Holistic analysis and wicked problems: social work with service users in vulnerable situations at Danish job centers

This paper addresses how social workers handle making holistic analyses of complex social situations in a specific context of Danish job centres where the policy of activation is significant. Like many of the emerging challenges in contemporary social work, unemployment among service users in vulnerable situations is a wicked problem in modern welfare states. According to the IFSW, ‘The holistic focus of social work is universal, but the priorities of social work practice will vary from one country to the next’. The general Danish theory on holistic focus is very abstract and difficult to use in practice in engagement with individual service users. The practice methods are inspired by rationalistic decision-making processes and are clear about how to gather information and make descriptions but very non-specific about how to move from descriptions to holistic analysis. The study is based on interviews with social workers about how to make professional judgements in their work with social assistance recipients with multiple social problems who find themselves in a complex social situation. The study shows that holistic analysis in practice does not follow a rationalistic decision model. The analysing process is situational and concrete and appears when several relevant institutional elements emerge at the same time. The analysis supports that social work with wicked problems calls for a stronger focus on reflective practice.