Observing the untold stories about digital behavior

Sammanfattning: The Danish social workers in the Job Centers holds the key to shaping the public policy, at the frontline. The way they choose to facilitate their tasks practicing digital tools impacts the client’s security and how the profession is being shaped. Policies reforms regarding digital tools aim at providing efficiency for the work processes and actively ensure the clients' legal rights. Polices are found to be interpreted differently on a street-level, contrary to the aim on a policy-level. In this research, the aim is to explore how the individual social worker, according to their behavior differently, use the digital tools within their discretionary power to solve their tasks and explore how those choices are affecting the client interaction. Qualitative inductive research design has been applied combined with the autoethnographic method to be able to observe the untold social workers' stories. The theoretical lens is based on Lipsky’s street-level bureaucracy theory to understand the social workers' behavior derived from the observations. The data shows that the social workers consider the client to be their primary focus in all tasks. According to the social workers, lack of training and missing clarification of the aim of introducing digital tools can undermine their professionalism and is interpreted as an alienating distrust of their discretionary actions coming from the managers. The social workers, who are choosing not to use digital tools can be perceived as a negative towards the introduction of digital tools and change. In conclusion, the lack of proper communication between social workers and managers can hurt the client’s legal rights. It can create ineffectiveness of case processing instead of supporting the social worker towards an evidence-based discretionary practice based on professionalism rather than personal attitudes. This research can contribute to deepening the understanding of why social workers choose different actions. Finally, the observations have shown that. More effort should be put into more transparent communication. If this doesn’t happen, the digital tools can instead of support and secure the profession end up becoming a disservice to the profession.