Categorizing clients with disabilities: -Exploring the gap between political goals and practice in Danish job centers

Danish governments have continuously proclaimed goals of raising the employment rate for people with disabilities, most recently in the publication “10 goal for social mobility” (Government 2016). In spite of this, the employment rate for people with disabilities has been more than 30 percent less than that of people without disabilities for more than a decade (Larsen & Høgelund 2015). An explanation of this difference could be the limited connection between these general goals, the employment laws and the actual implementation of the goals in the job centers (Amby 2015). Earlier Danish studies have by large focused on employment and disability at the stage where the client already has been categorized as having a disability (e.g. Møller & Stone 2013). This study offers new insight to the field in a Danish context by exploring the process in which people with disabilities are categorized during their first interactions with the job center by asking two interconnected questions: a) To what extent do job centers construct categories that capture client with disabilities? b) How do caseworkers identify whether (and to what extent) the client has lasting impairments that can be considered a handicap in the search for new employment The empirical data for this study is comprised of a survey among caseworkers in eleven job centers in Denmark and interviews with both caseworkers and managers in three of the job centers.