Compassionate responsibilisation in a neoliberal paternalistic homelessness system: ‘They’re not just numbers to me,I do actually care’

Abstract

Frontline workers in welfare systems are often understood as an ‘uncaring’ group, with their affective labour co-opted and reframed in terms of systemic efficiency. Yet they also operate at the frontlines of neoliberal paternalism, their work structured by encounters with extreme hardship, required to address this through ‘pedagogical interventions’ aimed at instilling a competitive, individualistic ‘self-care’ mindset in applicants. Approaching care as a universal need, an embodied practice, and a location of resistance to capitalism, I explore how actors at the frontlines of welfare governance mobilise care in their daily encounters with welfare subjects. Reporting upon 54 extended interviews with frontline workers within the post-2015 Welsh homelessness system, I argue that care is central to the operation of the neoliberal paternalistic welfare system, providing a motivation for workers to engender compliance with neoliberal paternalistic methods of governance. I illustrate this with the example of the Housing (Wales) Act 2014, drawing upon three findings. First, workers operate from a core caring sensibility, caring despite structural constraints. Second, responsibilisation is conceptualised as a strategy which, through its focus on individual empowerment, becomes one of care. Third, however, the focus of these interventions was performative, giving workers strategies to help clients fit into the system and thus increase the legibility of their deservedness. Thus responsibilisation, a technology associated with state abandonment of welfare subjects, was used by workers as a strategy to enable meaningful care in the context of the intense constraints of their role.

Introduction

In recent decades, poverty governance has become increasingly industrialised internationally, focused upon producing welfare applicant subjectivities, through technologies including behavioural conditionality, resilience/motivational training and empowerment (Fletcher & Flint, 2018; Flint, 2019; Schram et al., 2010). Intervening into the lives of poor citizens on the pretext of enabling them to develop self-reliance through becoming ambitious, responsibilised individuals has been justified as care (Allen et al., 2014; de la Bellacasa, 2012; Jensen, 2014). This relies upon an underlying assumption that ‘good’ welfare citizens are self-governing, making prudent economic and behavioural choices to move themselves away from state dependence, and reconstituting citizenship itself by making state assistance contingent upon (economic) productivity (Allen et al., 2014; Clarke & Newman, 2012; Cruikshank, 1999; Jensen, 2014; Newman, 2010). I here follow Larner (2003), understanding neoliberalism not as a monolithic inevitability but rather a diverse assemblage of practices which together normalise a market-focused approach to human need, and further the idea of human nature as fundamentally selfish, individualistic and uncaring.

Largely unconsidered, however, is the impact of legislative behavioural conditionality upon the daily (re)production of policy, practices and interpretations generating ‘living law’ (Hertogh, 2008) at the frontlines of welfare governance. Welfare bureaucracies are seldom seen as caring places. Indeed, a substantial body of research focuses upon them as uncaring: morally distant, homogenising and alienating locations (Auyero, 2011; Silver, 2010). This is of interest given the recent challenge mounted by Lynch et al. (2021), who argue that sociologists of injustice have overlooked the importance of care. This reflects a longstanding approach which understands affective relations as derivative, and hence deprioritised compared to class, wealth and power (see also de la Bellacasa, 2012; Lynch, 2007; Tronto, 2017). Conceptualising care as both an ‘ethical orientation and an action showing concern for others’ (Lynch et al., 2021, p. 57) (a working definition adopted in this article) the authors propose an instinctual practice of care and compassion to be fundamental to human existence and experience, operating in corollary to the universality of a need for care (Lynch et al., 2021; Tronto, 2017). Further, they suggest that care itself can be a resistive ballast to the hegemony of neoliberalism, arguing that the act of creating a space in which human interactions are valued irrespective of economic utility challenges the hegemonic normalisation of neoliberal understandings of human nature (Lynch et al., 2021; Tronto, 2017).

Street level bureaucrats (Lipsky, 2010) – frontline workers who apply high level policy and practice to specific applicants – are widely recognised as the ‘fulcrum’ of a modern neoliberal paternalistic welfare system (McDonald & Marston, 2005; Sauer & Penz, 2017; Schram et al., 2010). They translate overarching discourse – legislation, policy and normative practice – to the lives of those applying for state support. Yet their subject-positions have seldom been considered in terms of care. They have been understood largely as either complicit moralists, or disempowered and emotionally distanced from their clients (Alden, 2015; Bretherton et al., 2013; Gill, 2016; May et al., 2019).

I argue that care is central to the operation of neoliberal paternalistic welfare systems, motivating workers to engender compliance with neoliberal paternalistic methods of governance. I illustrate this using the Housing (Wales) Act 2014. The Act introduces both legislative conditionality and a requirement for extended casework provision to the Welsh statutory homelessness system. I propose that under the Act care provides a motivation for workers to engender compliance with neoliberal paternalistic methods of governance. I show that workers perceive their roles in terms of care, and subvert organisational constraints to provide care where necessary. Second, caring is complicated by the pressures of a neoliberal, competitive, housing market and the time-limited nature of their intervention. Third, workers understand acts associated with neoliberal welfare subjectification – empowerment, resilience, activation – as a necessary and often only, route to a caring approach for their clients: fitting them to the system becomes a mechanism to make them visibly deserving and hence eligible for help. I therefore argue that, although caring itself is a complex, morally ambiguous activity when entangled in poverty governance, it is also an intrinsic part of welfare encounters, and that affective care is increasingly integral to the daily practices of frontline workers in neoliberal paternalistic systems. The remainder of this article is structured as follows. First, I contextualise the study within two key literatures: an exploration of neoliberal paternalism as an increasingly apparent trend within welfare governance, and the role of emotion work within street level bureaucracy. I then outline the methodology, before presenting findings. Finally, I discuss how this visibilisation of the care practices of homelessness workers complicates Lynch et al.’s (2021) proposal that care can operate as a site of resistance to neoliberalism.

Neoliberal paternalism, work intensification, care and control

Schram et al. (2010) define ‘neoliberal paternalism’ as combining both a neoliberal privileging of market rationalities and a paternalistic conception of welfare subjects as requiring pedagogical intervention and direction; they regard it as an increasingly important feature of welfare governance over the last few decades (Schram et al., 2010; Whitworth, 2016). Neoliberal paternalism is individualistic, operating to responsibilise welfare subjects for their own wellbeing in the context of wider state withdrawal and consequent economic and social precarity through engendering an enterprising, competitive, autonomous construction of selfhood (Clarke, 2005; Clarke & Newman, 2012; Joseph, 2013; Lemke, 2002; McKee, 2011; Peck, 2001; Stonehouse et al., 2015). This justifies state interventions into the lives of welfare subjects through a rhetoric of care, proposing that previous state provision of support (particularly state housing and housing benefits to low income families) has created an ‘intergenerational worklessness’ (Jensen, 2014) based in an unrealistic infantilisation of welfare subjects enabled by a neglectful, indulgent, previous administration (see also Allen et al., 2014; Garthwaite, 2011; Tyler, 2013). In the UK, although the seeds of neoliberal paternalism can be traced back several decades, it has become particularly evident in the past 20 years, for instance in rhetoric surrounding the Welfare Reform Act 2012 (Fletcher & Wright, 2018).

Neoliberal paternalism understands welfare claimants as both currently deficient, through their lack of motivation and knowledge of how to act as neoliberal citizens, and yet potentially recoverable through the technology of empowerment (Clarke & Newman, 2012; Cruikshank, 1999; McKee, 2009). An empowerment approach justifies the re-creation of welfare-using subjects through a three-step approach. First, the applicant is encouraged to understand their economic disadvantage in individualistic terms, as both their own failing and a problem which, with the correct mindset and approach, and if they accept guidance from state authorities, can be overcome (Berger, 2009; McDonald & Marston, 2005; Sauer & Penz, 2017; Sweet, 2019). Second, the target of recuperation is the performance of an activated, motivated, economic subjectivity, in which the applicant must compete for precarious, casualised resources such as housing or low-paid employment (McDonald & Marston, 2005; Schram et al., 2010). Third, the relationship between impoverished individuals and the state becomes understood contractually, with welfare support not an entitlement arising from citizenship, but a reward for economic participation (Clarke & Newman, 2012; Sauer & Penz, 2017; Tronto, 2017).

