A key theme in the research on bureaucratic encounters pertains to street-level bureaucrats' opportunities for responsiveness when discretion is constrained by the introduction of standardized service delivery regulations, such as information communication technology (ICT). This article contributes to existing scholarship by exploring how low-discretion officials at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency Customer Center manage competing demands of making decisions that are built on regulations and simultaneously responding to the situation at hand and individuals' needs. Analyzing real-time interactions using the conversation analytical concept of "offers of assistance" enables us to discover new aspects of interactional practices of responsiveness in standardized service encounters.

Based on conversation analysis, this study investigates central practices in what is defined as a caring interview, in the context of welfare administration. Caring refers to (1) a helpful interviewing in reformulations of questions, taking interviewees' difficulties to answer into consideration; (2) a caring attitude in the framing of questions, showing understanding of clients' circumstances and (3) professional's enactment of expertise in assessments of clients' disabilities and care needs. Data include a corpus of 43 recorded interviews in which officials at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency interview clients who have applied for benefits. The study adds to research on interactional sensitivity, polar questions and epistemic stance in institutional interaction. The study shows how the interviewer prioritizes confirming polar questions, takes responsibilities of knowing into account and reduces the epistemic gap to the interviewee in practices of a caring interview. This makes the interviewing markedly different from standardized and bureaucratic interviewing.

En förändring i bemötandet gentemot utomstående forskning har uppstått hos Kriminal­vården. Den är inte lika öppen längre, skriver forskarna Anders Bruhn och Odd Lindberg. 

At the same time as the number of child and youth placements in foster care is increasing in Sweden, some serious deficiencies have been highlighted, such as instability in placements and shortcomings in the social services' monitoring. Because the child welfare workers are ultimately responsible for these children's situation, understanding how they handle their multi-dimensional occupational role is crucial. The aim of this article is to study child welfare workers' individual and collective experiences of and expectations about their occupational role and responsibilities in their administrative and relational work with children and youth in foster care. Individual interviews with child welfare workers from a previous evaluation of a national pilot project, and two focus groups with child welfare workers, constitute the empirical basis. Theoretically the article explores central concepts such as sub-roles, dilemmas, professionalism, and functional specificity. The results show that the child welfare workers are burdened by a heavy workload, but that the prerequisites and the obstacles they face also must be understood in relation to prevailing contradictions and dilemmas in their occupational role. Even though the child welfare workers stress that professionalism is about putting relational work first, their activity is dominated by administrative tasks and functional specificity.

En väl fungerande relation mellan socialarbetare och klient är ett nödvändigt villkor och ett grundelement i allt professionellt socialt arbete. Men trots att relationsarbete är svårt, så problematiseras det sällan i texter som rör det sociala arbetets kärna och karaktär.

I den här boken tar vi oss an just den uppgiften. Några exempel på frågeställningar som boken tar upp:

• Vad kännetecknar ett gott relationsarbete på det sociala arbetets fält?
• Hur kan en väl fungerande relation etableras mellan den professionelle tjänsteutövaren och en klient i ett mer eller mindre utsatt läge?
• Hur och under vilka villkor kan ett gott relationsarbete utföras av socialarbetare inom olika verksamhetsområden?

Bokens kapitel inrymmer både teoretiska fördjupningar och praktiska exempel och kan därför användas såväl inom utbildningar för socionomer och på angränsande fält som inom praktik på olika sociala yrkesfält.