doi:10.

1093/bjc/azaa094 BRIT. J. CRIMINOL.  (2021) 61, 773–791

Advance Access publication 21 January 2021

PLURAL GOVERNMENTALITIES: GOVERNING WELFARE

FRAUD IN SWEDEN
Anders Stenström*,

The criminalization of welfare and policing has often been analysed as being indicative of the
global rise of a neoliberal political agenda. The current paper examines how governmental power

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is organized to govern investigators responsible for policing welfare in Sweden. Using empirical
illustrations from the Swedish case, it shows how multiple governmental logics are enacted in the
context of a broader political will to crack down on welfare fraud. Specifically, it demonstrates how
so-called control investigators are tasked to realize a neoconservative agenda. To this end, these in-
vestigators are themselves governed using an amalgam of neoliberal and bureaucratic rationalities
and technologies. The paper argues that examinations of the articulation of multiple govern-
mental rationalities offer one route for thinking intelligibly about power and criminalization and
by extension about the limits of neoliberal rule.
Key Words:  governmentality, criminalization, policing, social insurance, welfare fraud,
Sweden

Introduction
The late 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium marked a shift in the govern-
ance of the Swedish welfare state. One important, yet little recognized, development
was the criminalization of welfare fraud and the subsequent formation of dedicated
fraud units within the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SIA). Informed by qualita-
tive interviews with control investigators, the current article utilizes a governmental
framework to investigate the administrative arrangements that are deployed to govern
investigators and thus citizens ‘at a distance’. It argues that the control system deployed
to shape the policing of welfare is comprised of an amalgam of governmental logics.
Specifically, neoliberal logics and bureaucratic ideals are linked together to enact a
conservative vision of the Swedish social insurance system, in which a moral obliga-
tion towards the welfare state is at the fore. Moreover, and in response to Martin and
Waring’s (2018) call to pay closer attention to the social dimension of governmental
power, I  examine how this particular configuration of power is conducive to profes-
sional norms and notions of deviance among investigators. In short, I would contend
that the article furthers our understanding of the plural ways in which governmental
power is deployed to govern actors responsible for implementing policing strategies.
The article uses the Swedish case to shed further light on how we may understand
the role, organization and practices of in-house policing units, the criminalization of
welfare fraud and governmental power. According to one influential strain of research,

*Anders Stenström, Department of Criminology, Stockholm University, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden; anders.stenstrom@
criminology.su.se.

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© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD).
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
 STENSTRÖM

the emergence of in-house policing units and the criminalization of welfare fraud are
understood as indicative of how the welfare state—particularly in Anglophone set-
tings—is becoming increasingly repressive and neoliberal (e.g. Ericson et  al. 2000;
2003; Ericson and Doyle 2004; Little and Marks 2010). Examples of this development
include, but are not limited to, the ways in which the boundaries between the police
and social services are being blurred (Soss et  al. 2011; Gustafsson 2011; Beckett and
Murakawa 2012; Headworth 2021), how, as an effect of welfare retrenchment, the crim-
inal justice system is becoming increasingly responsible for delivering social services
(Comfort 2007; Gustafsson 2011)  and the ways in which policing arrangements and

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information are used to ‘govern through crime’ (Simon 2007; see also Ericson et al.
2000). As several scholars have noted (see e.g. Lacey 2013; Wilcock 2019; Hörnqvist
2020), neoliberal logics and policies often serve as the overarching analytical frame in
which these developments are understood (see e.g. Chunn and Gavigan 2004; Ericson
2007; Waquant 2009). Accordingly, welfare retrenchment and the neoliberal distrust
of the welfare state is reshaping the provision of welfare services and turning crimin-
alization and policing into seminal tools in the management of welfare recipients. As
Richard Ericson (2007: 1) writes, the ‘urge to criminalize is rooted in neoliberal polit-
ical cultures that are obsessed with uncertainty’.
However, as several researchers also acknowledge, there is a danger of attributing
social shifts to neoliberalism. With respect to our understanding of governmental
power, O’Malley (2010: 11)  notes that interpretations may become limited or ‘too
monolithic’ in the sense that shifts and social processes are viewed as an expression
of an ‘encompassing rationality of neo-liberalism’ (see also Rose et al. 2006; Dean and
Villadsen 2016). As a counterpoint, scholars have highlighted and analysed the hybridity
and limits of neoliberal logics within the welfare state and governmental analysis more
broadly (see e.g. O’Malley 1999; 2001; 2004; 2010; Larner 2000b; Lippert and Stenson
2010; Soss et al. 2011; Hannah-Mofatt and Maurutto 2012; Bevir 2017; Lara-Millán and
Van Cleve 2017; Martin and Waring 2018; Wilcock 2019; Hörnqvist 2020). The current
article provides further insights into the hybridity and plurality of power by outlining
how three political rationalities (neoliberalism, neoconservatism and bureaucracy)—
or ‘mentalities of rule’ (Foucault 1991)—are woven together within the Swedish welfare
state’s administrative apparatus.
The paper proceeds in four sections. First, I  present a short introduction to the
Swedish welfare state, noting in particular some of its hybrid features. Next, I  pro-
ceed to outline the theoretical framework adopted in the article. I  then discuss the
rise of moral obligations and authoritarianism—in local discourse subsumed under
the rubric of ‘wrongful payments’—and the policies geared towards the reduction of
such wrongful payments. Having outlined the emergence of these policies and briefly
commented on their historical lineage, the third section investigates how power is or-
ganized to implement governmental discourse. The final section presents the study’s
conclusions.

