Legitimating collaboration, collaborating to legitimate: Justification work in “holistic” services for long-term unemployed persons

Magnus Paulsen Hansen*, Signe Elmer Christensen, Peter Triantafillou

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Abstract

To address complex social problems, such as long-term unemployment, local authorities in many countries are developing “holistic” or “integrated” services, where multiple actors and professions collaborate with a view to better meet the needs of the individual citizen. By breaking with existing practices and regulations, collaborative services must be legitimized in new ways so as to appear acceptable not only in the eyes of the public and politicians, but also to caseworkers and the long-term unemployed persons. This article examines the multifarious and sometimes neglected efforts to make these collaborative services legitimate in the eyes of this plurality of stakeholders on multiple levels of governance. Our study indicates three distinct but mutually interrelated spheres of audience that require partly conflicting justification work. We also find that the narrow pursuit of justification work to ensure legitimacy with one audience may potentially jeopardize the justification work in the other two.
Original languageEnglish
JournalJournal of Social Policy
Volume53
Issue number3
Pages (from-to)876-896
Number of pages21
ISSN0047-2794
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 12 Jul 2024

Keywords

  • collaborative governance
  • legitimacy
  • justification
  • long-term unemployment
  • Denmark

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