Changing frameworks

Considering the increasing speed of reforms, re-organizations, new legislation and increasing demands to social work services in the Nordic countries, one could claim that changing frameworks and organizational reconfiguration have become a permanent condition – rather than the exception – for many services. In the daily lives of these services, managers, social workers and ultimately service users have to adjust to changing political winds, new programme and legislation (Vohnsen 2017; Bjerge and Rowe 2017; Bjerge and Bjerregaard 2017; Bason 2010; Hill 2002; Christensen 2017; Thedvall 2017; Krause-Jensen 2017). Reform and modernization programme serve many purposes in the sense that they are not only set up to, e.g. adjust specific services to changing societal frameworks such as demography, economy, new knowledge and technology. They also function as ways in which politicians and administrators try to flag visions and foresightedness and influence the development of the public sector. Further, reforms are often such an unquestionable part of the development that they have become a routine, and being opposed to reforms is often considered old-fashioned, irrational and reactionary (Brunsson and Olsen 1997). However, one thing is how reforms, reorganizations, modernization and reconfigurations are represented officially in policies, guidelines and legislation, another thing is what happens in the local context where such initiatives are given life on a daily basis. Research emphasizes the importance of social workers ́ (as well as other public employees) cooperation holds in regards to implementing changes and reforms (Lipsky 1980; deLeon and deLeon 2002; Meyer and Rowan 1977). Therefore, this issue of NSWR presents a collection of articles that in one way or another feed into discussions of what changing frameworks mean for the working conditions of social workers, for how they navigate services, as well as how changes influence the services they deliver. Thorsten Braun & Anders Bøggild Christensen ́s article, Implementation of the 2014 reform of social assistance at job centres – categoring of young clients, analyses a much-debated reform on social assistance within the Danish employment field. One of the key elements of this policy was to find new strategies towards youth unemployment by introducing new categories of clients, which has left discretion very central to the reform. Analysing interviews from two job centres, the authors explore how different kinds of organizational adaptation to the reform can be linked to differences in frontline categorizations. Braun & Christensen conclude among other things a.o. that an implementation context characterized by paradigmatic implementation tends to categorize more young clients as ‘ready for education’, whereas this is not the case for incremental implementation. Despite the fact that caseworkers are influenced by the organization they work in, there is some room for individual discretion. In the article by Tommy Lundström, Marie Sallnäs & Emelie Shanks ́, Stability and change in the field of residential care for children. On ownership structure, treatment ideas and institutional logics, the authors demonstrate many changes that the field of residential care for children in Sweden has been subject to. Focusing on changes in ownership structure that took place in the 2010s, the authors relate these to shifts in treatment and institutional logics. Drawing on data from the national register of residential care units and websites of privately run residential care units, the article note that today, 80% are run by private companies and to a growing extent by large for-profit corporations. This goes hand in hand with a development from small-scale establishments with a ‘family logic’, to large-scale establishments with a ‘professional logic’, that is from a domination of small family-run units with milieu therapy to big business and a focus on evidence-based NORDIC SOCIAL WORK RESEARCH 2020, VOL. 10, NO. 1, 1–4 https://doi.org/10.1080/2156857X.2020. 1699313