Despite being conceptualised in terms of individual improvement, welfare subject empowerment operates within welfare systems in a highly structured and segmented manner. First, neoliberalism commodifies caregiving, understanding need and dependency in terms of service provision. Conceptualising bodily need (for instance, for shelter, warmth, sustenance) as problematic dependency allows systems to produce ‘care products’ (Hoppania & Vaittinen, 2015) – services, interventions and approaches which are not only generic and standardised (arising from an unease over the ‘fairness’ of care-based affect) but typically closely monitored, documented and surveilled (Mackie, 2014; Pulcini, 2017; Schram et al., 2010). Second, neoliberal paternalistic approaches rely heavily upon emotion work – the process of managing and producing specific feelings and affective states as part of employment (Hochschild, 2012) to produce self-governing, motivated, empowered individuals. Use of technologies of rapport and persuasion, along with careful management of visible authority, is associated with both responsibilisation and justification of pedagogical interventions – strategies to ensure that those receiving state support ‘understand their place within civil society and . . . learn about appropriate forms of behaviour’ (Jones, 2010, p. 728; see also Peck, 2001; Schram et al., 2010). Caseworkers must provide support and motivation, deploy empathy, engender trust and generate compliance, while simultaneously managing the boundaries of the encounter and maintaining distance (Hochschild, 2012; McDonald & Marston, 2005; Sauer & Penz, 2017). Third, empowerment of welfare subjects operates in the context of resource scarcity, requiring frontline workers to make prioritisation decisions among applicants. Empowerment alone, therefore, is not sufficient. It further requires legibility: applicants must correctly perform empowerment to be recognised competitively as the most appropriate recipient of time, assistance, referrals and material resources (Berger, 2009; Lidstone, 1994; Lipsky, 2010; Meyers, 2011; Sweet, 2019). Thus the system on the one hand requires care to operate, yet at the same time, this care has potential to operate as a source of resistance, by challenging the assumptions on which neoliberalism itself is based.

The Welsh homelessness system is of especial interest to developing an understanding of the practices of care among frontline welfare workers. The Housing (Wales) Act 2014 represented a significant shift in British homelessness provision. The Act itself understands as an injustice the lack of help offered to those who could self-solve in comparison to those requiring substantially greater ongoing intervention, reflecting a broader trend within the British homelessness and housing landscape toward questioning whether the previous system of a long-term right to state housing for those considered most vulnerable as a result of homelessness was an equitable option (Fitzpatrick & Pawson, 2014; Mackie, 2014). First, the Act considerably expands the amount of practical support and help offered, with all applicants eligible for an enhanced casework service underpinned by third-sector and in-house referral options. Second, it introduces behavioural conditionality: help is offered contingent upon an applicant not ‘unreasonably failing to co-operate’ with the Local Authority (Guidance to the Housing (Wales) Act s79 (5)). Underpinning the Act is a reformulation of homeless citizenship, from disempowered vulnerability, to potential activated home-seekers for whom a range of pedagogical interventions and incentivisation strategies are proposed, including bond schemes, mediation services and money management advice (Mackie, 2014). This approach contrasts sharply to the prior system, under which most applicants were eligible only for minimal ‘advice and assistance’ for a period of 28 days (Bevan, 2021; Browne Gott et al., 2021; E. England & Taylor, 2021; Fitzpatrick & Pawson, 2016).

Caring on the frontlines

Both to give and receive care has been argued to be a fundamental aspect of human nature (Crean, 2018; P. England, 2005; Fisher & Tronto, 1990; Gilligan, 2016; Kittay, 2011; Lynch et al., 2021). However, ‘care’ is also financialised through a process of professionalisation and outsourcing, with care-providing organisations, including the growing ‘shadow state’, having a vested interest in asserting the existence of certain needs, since it then justifies their (funded) intervention (INCITE! et al., 2007; Muehlebach, 2012). This produces paternalistic approaches which co-opt care into oppressive political agendas, and generate system gaps which recognise care needs selectively (Lynch et al., 2021). This approach recognises that caring itself can become folded into a neoliberal agenda, with techniques such as compassion and rapport becoming strategies which increase the effectiveness and reach of neoliberal paternalism (Muehlebach, 2012). Yet this approach also recognises that identities and expectations are continually made and re-made performatively. In encounters between state agents and individuals (Butler, 2002; Henderson et al., 2010), all actors are recognised as situated, bringing prior experience, expectations and knowledge to the encounter (May et al., 2019). The interactions between caseworkers and applicants are shaped and informed by legislation and policy but are not dictated by them (Lipsky, 2010). Further, government workers are well recognised not to be simply conduits of state narratives but rather operate to translate them to become relevant and applicable to specific local situations, increasing the reach of government discourse (Foucault, 1979). In these interactions, resistance is possible, even inevitable, creating spaces in which alternatives to neoliberalism exist, and even thrive (Bevir, 2010; Cruikshank, 1999; May et al., 2019).

