Personalised activation: promises, practices, tensions

Abstract

Personalisation has become an important policy aspiration, in Norway and other welfare states. As a guiding motif of policy development, personalisation holds promise for renewal of welfare through enabling flexible and diversified services that bridge the gap between socio-economic disadvantage and emancipation. In activation policies, (policies that aim to support welfare claimants into paid work), personalisation has gained clout as narrative, strategy and instrument of reform, whose promise of holistic experiences of job-seeking and improved job outcomes, is hard to refute.

Despite the current enthusiasm around personalisation in welfare policy, this thesis’ starting point is that personalisation can only be grasped as a concept in a process of becoming. The promise of personalisation can therefore rarely be understood outside the concrete policy contexts in which it unfolds. This thesis aims to explore personalisation in the context of activation. Two knowledge gaps motivate the inquiry.

First, current studies of personalisation in activation are fragmented, either theorising personalisation at a considerable distance to practice and concrete relationships or dwelling on the activities and relations between frontline workers and citizens within personalisation processes. This fragmentation creates a knowledge gap regarding how personalisation as policy idea connects to the contingencies of activation institutions, how it transforms and is transformed in practice, and the tensions this may engender. Resulting from the first gap, there is little crossfertilisation in terms of analytical frameworks with regard to studies of personalisation within activation. I argue that this leaves us with a weak knowledge base, regarding how the potential and pitfalls of personalisation as reform idea can be conceptualised and understood.

This study intervenes in this gap, first, by combining macro analyses of personalisation and micro processes on the activation frontline. Secondly, by studying personalisation through three analytical lenses: as innovation idea, as street-level practice, and as policy discourse. The following research question guides the study:

How does personalisation unfold in Norwegian activation policy?

The study adopts an exploratory design, combining observations, interviews and document analyses to explore practices and discourses related to personalised activation. The personalised activation measure of Extended Follow-up (Arbeid med støtte) implemented by the Norwegian Labour and Welfare administration (Nav) provides an empirical basis for the study. This is combined with an analysis of selected national policy papers on activation. The analysis results into three papers that, together with the kappa, form the main body of this thesis.

Paper I, (Skjold & Munkejord, 2023), investigates how personalisation unfolds as collaborative innovation idea at the frontline of Nav. The paper identifies tensions between module-based and adaptive strategies to personalisation. The paper argues that these tensions can be rendered productive through ‘autonomy binding structures’ that enable street-level workers to exercise flexibility within the institutional set up of Nav.

Paper II (Skjold & Lundberg, 2024) zooms in on tensions between personalisation and accountability. The paper conceptualises accountability as practices and behaviours of account-giving. It shows that through account-giving, frontline workers reconnected their practices of personalisation to accountability demands. This at times enabled them to contest and reframe boundaries of recognised practice, in their search for employment solutions for jobseekers.

Paper III (Skjold, 2025) zooms out and asks which unemployment problems personalisation seeks to solve. Anchored in a discourse theoretical framework, three distinct problematisations of unemployment are identified: demand, supply and support. While personalisation through demand and supply is focussed on individualbased interventions, the support discourse reorients personalisation towards systemic failures. The three frames have overlapping institutional layers, imbued with inherent tensions between aspirations of empowerment through support, and goals of rapid work transition.

From these findings, this thesis contributes three modest insights to our understanding of personalisation in activation:

First, it reveals the tensions created by the mismatch between the cognitive and the institutional aspects of personalisation within Norwegian activation. The thesis shows that while frontline workers were crucial to personalisation, their ability to personalise services was contingent on political steering of personalisation. Yet, when political directives combined unlimited follow-up with strict timelines, and relationship building with rigid performance metrics, the goals of personalisation became largely subordinate to those of activation.

Secondly, by adopting diverse analytical frameworks, the study contributes to an analysis of personalisation that does not unilaterally frame it as a good. Navigating from an innovation lens to a post-structural lens reveals the contingency of personalisation on existing ideational and institutional contexts of activation. By doing so, personalisation becomes a necessary but insufficient condition for activating the long-term unemployed. This line of inquiry potentially opens room to reconnect to normative debates regarding paid employment as an uncontested precondition for a functioning welfare state.

Lastly, this study contributes to reconnecting innovation to its social and relational roots, and away from neo-Schumpeterian conceptions of economic productivity. To study personalisation as innovation idea recentres the social as the location of action whose end point is open, contested and political.