pathway towards employment (Dillahunt and Alex 2019). We suggest that digital self-services, in addition to providing clients with an easy way to report administrative information, should be designed to give clients a better understanding of the work tasks they carry out and the role these tasks play in their overall case progression. This understanding could increase the clients’ motivation to carry out the work tasks, if the tasks are actually experienced as useful to them.

Unemployment amongst youths is a complex societal issue that will not disappear with better-designed services. However, we argue that as public administrations keep digitalizing their services by means of introducing digital self-services, we should open for a discussion on the limitations of digital self-service and the role that self-service should have in the larger context of public welfare. Our analysis suggests that while clients may find digital self-services easy to use, they do not necessarily find them useful to help them in their situation. On the other hand, relational work activities are, to a greater extent, experienced as useful and motivating. We suggest that public administrations, to a greater extent, should distinguish between what administrative work the client does in order for the administration to be able to do its work and what is intended to help and support the client on their way forward. For example, we argue that the Activity Planner used in WA can be seen as a tool that is primarily experienced as a way of controlling what the clients do, but the planner’s functionality is disguised as a tool that the clients benefit from using to find a job. The work done with the Activity Planner was not perceived as useful for the clients — rather, it was experienced as coercion. Public administrations need clients’ input to efficiently and correctly assess their needs and claims to financial benefits and services. Digital self-services whose input is used for this should be presented in a way that mirrors this purpose.

Our analysis shows that there are two different kinds of social aspects that affect the youths’ experiences with WA: contact with the advisor and meeting other unemployed youths. Research has pointed out the front-line workers’ vital role in how clients navigate the bureaucratic (and unfamiliar) system (Borchorst et al. (2012); Dolata et al. (2020)). Young clients who have little experience of both working life and WA typically do not “master the game", i.e., they do not “understand their own and the municipal caseworker’s role, the objects of work they refer to, and the obligations that adhere to these" (Borchorst et al. 2009, p. 183). Young clients, therefore, often depend on good help from their advisors to understand WA and its opportunities.

For the clients, the relationship with their advisor is essential for their experience of feeling that they are assessed correctly and get adequate follow-up. These clients may experience the relationship with their advisors as a personal relationship with a responsible adult: they may not have (had) many adults to lean on — enabling them to address experiences of difficult things in life. At the same time, the relationship with the advisor is felt to be important for how their case is assessed. For example, it is important for the clients that the advisors believe them when they tell about the challenges they experience (such as mental health) and use this information to make good decisions for their case (such as which activation measures to participate in). Therefore, having a close relationship with their advisor is important for these young clients, as well as having regular face-to-face meetings so that they feel that their situation is assessed correctly. When young clients experience having a close relationship with their advisor, it is easier to open up about challenges they experience, which is important for deciding on what kind of follow-up they should receive. A concrete example is Dan, who, in a meeting with his advisor, felt that the advisor understood why it was difficult for him to stay at work and suggested that he should seek help for social anxiety.

In addition, we find that feeling like part of a larger social community can also be important for how young people experience the follow-up and how well they enjoy the various activities that they participate in. Many studies of young people’s motivation to engage in studies or work show that the social community is crucial and may even be the most important reason to engage (e.g., Senter (2023)). The social part of the follow-up is not really a part of the self-services, but research on other vulnerable people and low-resource job seekers suggests that social media communities, e.g., on Facebook, where people can create communities with other people in a similar situation, is highly appreciated (Dillahunt and Joey 2020; Ashkanasy et al. 2009).

Earlier CSCW research has argued that “the disparity between who does the work and who gets the benefit" (Grudin 1988, p. 86) is a crucial aspect of how successful a digital system will be. In line with Grudin (1988), Borchorst and Susanne (2011) contend that “the tension between contribution and benefit, who sows and who reaps, may change and develop over time" (Borchorst and Susanne 2011, 184). They argue that in the context of public service, time is an important factor: some of our interactions with public institutions tend to be very seldom and very short (like renewing one’s passport) while other interactions are long-lasting and develop over time (like our cases). “In these instances, citizens’ incentives for engaging in collaborative activities with government and investing time in deciphering bureaucratic intricacies increase" (Borchorst and Susanne 2011, p. 184). Our findings suggest that clients perceive the work they do with digital self-service tools not as part of a cooperative effort but rather as mechanisms for control by the WA. As such, they only experience the relational work as cooperative — not the administrative work. This perception may stem from clients’ lack of awareness regarding the usefulness of their activities. We propose that numerous tasks conducted via digital self-service could be beneficial to clients if they comprehend the underlying objectives and recognize the potential for skill transferability to other (work) environments. These activities resemble tasks commonly carried out in various professional contexts, such as reporting, time management, planning, and goal-setting. The primary issue lies in the clients’ limited recognition of benefits beyond the convenience of avoiding WA office visits and maintaining an overview of their documents. We find that young WA clients value the easy access and overview granted by digital self-service. Hence, we argue that digital services may be beneficial rather than digital self-service. An alternative approach to service development for younger WA clients may contribute to uncovering the needs they have without the need for extensive knowledge of WA and its inner workings.

Mills (2000) argues that often, problems considered personal troubles are best understood as public issues. Personal troubles are typically problems where the individual gets the blame, while public issues are embedded in how society is rigged and concern many individuals. Mills (2000) coined the term sociological imagination to refer to the ability to appreciate the societal and structural basis for individual problems. We suggest that Mills (2000)’s classical notion is useful for seeing the unemployed youths and their relations to the WA in the larger societal context. This perspective does not, however, make things easier but suggests that the unemployed youths’ situation is a wicked problem (Rittel 1973): a complex societal issue that has no definitive problem formulation and where there is no single solution — or even no way to tell if the problem is solved. A wicked problem is an incomplete, contradictory, and changing condition of a complex set of entangled problems — each of them possibly a wicked problem in itself or a symptom of another (wicked) problem.

A strategy for solving a wicked problem is a collaborative approach: “to make those people who are being affected into participants of the planning process. They are not merely asked but actively involved in the planning process" (Rittel 1973, p. 394) in line with a Participatory Design approach (see, e.g., Bohøj et al. (2010) and Grudin (1988)). A participatory approach to (re-)designing the service can be a way to address the wicked problem and create an effective service tailored to its target group. We suggest that a participatory design process could result in a better understanding of “the complexity of service provision and the tensions resulting from caseworkers dual role as counselors and bureaucrats, the multiplicity of actors and their potentially conflicting actions, as well as the different approaches of citizens to information sharing" (Bratteteig and Ina 2016, p. 144).