Welfare workers have seldom been understood in terms of their care practices. Historically they have been seen as emotionally and morally distant and bureaucratically focused (Bretherton et al., 2013; Gill, 2016). However, in neoliberal paternalistic welfare systems, they are increasingly understood as manufacturers of artificial, commodified affect intended to produce and maintain ‘engagement’ of reluctant applicants, with the strategic deployment of ‘affective self-technologies’ (Bolton & Boyd, 2003; McDonald & Marston, 2005; Sauer & Penz, 2017). This embroils them in performativity: to generate high quality engagement, they must appear to care (Sauer & Penz, 2017). Yet emotional labour is not, typically, simply performative, but rather involves the production and enrolment of affect as part of the work done, with wider consequences for the experiences of emotion workers (Bolton & Boyd, 2003; Hochschild, 2012; Puentes, 2018). For instance, Bolton and Boyd (2003) observe that a consequence of providing emotion work, even in a highly commercialised setting, is the development of a sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of those toward whom emotion work is directed. This care exists despite the presence of financial recompense, undermining the ‘love and money’ (P. England, 2005) dichotomy which privileges uncompensated, ‘selfless’ and disproportionately gendered care.

Lynch et al. (2021) propose that a recognition of the radical, resistive potential of care expands sociologies of injustice beyond a focus on structural, economic and representational power inequalities and into an awareness of the importance of encounter and affect (see also Crean, 2018; Tronto, 2017). They argue that practices of care can offer a space in which resistance to reductive, economic, individualistic understandings of human nature and social need can be cultivated and spread (Lynch et al., 2021; Tronto, 2017). Visibilising these activities is itself a radical, resistive and necessary act, countering hegemonic understandings of care in terms of capitalist reproduction and commodification (de la Bellacasa, 2012; Lynch et al., 2021; Pulcini, 2017; Tronto, 2017). Yet if care provides a location of neoliberal resistance, then how does this influence the activities and subjectivities of those on the frontlines of neoliberal enactment, particularly those whose roles require them to engender a neoliberal rationality of self-care, empowerment and abandonment? I now consider this question through a close examination of the subjective experiences of frontline workers in the newly conditionalised Welsh homelessness system. I argue that the everyday practices of care by these actors evidence resistance to a reductive understanding of applicants as ‘other’ (de la Bellacasa, 2012), and yet this resistance cannot be completely realised without incorporating the ‘dark side’ of care (Lynch et al., 2021) – a paternalistic, selective approach which itself reinscribes (among others) economic, ableist, classed, gendered and racialised inequalities both among those cared for and among those caring (Lynch et al., 2021; Puentes, 2018; Tronto, 2010).

Methods

The research took place in Wales, UK. As the first of the devolved nations to introduce conditionality to its homelessness system with the commencement of the Housing (Wales) Act 2014, Wales is a useful location to study the impact of neoliberal paternalism (Browne Gott et al., 2021; E. England, 2022). This shift to conditionality within the homelessness system is consistent with the wider impetus toward activation of welfare claimants in the UK. The Welsh homelessness system especially focuses upon promoting use of the private rented sector as a solution to homelessness (E. England & Taylor, 2021; Mackie et al., 2017).

I draw on data from a doctoral study considering the enactment of the Housing (Wales) Act 2014 from the perspectives of both frontline workers and applicants themselves. Here I consider extended, open-ended interviews with 54 frontline workers within the Welsh homelessness system, who were asked to reflect upon their normative workplace practices over the lifetime of a homelessness case. Participants either directly or indirectly had responsibility for homelessness decisions. All operated in a casework role at the time of interview. Those in primarily managerial or strategic roles were excluded. They had varying lengths of service, with around half working in homelessness for over a decade and two-thirds in post before the enactment of the Housing (Wales) Act 2014. Two-thirds were female. All worked in local authorities across Wales.

Most participants were recruited from their place of work with a small number contacted directly following social media recruitment aimed at applicants. Most were interviewed in their workplace or an alternative chosen location (usually a coffee shop). All interviews were conducted between September 2018 and January 2020, by myself. Interviews were semi-structured, lasted around an hour on average, and were digitally recorded and transcribed.

A Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach was used to analyse interviews. CDA is a tool to understand the perspectives of participants in the context of shifting, competing and situated social power (Fairclough, 2005). It is useful in exploring how ideas operate across different organisational contexts to create and uphold structures which justify exclusion (Wodak & Meyer, 2015). Following Foucault, this approach rejects a prescriptive, top-down notion of social construction of meaning, and rather recognises the cumulative importance of individual encounters in producing alternative understandings of the nature of the social world (Fairclough, 2013). It locates the perspectives of participants amid shifting, competing and situated social power (Fairclough, 2005). This approach recognises discourse as productive, operating dialectically with personal and organisational practices, and contributing to normalisation and integration of new ways of working (Fairclough, 2005). Yet it also attends to the radical, resistive and pragmatic power of discourse and so is especially useful in making visible social experiences which have previously been overlooked, erased or dismissed. Used in this study, it operates to centre the social understandings produced by frontline workers whose labour is integral to, and yet largely unconsidered with, the act of (re)producing disciplinary bureaucratic discourse.

