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Human resource development (HRD) approaches aim to increase service users' labour market prospects through training and upskilling. However, research on activation policy implementation suggests that individualised, tailored measures may be difficult to implement because of organisational structures, standardised procedures, contradictory professional interests, and broad framework laws. This qualitative study explored the institutional framing of the Norwegian Qualification Programme and how that framing created barriers in service users' trajectories towards labour market inclusion. The study applied a bottom-up perspective to analyse how these barriers are entangled in a multidimensional web of interrelated and sometimes contradictory relations. Highlighting the service users' perspective, the study aimed to examine how institutional framing may interfere with the activation policy goal of qualifying service users for the labour market. The results point to how institutional framing governs local practice and creates barriers that ultimately may impede activation policy goals.

Few studies have considered how labour activation programmes affect participants' identity construction, particularly from a gender comparison perspective. Using qualitative data and recognition theories, this exploratory study of the Norwegian Qualification Program examined how gender may affect labour activation recipients' identity construction and sense of social value. The findings suggest that women experience labour activation as an enabling process, facilitating an enhanced sense of social value and status. In contrast, men experience either no such change or a diminution of their sense of worth and status. The study shows how cultural values regarding gender, work and employment are embedded in social work practice and activation policy implementation. Underscoring how activation may be intertwined in such cultural values and norms, the study calls for further research to understand these processes, as they may affect outcomes in labour activation policy.

For several decades, the turn towards labour activation has dominated European social work and social work institutions. While social work research and practice focused on labour activation have long considered "the person in the situation", exploring the service users' experiences at specific moments and contexts in time, we argue that labour activation is an ongoing process involving a complex interplay of factors (structural, social, personal), and that these are shaped by changes and ruptures throughout a person's life course. Furthermore, the changing situation is not an objective fact, though its meaning is actively constructed by the service user. Asking how participants in a labour activation programme subjectively make meaning of their activation experiences, with reference to changing personal histories and institutional encounters over time, we shift the focus from social work's emphasis on "the person in the situation", and we open the concept to include "the person in the changing situation" to help enable a more dynamic analysis of the activation process. The concept accounts for the interaction between subjective meaning making and institutional structures and offers, as these change over time. The study is based on fieldwork in the Norwegian labour and welfare services (NAV). We present three participants in the Norwegian Qualification Programme as illustrative cases, each with distinct profiles, to illustrate how service users actively refer to changing situations – as these are shaped by time, biography and institutional movement – when making meaning of their labour activation experiences. The findings have implications for social work research and practice, as matters of biography, timing and life course trajectories must be accounted for to gain a more accurate picture of the labour activation experience. A consideration of institutional and life course change also offers a better professional understanding of the complexity of lived experiences when working with service users, potentially enabling a more effective practice.

Using a cluster-randomised design, this study analyses the effects of a government-administered skill training programme for social workers in Norway. The training programme aims toimprovesocial workers' professionalcompetences byenhancingandsystematising follow-up work directed towards longer-term unemployed clients in the following areas: encountering the user, system-oriented efforts and administrative work. The main tools and techniques of the programme are based on motivational interviewing and appreciative inquiry. Thedata comprise responses to baseline andeighteen-month follow-up questionnaires administered to all social workers (n ¼ 99) in eighteen participating Labourand Welfare offices randomised into experimental and control groups. The findings indicate that the skill training programme positively affected the social workers' evaluations of their professional competences and quality of work supervision received. The acquisition and mastering of combinations of specific tools and techniques, a comprehensive supervision structure and the opportunity to adapt the learned skills to local conditions were important in explaining the results ; Postprint version of published article