This thesis study is about how social workers who work in a municipal Labor Market Unit (LMU) for young people (16-29 years) interpret, transform, and use young people's biographies, that is, their experiences, desires, and living conditions, and how they form this to use as "material" in their daily work. This has been done through an ethnographic field study (about 4 months) of a LMU where the everyday work between social workers and young people has been examined through observations, recorded conversations, and interviews. Eight social workers practice in the organization and they meet approximately twohundred young people a year. The transformation of biography into (biographical) work material means that social workers request, use and transform parts of young people's biographies to fulfill the organization's mission. This means, for example, transforming young people's competencies and experiences into a CV, personal letter, and how young people present themselves to facilitate access to the labor market. Since young people in these types of activities often do not have formal skills, there is an extended effort to shape them into employable individuals (Garsten & Jacobsson, 2004b). It is the task of human service organizations to contribute to this process and the thesis studies how this is done based on the social worker's organizational conditions (Hasenfeld, 2010).Organizational conditions are defined in the thesis as policy requirements and the concrete resources that social workers have available in everyday life to conduct their work.
LMUs for young people are often aimed at young people who are far from the labor market, and they contain several different working methods that will provide support for young people to develop and get closer to the labor market. The municipal labor market unit should complement the state by finding local solutions and reducing the use of income support for those who are outside the state's general compensation systems (Nybom, 2012). Ever since the economic crisis in the 1990s, which drove up youth unemployment, these units have been an actor in managing the situation of young people, among others (Hornemann Møller & Johansson, 2009). Nybom (2012) show that LMUs since the 1990s are in a second generation where demands for activation are mixed with the importance of different government agencies working together and a certain adaptation to the individual is advocated. The LMUs, which were previously often located in unsuitable premises, often on the outskirts of communities, have gradually been modernized and moved closer to the center, gaining a more professionalized organization, with clearer working methods and appearance (Panican & Ulmestig, 2019). But LMUs are still characterized by politicized decisions, and a scattered knowledge base where those who work in these activities have a heterogeneous educational background (Hagelund, 2016). Common to these types of initiatives is that they are required to strive to activate young people. Activation means that the unemployed need to actively demonstrate that they are seeking work and participating in initiatives, and this is then linked to financial compensation, control, or persuasion. Crespo and Serrano Pascual (2004) say that policy descriptions of activation contain contradictions. On the one hand, the individual's freedom and self-determination must be considered, while the individual must accept the prevailing conditions in the labormarket and adapt to them. Bonoli (2013) shows that the state should be an active player, while citizens are encouraged to be active players who take responsibility for their situation. The active refers to the active citizen who is expected to be reflexive, flexible, and mobile to adapt to today's labour market (Dahlstedt, 2009).The individual should move to where work is available, retrain if necessary and accept low-wage work. If the individual is not active in changing and adapting to changes in the labour market, the repressive systems come into play, and these involve discipline, or external rewards, and are intended to prevent the individual from becoming passive. Taking an 'active' approach to the future then becomes not only an opportunity but also a condition for citizens to benefit from society's resources. By shifting the responsibility with a focus on the individual downwards and the associated governance system, the social worker must also show others that they can activate young people, which is then called double activation (McGann, 2021). In parallel with the development of activation and the work line in policy documents, there is also an increased interest in policy documents in personalizing and involving the individual in work (Caswell m.fl., 2017; Julkunen m.fl., 2007;Newman, 2007; Valkenburg, 2007). See also (SOU 2017:19; SOU 2018:11; SOUix2018:12). Personalizing and involving the individual in the work should be understood as an intention to adopt the intervention concerning the individual's needs and entire life situation. This means that there should be cooperation with users regarding the efforts needed for the transition to the labor market (Valkenburg, 2007). These dual requirements create institutional tensions in the organization as they can be difficult to reconcile. The idea is to work with young people based on their needs and at the same time be able to offer opportunities for work and education. The overall focus of the thesis is how social workers deal with these tensions by examining how young people's biographies are processed by social workers.
Purpose and questions
The purpose of the thesis is to describe and understand how social workers,who work in a Labour Market Unit for young people, interpret and use youngpeople's experiences and desires in alignment with organizational conditions. The following research questions are examined:
1. How are the activities organized and what categorization of the young people's biographies emerges?
2. What characterizes the interaction between social workers and young people when young people's experiences and desires are actualized and what does this mean for the social worker's work?