Interviews followed a broad topic guide consisting of both open and closed questions, although in practice, following the participant’s lead was prioritised over closely following the schedule. This not only led to richer, more detailed responses, but afforded participants greater control and authority within the interview encounter. In line with a Critical Discourse Analysis approach, participants were asked to discuss aspects of their social world, with the reasoning that, through understanding how different actors described and represented these events, heterogeneous constructions of social meaning in the setting would be produced. They were asked about the applicant’s journey through the system, including the initial encounter, information usually sought, subsequent handling of cases, and ongoing follow-up work. Answers to these questions typically included a discussion of their understanding of the rationale, along with their perceptions and feelings around working processes, stresses and resource shortages. Follow-up questions then explored their experiences of autonomy, choice and consequences, to understand the rationale behind their decisions. Through these discussions, I aimed to understand the social world in which they operated, and their own understandings of the choices they were free to make. Of especial interest here were the tensions between wider external and organisational discourse and the experiences of those working within these organisations.

Analysis followed Fairclough’s (2013) approach of attending to four overlapping aspects of discourse production: (1) the relationship between new discourses and existing, established understandings, (2) the hegemonic operation of discourse to further specific interests, (3) the naturalisation of these discourses within organisational structures and (4) the consequences of these discourses in terms of producing new understandings and practices. Thematic grouping of discourses were generated through an iterative, systematic approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Ethical approval for the study was obtained from Cardiff University Department of Geography and Planning ethics board.

‘I’m a people person not a paper pusher’: ‘Care-subjectivities’ among frontline workers

Workers constructed their role in terms of an expansive, care-based regard for applicants’ needs. As Cathy explained, ‘They’re not just numbers to me, I do actually care.’ They invested emotional and cognitive resources in their clients, extending beyond the boundaries of the workplace. Delyth, a frontline worker with several decades of experience, explained, ‘I always say to new [workers], leave it in the office! Go home and switch off! That is important I know but [laughs]. I can’t help it. It’s the kind of job that gets under your skin.’

This worrying operated as ‘affective attention’ (Cooper, 2009) – a form of care which both recognises and addresses structural inequalities. Resource struggles and consequent prioritisation decisions are an integral, defining part of street level bureaucracy (Lipsky, 2010). However, the new requirement to seek private rented accommodation produced a sense among workers that requiring applicants to self-solve, even with help, was both unfair and unrealistic. They highlighted the difficulties applicants faced in securing accommodation due to a shortage of affordable properties, characterising this as an unfair, dispiriting and relatively recent inequity. As Winnie, a longstanding decision-maker, explained, these obstacles felt considerable. She saw the situation as worsening: ‘It’s brutal. It’s the worst I’ve seen’. Workers saw the shortage of affordable properties as creating an impossible situation for applicants. As Shirley, another longstanding decision-maker, exclaimed, ‘What can you do, you can’t magic houses!’ This compassion challenges previous studies which locate frontline workers as conduits of a dominant failure-based discourse wherein applicants are understood as homeless through their own ineptitude or indolence (Allen et al., 2014; Bretherton et al., 2013; McDonald & Marston, 2005; Schram et al., 2010).

This sense of unfairness translated into a resistive discourse, in which workers developed the idea that the system should be fair. This intensified their commitment to supporting clients emotionally. Carol, a decision-maker, articulated her frustration at the reality of ‘watching them slowly fail, doing everything right’. Regarding the system as unjust and that clients were unfairly treated, she responded by actively buffering an official narrative of opportunity against her clients’ lived experience. She felt it critical not only to be honest with clients about the difficulties they faced, but to witness and validate their reality. This was often personally difficult, yet Carol saw it as a moral imperative. She explained, ‘[It] gets to me. I will not pretend its easy to them. I will not tell them they should be trying harder when they’re doing everything they can. I will not say black is white.’ In actively refusing to perpetrate hegemony, she occupied a caring-with position (Tronto, 2017): motivated by and guided by a sense of compassion, rooted in a recognition, of the legitimacy of her clients’ struggles (de la Bellacasa, 2012).

