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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2022

MAGNUS PAULSEN HANSEN ,
SIGNE ELMER CHRISTENSEN  and
PETER TRIANTAFILLOU Open the ORCID record for PETER TRIANTAFILLOU [Opens in a new window]
MAGNUS PAULSEN HANSEN*
Affiliation:
Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, 4000 Roskilde – Denmark emails: mapaha@ruc.dk; triant@ruc.dk
SIGNE ELMER CHRISTENSEN
Affiliation:
Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, 4000 Roskilde – Denmark emails: mapaha@ruc.dk; triant@ruc.dk
PETER TRIANTAFILLOU
Affiliation:
Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, 4000 Roskilde – Denmark emails: mapaha@ruc.dk; triant@ruc.dk
*
Corresponding author, email: mapaha@ruc.dk
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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.

Keywords

collaborative governancelegitimacyjustificationlong-term unemploymentDenmark
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , July 2024 , pp. 876 - 896
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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