Good Clients and Hard Cases: The Role of Typologies at the Welfare Front Line

Frontline staff play a critical role in welfare-to-work delivery, making decisions about who gets selected for which supports and sanctions. Research on these street-level bureaucrats shows them rarely implementing policy exactly as written. Instead, they bring differing valuation frames and identity assessments to this work, resulting in different implementations of policy. Central to this selectivity is the way they type and classify different clients’ characteristics. Using case data from four Australian employment services sites collected over 18 months of fieldwork, we explore how frontline staff members sort clients according to two important dimensions of their perceived conduct: job readiness as workers and trustworthiness as people. We examine the staff’s rationale and the implications of these categorization practices for how clients are treated.