Professionals without a Profession? Discretion, Professional Knowledge, and the Use of Digital Profiling in Active Labour Market Policies

In the field of active labour market policies (ALMPs), caseworkers have been described as “professionals without a profession” (van Berkel et al. 2010) due to the low level of institutionalisation of the profession. This could negatively affect how operators exercise their discretion, making case management almost unpredictable (Delpierre et al. 2024), and vulnerable to individual frontline workers’ preferences and biases. Against this backdrop, the paper examines the discretion of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs; Lipsky 2010) in implementing an ALMP specifically designed to limit their discretionary space and increase policy standardisation through the use of an increasingly utilised instrument in this policy area (Desiere et al. 2019), an algorithm-based tool for profiling users and “tailoring” services. The policy in question is the EU-funded, Italian program “GOL – Worker Employability Guarantee”, adopted by the government within the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. Based on extensive ethnographic observation in three Lombardy PES (Milan, Monza, and Mantua), documentary analysis, and in-depth interviews with frontline workers and middle management, we present empirical evidence regarding the behaviours of SLBs directly tasked with users’ profiling. We suggest that caseworkers continue to carve out spaces of autonomy and exercise discretion through various strategies, so the question becomes what factors influence their discretion. We focus on the role of “meso” conditions to address this issue. On the one hand, we explore the influence of a professional status still “under construction.” On the other hand, we investigate the potential impact of the organisational setting by examining differences across the three cases under analysis (e.g., caseloads, management styles, recruitment policies, and the mix of operators’ educational profiles). In this way, we aim to contribute to current debates on the interplay between (new) professional expertise, the use of digital technologies, and SLBs’ discretion.