Keep Them Waiting, Keep Them Quiet: Waiting as a Strategy of Social Control for Citizens on Social Assistance

The amount of time citizens have to wait before bureaucratic authorities attend to them works as a strategy of social control that teaches individuals about their status as citizens. Theoretically, the paper draws on studies of policy feedback and social control. Empirically, the paper analyses data gathered during four months of fieldwork and 30 in-depth interviews with Danish social assistance recipients, who participate in a 13-week mandatory internship to perform unskilled labour in the recreational sector. Social control and status learning work through two interrelated processes. First, street-level bureaucrats unilaterally control the time of citizens by deciding how long citizens have to wait (i) to consult their caseworker, (ii) to change from private- to work clothes, and (iii) when to be allowed to go home. The timing of events changes arbitrarily from day-to-day. As a result, citizens experience firsthand that bureaucratic authorities handle their time carelessly. In consequence, as they are "kept waiting", they learn that their status and worth are less valuable than the status and worth of other groups in society. Second, because citizens highly depend on the people who make them wait, that is, the street-level bureaucrats, they suppress their dissatisfactions. Thus, waiting works as a form of social control to "keep them quiet". Overall, this study demonstrates how ordinary things, such as the amount of time citizens have to wait when dealing with bureaucratic authorities, create large symbolic boundaries between groups in society and at the same time effectively prevent citizens to voice their concerns.