Professional Judgement and Inequality: Discretion, Bias, and Decision-Making In Welfare Services

Professional judgement plays a crucial role in shaping access to welfare services, opportunities, and resources. As front-line professionals act as key gatekeepers, their decisions can contribute to the reduction of social inequalities but may also reproduce or reinforce existing disparities. This session examines how everyday decision-making processes within welfare institutions may shape unequal outcomes through mechanisms such as discretion, categorisation, and bias. While research on inequality has often focused on discrimination at the employer level or on broader structural factors, this session shifts attention to earlier stages of allocation, highlighting how inequality may be produced or reinforced within public services themselves. We welcome contributions studying professional judgement and inequality in welfare settings such as public employment services, social work, healthcare, education and other institutions, employing both quantitative and qualitative approaches.

Paper topics could include, but are not limited to:

• Discretion and decision-making in welfare professions
• Cognitive processes and categorisation in professional work
• Professional assessments of clients’ employability, deservingness, or risk

• Ethnic, racial, gendered, or class-based bias in professional decision-making
• Implicit vs explicit bias in frontline service provision
• Intersectionality in professional decision-making

• Organisational pressures (e.g. performance metrics) and their impact on judgement

• The impact of guidelines, algorithms, or decision-support tools for professional judgement

• Experimental approaches to studying professional judgement
• Qualitative studies of everyday decision-making practices

Overall, the session advances the sociology of professional groups by exploring how professional judgement, even when formally neutral, may be related to inequality through everyday practices and institutional roles.