This master thesis is covering an analysis of the implementation of social action plans in the Danish government. The purpose of the action plans is to increase the awareness of the social effort bone towards the citizen, secure that the citizen receives a full covering effort and that the citizen is interacting in his or her own case.
The target group of the action plans are citizens receiving social benefit under the Law of Social Service chapter five. This is citizens with reduced physical or mental condition and citizens with social disabilities, whom are not able to obtain a normal life in private homes without social support. This is for instance homeless peoples, addicts and people with learning disorder etc.
Based on our literature studies, we are raising a question if it is possible to live up to the purpose with the social actions plans in governmental practice, since numerous studies have pointed out problems in relation with the implementation of such. Thus, we found it interesting to follow the central, political intention with the social action plans from the top of the democratic system down to employees handling the specific cases and developing the action plans with the respective citizens.
We choose to look at the question through a horizontal perspective, where our focus is on the implementation of social action plan from central political level to the front employee level – the personnel handling the cases and developing the action plans with the citizens. Following, the perspective was made vertically. We presumed that there are variations in how the action plans are implemented in the different, governmental practices. Thus, we followed the studies with a comparative analysis of two government practise working with social action plans. Combined, this gave us a description of how the central political intention behind social action plans are executed in governmental practice and through a comparison of the examined practices, we have been able to identify numerous different factors inflicting on the implementation phase.
The theoretical framework builds on theory by Norman Fairclough Critical Discourse Analysis and his three dimensional model. And Michael Lipsky Street-Level Bureaucracy theory, which focus on how discretionary services, work practices and work conditions interact to influence client outcomes.