3. What strategies emerge when social workers deal with conditions and dilemmas in working with young people?
Background and previous research
LMUs exist today in all municipalities and affect about 100,000 participants of allages, of which 25,000 are younger than twenty-five. About 5200 employees are working within LMUs (SKR, 2020). LMUs in Sweden are located between labormarket policy and social policy measures (Salonen, 2009; Salonen & Ulmestig,2004). Municipal labor market policy is not statutory or significantly regulated butx is linked to general statements in the Social Services Act that "the municipality shall ensure good living conditions" (2001:453). The Unemployment Board Act of 1944 gives a certain competence to act and must exist in every municipality (1944:475). Since 1995, there is also a requirement that people receiving income support must be actively seeking work and be available to the labor market, and LMUs can be used for these purposes. If there is a requirement for financial compensation via social services (SFS 2001:453), the measure must be skills enhancing. According to Thorén (2008), this cannot always be achieved. Through the municipal activation responsibility (KAA), Chapter 29. 9 § school legislation (SFS 2010:800), local education policy is also involved. Since 2015, the municipality must keep itself informed of which young person under the age of twenty who do not attend upper secondary school and who have not completed an upper secondary education, and these must be actively offered help. Even if the young people say no to support at initial contact, "the work [...] must be adapted on the basis that young people may initially decline an intervention, but later accept it" (Swedish National Agency for Education website), which indicates that the municipality must actively and repeatedly seek out these young people. The young people should be offered appropriate individual measures such as motivational and study-oriented talks, collaboration with other actors, or transitions to other forms of study or work. The work should as far as possible be based on the young person's conditions, needs, and wishes (Prop2013/14:191). The argumentation in the policy describes KAA as a form of social investment in that young person who complete upper secondary school are also included in society to a greater extent. The rhetoric is like the activation discourse presented above.The research that has studied the effects (access to the labor market, changes inincome) of these types of activities suggests that they fail to any great extent (Giertz, 2009), nor do they provide any clear answers as to which interventions may be useful. It is most difficult for groups that are far from the labor market. For these groups, stricter requirements do not seem to be the solution, but rather to make room for the participants' life situations and needs and based on these, provide diverse types of support. These types of activities oscillate between two normative orientations. One model is called work first and involves a focus on participants quickly entering the labor market. The other model is called human resource development and is based on increasing the employability of individuals through broader initiatives such as training and personality development initiatives (Salonen, 2009). In the Swedish context, initiatives have been characterized by social work, which means that the second model has been given greater scope compared with initiatives in Central Europe and the USA (Jewell, 2007). Research that focuses on how unemployed people are portrayed is often critical and argues that participants should be changed to an excessive extent according to organizations' requirements to develop into employable people in combination with sometimes meaningless activities (Panican & Ulmestig, 2019). Users' voices are not heard, and participation is often conditioned to financial incentives. However, there are studies, mainly those that analyze interaction, which suggests that it is possible to balance the compelling tasks of these organizations with the unique life situation of individual users. Research on frontline bureaucrats shows that they have several strategies at their disposal, that they usemoral work, i.e., they assess the moral value of users, which forms the basis for the work to be carried out (van Berkel m.fl., 2017).
Theory
To analyze how social workers in a LMU for young people interpret and use young people's biographies to organizational conditions, the thesis uses theories mainly based on organizational theories from Hasenfeld (1972, 1983, 2000, 2010) and interactionist theories from Goffman (1974, 1978, 1983). These are used to focus on the professional as a frontline bureaucrat (Lipsky, 1980 [2010]) in Human Service Organizations and the dual position professionals find themselves in between organizational interests on the one hand and the user's interests and needs on the other, and how this institutional tension is managed through different strategies, roles, and activities. From organizational theory, concepts such as categorization and people-processing are used to understand that human care organizations have procedures for both determining which people should be admitted to the organization as well as preparing them for the next step. This means that young people's biographies are valued and processed to become appropriate work material according to the technologies and purposes of the organization. But young people are not seen in the thesis as passive but can appear in diverse ways to the social workers and in this way, the categorization work is seen as an ongoing process where there is mutual expectation of the other (Dahmen, 2021). Organizations have their methods (technologies) that provide conditions and in themselves illuminate various aspects of the users' life situations. According to Hasenfeld, human care organizations can both process,change and try to maintain the users' situation. The thesis also used the concept of practice ideology, which is the organization's (social workers' collective) understanding of how they should work (Hasenfeld, 1983). Lipsky (1980 [2010]) argues that social workers have the scope to implement policies concerning users' life situations. To analyze situations and interactions, Goffmann's concepts of inter action order, frames and backstage/frontstage (1974, 1983) are used. Interaction order means that the participants jointly try to create meaning and maintain situations according to the interpretation that forms the basis. Framing is about clarifying in analyzing the social rules that exist for how situations, roles and interactions should take place. Backstage and frontstage mean that social situations are seen to contain both formal roles/scenes as well as situations where participants can take a break and rest. Interactions are analyzed as institutional conversations which means that they have their specific roles, tasks, and power. The concept of communicative projects (Linell, 2011) is used to analyze interaction in terms of what social workers and young people want from each other and how they influence each other. Taken together, the theoretical concepts provide the opportunity to understand what LMUs organization in activities and spaces means, the patterns that emerge in the interaction between social workers and young people when biography is actualized, and finally the arguments and reflections that social workers have about working with young people between ideals and conditions.
