Assembling the case: Citizens' strategies for exercising authority and personal autonomy in social welfare

Abstract

This study examines caseworkers' and citizens' interactions when assembling resource development applications for citizens with serious health and personal issues. As with other types of welfare schemes, the application serves as a mechanism of both support and control. From our study, we illustrate how an increased reliance on data is transforming the citizen-caseworker interaction in social welfare. We characterize this transformation as 'datafication': a phenomenon where the increased reliance on data for decision-support across contexts of data production makes it challenging for individual citizens to contest or correct data-born accounts of their situation. Our contribution is two-fold: first, we empirically characterize the citizen-caseworker interaction in the application process. Second, we discuss how citizens' private resourcing complements the formal application process and provides them with strategies to give authority to their case and exercise personal autonomy. The private resourcing practices we observed show how integrating supplementary accounts from citizens into the systems that caseworkers rely on could make citizens' experiences and social context legible. This in turn has policy and technology design implications as public services increasingly introduce data-driven modes of case management.