The purpose of the thesis is to explore and understand how cash benefit recipients tell about the Danish employment system. The focus is on cash benefit recipients’ narratives about the Danish employment system and how the interaction with the Danish employment system could affect the cash benefit recipients’ identity. The data material for the thesis is collected through narrative interviews with cash benefit recipients and observation and sound recording of conversations between cash benefit recipients and a caseworker. The theories used to analyse the data material are by Jerome Bruner and Marianne Horsdal. Bruner and Horsdal’s theories focus on narratives and how people use narratives in their everyday life. Marvin B. Scott and Stanford M. Lyman’s theory about justification and excuses is briefly applied too. The cash benefit recipients’ narratives about the Danish employment system are mostly negative. They only tell about few positive experiences such as a mentor and a teacher who had a good impact on two of the cash benefit recipients. It seems that the cash benefit recipients interaction with the Danish employment system had an effect on their identities in a smaller or greater degree. One of the male cash benefit recipients has grown more sceptics in his years in the Danish employment system and doesn’t seem to have any plans for the future.
The thesis gives a small insight into how five cash benefit recipients experience the Danish employment system and how this may have affected their identities.