Left to Their Own Devices: Unemployment and the Digitization of User Experience in the Norwegian Welfare State

In 2005, the Norwegian government initiated a far-reaching organizational reform of the country’s public welfare system. Three separate institutions—the public employment services, the municipal social services, and the national insurance office—became a single cradle-to-grave, one-stop shop: the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration, or NAV. Since then, NAV has established not only a significant physical presence in Norway, with at least one office in each of the country’s 426 municipalities, but a robust digital one. Surveys indicate that a growing share of unemployed users’ contact with NAV take place on this emergent digital terrain, consisting of a web portal (nav.no), online chat, social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube), text messages, and digital documents. This paper, based on more than a year of ethnographic research among jobless benefit recipients in Oslo, maps empirically the encounters and exchanges between NAV and its unemployed users, illuminating the changing—and understudied—conditions under which jobless people identify and claim their rights to social citizenship. Further, against the backdrop of a trend toward self-service and digitization across European welfare states, the paper offers a critical analysis, based on the Norwegian case, of the ways an increasingly screen-mediated user experience affects how people conceive of the state and the reciprocal obligations that link them to it.