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Institutionella logiker i uppsökande ungdomsarbete och social barnavård

Abstract

Preventive work holds a central place in the recently implemented child welfare reform in Norway, where early interventions and the shared responsibility of public authorities to support children and young people in vulnerable life situations are emphasized (Bufdir 2022). At the same time, this deve­lopment raises questions about how preventive work is understood and practiced within contemporary child welfare. This article explores how professionals in an outreach youth service navigate tensions between relational considerations and institutional demands in their encounters with the child welfare system. Drawing on a four-month ethnographic field study conducted in a Norwegian municipality in 2025, consisting of participant observation, field conversations, and one semi-structured in-depth in­terview, the analysis applies institutional logics (Røhnebæk 2021; Thornton et al. 2012) as its analytical framework. Three dominant logics are identified: i) a welfare-oriented logic characterized by flexibili­ty and relational closeness: ii) a legal logic grounded in legal certainty, documentation requirements, and risk assessment, and iii) a logic of integrity that seeks to reconcile the two. The results show that out­reach youth work has its greatest potential when carried out in the spaces between different levels of preventive efforts but is constrained when bureaucratic regulations take precedence. Integrity, unders­tood as openness about and justification of one’s role, uncertainty, and power, emerges as a core pro­fessional ethical value that can foster trust in interprofessional collaboration. The discussion highlights how bureaucratic arrangements, such as separate record-keeping systems and administrative procedu­res, challenge relational approaches and contribute to fragmented collaboration. It is argued that in­tegrity can function as an active professional approach to bridge differences between relational and le­gal practices, and that supportive organizational structures are needed to balance flexibility in care work with demands for legal certainty. Trust thus appears both as the condition that sustains collaboration and as an indicator of its quality, while simultaneously requiring continuous maintenance across institutio­nal contexts.