Audit Culture and the Case Worker: A Study of the Public Employment Service and the Social Insurance Agency

This project studies the organizational governance of caseworkers in the Swedish Public Employment Service and the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, focusing in particular on audit culture and what it does to the organization and the individual in the organization. What are the implications of these forms of governance for the caseworkers and their experiences at work? The project combines different data sources, such as interviews with management at all levels in the two agencies and with caseworkers in several local offices, policy documents and organizational routines, in combination with ethnographic observations by shadowing caseworkers in their daily work (excluding direct client encounters). Comparing the two agencies also enables us to see if and how audit culture plays out differently in different welfare bureaucracies.