A commitment to caring was maintained despite a shortage of time and resources. Caring takes resources both temporally and materially, and hence requires an act of prioritisation (de la Bellacasa, 2012; Tronto, 2010). Recognising need, listening to people, understanding their needs and seeking feedback are all labour intensive and require a broad commitment at an organisational level to enable workers to engage in this part of their job (Tronto, 2010). Yet the time allocated to caring is informative as to the value placed upon it as an activity (Tronto, 2017). Workers overwhelmingly felt that they were not given enough time to care adequately. According with developments in neoliberal paternalistic systems internationally, workers saw the sheer volume of work as having increased: caseloads were often larger, and cases were both more complex and more demanding (Auyero, 2011; McDonald & Marston, 2005; Sauer & Penz, 2017; Schram et al., 2010; Whitworth, 2016). Emotionally, this created a tension for workers. A rapid applicant turnover promised help to more people, which workers often saw as morally important. Yet a lack of time to provide non-generic, responsive engagement made it difficult to maintain their identity as caring beings. Gloria, who had worked for several years under the old Act, articulated this tension between quantity and quality: rapid mass processing was useful, but impeded personal connection. The overall resource scarcity within the system communicated to Gloria that her instinct to provide affective care was misguided and indulgent, and she felt morally compelled to ignore her own desire to spend extra time with clients and build personal relationships.

I do get it. It means we can work more efficiently, and god knows anything we can do to help people faster is justified but for myself, I’m a people person not a paper pusher and . . . I like to be getting to know them and chatting and . . . just ‘how can I help you’, you know? I feel we’ve lost that, unfortunately.

‘Offence is the best form of defence’: Responsibilisation as a care-based choice

Caring was not only conceptualised as interpersonal interactions between the individual worker and the applicant, but extended beyond a ‘politics of encounter’ and into an awareness of the structural issues applicants faced. Caring requires that the carer recognises and validates the actual location and options available to the cared-for (Tronto, 2010). Thus, care requires both a willingness to listen to and respect the individual, and to be realistic in considering what courses of action are open to them. The harsh reality of the private rented sector was frequently juxtaposed with a nostalgic past in which social housing was represented as plentiful. Angela, whose career had begun only a few years prior to the Act, nevertheless drew upon a collective memory of abundance to construct the current system as both unfair and inevitable; and yet this recognition of the unfairness of the system imposed, for her, a powerlessness and resignation.

I’d love it if people could just come in, like it was years ago, and there’d be all the keys on the wall, and we would just allocate them a property and then they could go away . . . But that’s not going to happen any time soon, so private rented is the way to go really, until the situation has been resolved.

Providing specific, meaningful care required a simultaneously structural and individual level response: recognising, and witnessing, structurally-imposed hardship, while supporting them to operate within the system successfully. Mair, a relatively new worker, articulated her sense that the urgency of homelessness necessitated pragmatic compromise.

It’s all very well dreaming, it’s all very well saying, oh we need more houses. Well I agree one hundred percent! Sign me up! But in the meantime, John’s over there in a tent.

Workers saw the act of making applicants take responsibility for their own activation as care, constituting a response to the specific needs of applicants in their situated and specific, structurally adverse set of consequences. The desperate difficulties faced by many clients in finding accommodation made it more necessary that they understood the importance of adopting a neoliberal, homo economicus subjectivity in which they were competitive and autonomous as the only mechanism to secure accommodation. Workers presented this as ‘honesty’, ‘being straight’ or a ‘reality check’ – all words which convey an approach in which the worker is seen as communicating their greater truth from a position of authority (Jones, 2010). Bethan explained:

I’ll be honest with them. I’ll say, ‘I know it’s incredibly difficult. I’m not really expecting you to find anything. But if you look you might find something.’ I always say that. ‘It’s unlikely there’s anything on there. But do check just in case because if something does come up they go really quickly.’

These interactions could perhaps be interpreted as confrontational and potentially revanchist, with frontline workers adopting punitive approaches toward abjectified welfare subjects (Allen et al., 2014; Jensen, 2014). And yet largely missing from these accounts by workers was any sense of satisfaction, nor a desire to enact correction or revenge. These encounters were notable for the emotional energy which workers put into them, driven by a clear moral sense that they needed to help applicants reconfigure their understanding of their situation not to advantage the state but because to fail to take control of the situation placed the individual at considerable risk. Amma, reflecting on her experiences in a busy office, articulated how she actively grappled with a tension between shifting the focus away from structural inequalities through individualisation against the implications of failing to help clients at an individual level. To do this, she offered a discourse of pragmatism.

Offence is the best form of defence. Trying to give them confidence. Get out there. I know it’s hard. You’re not telling me anything I don’t know . . . But what’s the alternative? That’s what you’ve got to think about. We are where we are.

