ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses public encounters between unemployed persons and employment officials at Danish employment offices. It provides a summary of some of the findings in a detailed comparative study of 32 action plan talks and to demonstrate the combination of research methods used. The chapter introduces the study of encounters at employment offices between unemployed members of unemployment insurance funds and employment officials, implementing the activation goals in the Danish labour market reform from 1994 through talks about individual action plans. It combines quantitative and qualitative methods and considers some of the methodological problems in studying talk-in-interaction in institutional settings. The chapter focuses on the style of the official part in the encounter, each employment official being a case of public service delivery or street-level bureaucracy in action. Most research in welfare state and social work problems has been on a macro- or meso-level and/or has focused on alienation and clientification rather than involvement and participation of the citizens/users/clients.