Methodology
The thesis uses ethnographic methods (observations and interviews), and thefieldwork (about 4 months) was conducted at a municipal labor market unit, in the thesis called Navet, which is in a medium-sized municipality in Sweden. Eight social workers work there, and they meet about two hundred young people aged 16-29 every year. Within Navet there were several different groups with slightly different focuses, which contributed to a variation in working methods and activities that was fruitful in the analyses. The municipality is in many ways an average municipality in terms of unemployment, young people's education levels, and the financial resources spent on these types of initiatives. The empirical material consisted of observations (156 hours), informal and formal interviews (n 9) of social workers, recorded conversations between social workers and young people (415 minutes), and a small number of local policy documents were also analysed. The material was then analyzed in several diverse ways such as interaction analysis and coding. The approach of the field study was to be open to what goes on in these types of interventions, but still pay attention to how young people's biographies were actualized and shaped in different situations. The basis of the analyses was to arrange, reduce and finally organize and argue (Rennstam & Wästerfors, 2015). Field notes formed the basis for the analysis of Navet's various activities, spaces, and what young people's biographies were transxiiiformed into, which were then presented in the first results chapter. The recorded conversations were then analyzed according to conversation analysis-inspiredanalysis of content, how the conversations developed, and the communication patterns in what young people's biographies were embedded. This is presented in the second chapter. Finally, in the third chapter, an analysis of the interviews with the social workers was done with a focus on what they consider to be organizational conditions and the strategies they use to work with young people.The study is ethically approved.
Findings
The thesis shows that social workers, through various activities, process youngpeople's biographies into several diverse types of work material. Partly to employmentmaterial, which means transforming the young people's biographiesinto materials that are adapted for a labor market. Since young people's formalskills are often weak and the organization has difficulty providing real skills, thesocial workers process other parts of the individual. Secondly, through coaching,the young people's biography is processed into self-reflection material, whichmeans transforming the young people's biography into material that is adapted topersonal development. The third way in which the biography is transformed intoa relational and situational material means adapting biographies to materials thatwill work in the everyday activities that exist in the activities studied, such asbreakfast, breaks, and informal chatting in the middle of other activities. When itcomes to activities such as exercise, young people's bodies and lifestyles are alsohighlighted as a fourth material that creates conversations between young peopleand social workers. Finally, social workers are interested in young people's surrounding network, which becomes the fifth area where young people andsocial workers meet around experiences young people have. Another result in the thesis study is based on analyses of conversations between young people and social workers, where it appears that the conversations are shaped either according to a buy/sell logic where young people's desires control the process, or by a persuasive logic where the social worker in particular works in a desire of the young person. The conversations can also have a reasoning logic, which means that desires gradually emerge between social workers and young people. The results chapter of the thesis focuses on the conditions that exist in the work based on both starting from the young people's needs and situation and working with activation. Navet perceives three negative conditions that affect their work with young people:
The first is that Navet is dependent on other neighboring actors' work with the young people and that these actors have weak resources to provide the support that the young people are deemed to need. The second is that some young people are not compliant because they do not provide a biography about themselves that the social workers need to collaborate with them. This is considered to be because many of the young people have complex problems and are far from the labor market. Furthermore, it is described how the social workers try to manage and overcome these conditions by working relationally and responsively to bind young people to them, get them to stay, and make them want to share their biographies and be compliant with the availablemethods. There is also an effort to influence young people to adapt, and what prevents young people from participating in the activities is linked to neurological diagnoses.
Discussion
The concluding chapter discusses the ideal-typical professional roles used in LMUs based on the results of the thesis. The ideal-typical roles are the educator, whose role is to adapt young people to labour market policy norms; the semire presentative, whose task is to capture young people's concerns and try to transform them into support and initiatives; and finally, the carer's role of hosting young people who remain in the service over time. These three roles address the ideal of LMUs as places where young people are transformed into work/education, given support and care, and based on their wishes and life situation. However, an overall condition for LMUs is that they are not able to contribute to work and education to any great extent themselves, which creates a situation where they become dependent on other actors such as schools, healthcare, and the labor market. However, the social workers also perceive that these actors have weak resources to offer young people. These weak resources mean that some young people remain at Navet without being offered help, and this can be expressed by the social workers as working in a "vacuum land". But at the same time, social workers believe that they can give young people a lot by listening to them, reflecting on their life situation, and giving them a meaningful everyday life. This is referred to in the thesis as an "extended present". The thesis contributes to activation research through knowledge of what can happen in "vacuum land" situations that arise in LMUs. In previous research, these units are sometimes described as meaningless pastimes, while the thesis also shows that there are elements that can be considered meaningful activities for young people. The thesis shows that high demands are placed on social workers in these types of units as they work under conditions that are difficult to manage. The overall organizational condition is that these activities cannot contribute towork/education to a particularly significant extent and yet they need to deal with young people in difficult life situations. At the same time, there is a requirement for young people to be held individually responsible for becoming more employable. Social work in LMUs is very much about managing these conditions with the ideal of helping young people gain access to work based on their wishes and needs.