Responsibilisation was time consuming and difficult on an emotional as well as practical level. It required investment of energy, scarce resources and creativity. Workers had to think of new ways and engage rapport and other emotional labour techniques to secure compliance. Yet it was a widespread practice among workers, not because they believed applicants should take responsibility but because it was, in practice, the only way that they could improve applicants’ chances of exiting homelessness. As Llew explained:

What I’m trying to do here, is to give them that, give them empowerment, because the world has changed, the world has changed beyond recognition with the new law and if they don’t have that, that empowerment, you’re saying over and over, this is what you’ve got to do, and at the end of the 56 days, still homeless.

Workers therefore saw demystifying the working of the state as of critical importance. And yet in so doing, they also legitimised it, integrating and normalising the new system as a challenge which applicants could not realistically resist but rather needed to overcome to succeed (Fairclough, 2005; Jones, 2010). This was, however, an act of care in that it arose from both an appreciation of the needs of the particular applicant in their specific social context, and the limitations faced by workers in doing their job. Care, for workers, was necessarily focused upon immediate relief. It was specific: connected to particular flesh-and-blood clients in the current time and place (Tronto, 2017). Yet they felt this attentiveness was in tension with a responsibility to resolve homelessness.

Look, you don’t go into this job to say no, I didn’t anyway. I’m a people person. When I say to them, every one of them they walk in through that door and I say, ‘How can I help?’ and I really do mean that, I am here to help. Now there’s an extent to which, with the situation as it is and given . . . the wider situation, what we’re up against now, you know that is going to be a case of ‘how can I help you to help yourself’. I’ve got eighty cases open on my desk . . .

‘Show me you’re trying’: Caring within wider legibility constraints

Finally, a consequence of workers caring in a specific social context, and amid resource constraints, was that the wider system-level legibility of applicants became important. The new Act has considerably increased the extent to which local authorities must offer additional and expanded pathways to help for applicants, particularly through referrals to certain third-sector organisations, (who often have a close, sometimes exclusive, working and funding relationship with them). In practice, workers had both more options to help applicants but also had to meet increasingly stringent criteria to access this help. They reconceptualised care in this context not as the direct redistribution of resources, or as interpersonal assistance, but as a way to teach the applicant to help themselves. Hegemonic discourses in which applicants were problematised were incorporated by workers into system knowledge and used by workers to enhance pedagogical interventions (Jones, 2010; Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2000). As Dafydd explained, in this context, ‘care’ became helping an applicant to get help more broadly within the system, often through enabling them to access additional support, or specialist services.

The ones I worry about . . . this one bloke in last week . . . just slipped through every crack it felt like. Cos he was doing that bit too well . . . but you know, he needed a bit more . . . I was able in the end to get him a support worker . . . just to really give him a hand because he was struggling . . . but it took some doing shall we say, just the back and forth.

Workers justified their role within the system as brokers for clients, vouching for their deservedness. They could not do this alone but required applicants to work with them to produce a narrative of legible welfare citizenship. A willingness not only to comply but to evidence this compliance was a method of demonstrating that the applicant should be offered more help. They explained that the increasing stringency and evidential requirements in place under the new Act meant that they similarly needed to ensure that applicants were demonstrably suitable candidates for the service to which they had been referred. This required applicants to not only demonstrably engage with the service, but to be willing and able to evidence, performatively, this engagement. Workers were intensely aware of a ‘paradox of legibility’ (Sweet, 2019), in which those who have experienced structural harm must engage in performative attempts to resolve the situation themselves in a way which accepts an individualised, rather than institutional-level, narrative. Yet from the perspective of workers, this was underscored by their own limited ability to act. To help applicants they had to evidence them as suitable candidates for this service, which included encouraging them to both perform and evidence their compliance. Maeve, a decision-maker, explained:

If I can see then that they’ve really put their all in and they’re not getting anywhere . . . I can make a phone call to, could be [third-sector organisation], or [third-sector organisation]. I’m notorious for my phone calls . . . [that’s how] results come in! ‘Oh god it’s [name] what does she want now, cheeky mare!’ . . . but I want to do the best by them . . . and so long as I can say, he’s done it, he’s tried, so long as I can stand by that, we’ve got some options available to us then. That’s my straight up, it’s a deal I make [with them], show me, show you’re trying . . . we’ve got options then . . .

Schram (Schram et al., 2010) observes that under neoliberal paternalism, although frontline workers may appear to have substantially increased options in terms of helping clients, and extended time to do so, they also become constrained by a rigid and restrictive framework in which decisions need to be carefully justified. Such frameworks have primarily been understood as restricting the potential for care, through aligning choice, discretion and exception-making with regard and desire to help (Lipsky, 2010; Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2000). Yet among workers in this study, having system-wide rules and guidelines and consistency was widely understood as helpful in terms of care. Making the structures associated with discourses of welfare (un)deservedness evident enabled them to help their clients become visibly deserving (Jones, 2010; Spade, 2015) and so prioritised for scarce resources. This transparency was seen as a significant advantage of the new Act, offering a route to help applicants willing to show that they were attempting to comply with the requirements of the Act.

