Managing the case: the reconstruction of institutional actions

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Mechthild Bereswill
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2016 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 283908306

By examining processes of social administration on the basis of case records as an essential element of bureaucratic administration of individuals in the welfare state, the research project picks up on problems posed by the sociology of knowledge as well as by the sociology of social problems and social control. At the center stands the construction of cases within the records which serves the production of knowledge and as a basis for action of social actors dealing with a case. Against this background, the legitimization and implementation of welfare state measures are analyzed exemplarily and by means of selected individual case records concerning corrective training from the 1950s to the 1970s in western Germany. The leading research questions are the following: How do, in the frame of an institutional discourse, partially controversial and inconsistent positions become a bureaucratically manageable case with action-guiding premises? How does the record-based documentation merge into a case under the regiment of a complex authorship? How do bureaucratic actions create case knowledge as a starting point for social control measures? A sample of 60 case records will be formed from archive documents of the Hessian Landeswohlfahrtsverband. This sample will be examined by the use of content analysis in order to select 15 cases for a detailed analysis using the methodological perspective of grounded theory. The expected results will allow for a new view on the then existing administration practice and thereby create an empirical basis for a differentiated perspective on current practices of case documentations and administrative action.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants