ABSTRACT
Throughout the western world during the last few decades, substantial transformations have changed the nature of human services in general and of social policy in particular. Neoliberal organizational reforms such as privatization, etc., have supported a marketization of social service organizations; as a result, their most important task today is to make dependent clients independent as quickly as possible. In Denmark as in the majority of western countries, neoliberalism has affected the welfare model. The first coping strategy found in the data is resignation, which is characterized by the claimants as a stage during their unemployment trajectory when they have given up their attempts to live up to the current norms proscribing how they should behave. Adjustment strategy corresponds to a stage in the claimants' unemployment trajectory where they feel insecure about what is happening and what is supposed to happen and where they experience their situation as frozen with them unable to see their options to change it.