One of the big advantages of the new Act I feel anyway is that it’s all there in black and white. We all know where we stand to some extent . . . we can say to them [clients] this is the [route] you need to take.

Conclusion

Understanding care as universal and inevitable, a consequence of the embodied practices of daily interactions between social individuals, Lynch et al. (2021) argue that sociologies of injustice overlook the importance of affective care, and in so doing, ignore a key site of neoliberal resistance. Meanwhile, welfare governance itself has become increasingly embroiled in cultivating neoliberal citizenship among welfare subjects, with workers required to engage in pedagogical interventions aimed at producing competitive, autonomous and entrepreneurial individuals (Schram et al., 2010). Care scholarship has seldom considered how those whose roles are characterised as uncaring experience a purported fundamental human need to care (Tronto, 2017). This article has considered how an understanding of care as both resistive and universal complicates approaches to the work practices of those involved in production of neoliberal subjectivities. Specifically, this demonstration of how homelessness workers constitute their work in terms of moral, care-based choices. In showing care to be a core part of frontline homelessness work, with workers caring despite system constraints, the primacy of a caring identity even among those in roles which appear primarily bureaucratic and distant is demonstrated.

This extends key sociological work which has argued for the universality of a care subjectivity (Butler et al., 2016; P. England, 2005; Tronto, 2017), by exploring the flexibility of care, and demonstrating that it can include apparently uncaring, bureaucratic practices. It furthers the argument proposed by, among others, Lynch et al. (2021), Tronto (2017) and Spade (2020) that care can operate as a site of resistance to the hegemony of neoliberalism. Workers used the apparent constructions of the system to exercise care in a new way, harnessing demands to deploy pedagogical interventions to allow them to evidence applicant deservedness, enabling them to help applicants to access resources. This further unsettles the dichotomy between paternalism and care, showing that, in bureaucratic, apparently morally distanced situations workers nevertheless do often want to act in the best interests of those they care for. Engendering empowerment and responsibilisation was often a reluctant, pragmatic, constrained choice. The distinction between complicity in the ‘dark side of care’, or acting as resistive agents making constrained choices was shown, in this study, to be complex, porous and malleable. By applying this argument to those operating at the frontlines of neoliberal paternalism, I show that care does not, therefore, simply disappear with the intensification of neoliberal paternalism, but rather expands: a caring-with orientation amplifies as the injustices resulting from dehumanisation become evident (Tronto, 2017).

The Welsh homelessness system is conceptually similar to neoliberal paternalistic welfare systems internationally, in that it provides a statutory right to state assistance. The findings from this study are therefore of importance to an understanding of how the affective practices of workers within these systems can operate as a site of neoliberal resistance. Neoliberalism is integral to poverty governance, and yet previous studies of neoliberal paternalism have paid relatively little attention to the experiences of those entangled in its enactment. To this extent, it responds to Larner’s suggestion that to further our understanding of modern governance we must attend to the everyday, often contradictory practices which collectively comprise the shifting, hegemonic assemblage which is understood as neoliberalism (Larner, 2003).

This study focuses upon an instance of a neoliberal paternalistic welfare state: the Welsh homelessness system. However, it should also be noted that in the UK, and internationally, there exists a growing ‘shadow state’ – third-sector, or not-for-profit organisations which increasingly work closely with statutory providers to offer core services, and which are of increasing importance to welfare provision (Cloke et al., 2011; INCITE! et al., 2007; Johnsen et al., 2005; Jones, 2010; Renedo, 2014). The experience of these workers is relatively poorly understood, making an exploration of the possibilities for resistance to neoliberalism within these services of interest. Further, the Welsh homelessness system, in common with welfare systems internationally, includes specific provision for a minority considered especially vulnerable. This group have been particularly targeted by anti-welfare discourse (Jensen, 2014), making an exploration of whether workers approach these cases with the same level of sympathy and care of general interest to understanding the affective experiences of those administering neoliberal paternalism. Finally, although this study did not actively investigate the broader wellbeing implications of emotional labour upon workers there is considerable evidence linking it to psychological fatigue and burnout in care professions (Hunter et al., 2017). This highlights a need to actively consider the wellbeing of frontline welfare workers in system design, including an anticipation that care-based relationships will form between workers and applicants. It also highlights a need for specific work to better understand the impacts of neoliberal paternalism upon worker wellbeing.