The Swedish welfare state

Over the course of the 20th century, Sweden and the other Nordic countries developed
what are internationally recognized as exceptional and emblematic social democratic

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welfare states (see e.g. Esping-Andersen 1990; Sunesson et al. 1998). The social insur-
ance programme occupied a central role in this development and, subsequently, in
the notion of ‘Swedish exceptionalism’. Three traits are typically associated with the
Swedish social insurance model; first, it is characterized by universalism (social rights
and social benefits offered to large segments of the population); second, it is based
on income loss as opposed to means testing; and third, there is a high degree of co-
ordination in the administration of different forms of social insurance (Edebalk et al.
1998: 50). In essence, this model is aligned with the visions of social welfarism, whereby
the state offers economic compensation for many of the economic risks that occur

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throughout the life course.
The traditional vision of an exceptional Swedish insurance model—largely repro-
duced in Esping-Andersen’s (1990) influential analysis—leaves little room for private
arrangements, and Sweden may be viewed as a counterpoint to the global proliferation
of neoliberal reform. Still, the idea of Swedish exceptionalism and a ‘Swedish model’
is contested, and even a cursory introduction suggests that the development of the
Swedish welfare state over the course of the past three decades or so is imbued with
plurality, ambiguity and divergent interpretations (see e.g. Sjöblom 2019), and there are
clear indications that the Swedish welfare state today exhibits many of the traits asso-
ciated with a neoliberal political rationality and policies (e.g. market solutions and risk
management). For instance, previously state-run sectors, such as eldercare, education,
social care and healthcare services are today offered on private or quasi-markets. And
the deregulation and privatization of these sectors has been coupled with significant
regulatory growth (Hörnqvist 2020). Likewise, new public management regimes have
been implemented on a broad scale in the public sector (Hollertz et al. 2017). Moreover,
workfare and activation policies have become increasingly important in seeking to re-
duce welfare dependency and promote an active citizen (Hörnqvist 2010). In addition,
crime policies have clearly taken a ‘punitive turn’ with ‘law and order’, safety and po-
licing currently high on the political agenda (Tham 2018). These and allied develop-
ments (e.g. globalization and lower voter participation) have led some commentators to
proclaim the ‘death of Swedish exceptionalism’ (Pierre 2016).
However, others prefer to speak of the ‘decline’ of Swedish exceptionalism, with the
Swedish welfare state here being viewed as ‘good but not great, or perhaps great but not
exceptional’ (Pierre 2016: 6). Along these lines, scholars have also noted that Sweden
is still comparatively remarkable with respect to taxation, welfare services and the
general acceptance of the universal welfare state (Lindbom 2001; 2008). And, despite
stricter eligibility criteria and reduced compensatory levels, the Swedish welfare state
still offers, relatively speaking, generous and universal social benefits to almost any
person who resides or works in Sweden. Neoliberal policies, I would contend, have had
an effect on the Swedish welfare state but this has not resulted in the ‘death’ of older
and other modes of governing (Lindbom 2001; Larsson et al. 2012). I would argue that
the interesting analytical question then becomes that of how neoliberal logics intersect
and work together with other governmental rationalities.
In this article, I will shed light on this issue using the policing of welfare fraud as my
empirical case. In Sweden, welfare fraud was criminalized in 2007, when the Swedish
parliament passed the Benefit Fraud Act. The Act penalizes welfare recipients for delib-
erately or by negligence attempting to receive undue compensation, with a maximum
sentence of six years imprisonment. As we shall soon see, it is my contention that the
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most important effects of this statute were its desire to shape the actions of welfare
recipients using new techniques for governing the Swedish SIA (cf. Soss et  al. 2011).
Specifically, and as already mentioned, it mandated that the SIA should police welfare
fraud via its control units. Since the advent of dedicated fraud units, we have also wit-
nessed a growing concern within the SIA for other areas besides welfare fraud—today
the agency is also enrolled in several multiagency partnerships with the police and
other public authorities to crack down on serious organized crime, occupational health
and safety crime and economic crime (Stenström et al. 2014).

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Data and methods
The current research was carried out between the spring and autumn of 2018 as part
of a wider research project into the Swedish insurance institution. First, I reviewed rele-
vant social insurance policies, public inquiries, public reports and legal documents in
order to understand the emergence and details of the Swedish ‘wrongful payments’
discourse. Next, I contacted the SIA, and two civil servants were assigned as my point of
contact. I interviewed these two people to discuss the general organization of control
within the agency. A total of 13 civil servants participated in interviews focussed on ex-
ploring their work. Participants were recruited using snowball sampling. In particular,
I was interested in questions pertaining to the ways in which they were governed and
govern. Most of the participants worked at a control unit in a large Swedish city (a total
of approximately 150 control investigators are currently assigned to a control unit).
While these investigators have a legal duty to detect, investigate and report welfare
fraud, they are not legally mandated to prosecute fraud cases. As with claims fraud
in the private sector, for a case to be criminally prosecuted, it must be referred to and
subsequently processed by the Swedish Police Authority. However, control investigators
can also decide that a case should be investigated as a breach of administrative law
rather than the criminal statute. In such cases, the SIA retains control over the legal
process. Still, this does not mean that administrative measures are not punitive. The
recipient might avoid a prison sentence and criminal stigma, but the economic conse-
quences of administrative action can still be significant. Interviews were conducted at
the SIA, lasted for one to two hours and were recorded and transcribed in Swedish. The
quotations included in the article were translated by the author, and the study received
ethical approval from the Swedish Ethical Review Authority. Qualitative data analysis
was used to understand the practices and representations of participants. Coded ex-
cerpts of data were analysed through a continuous dialogue between theory, literature
and transcripts. In line with my theoretical interest, the coded data were systematic-
ally related back to the concepts outlined above, with a particular emphasis on under-
standing how relationships of power were formed through the SIA. Obviously, there
are limitations associated with this methodology. For example, it is not possible—nor
was it my intention—to measure how common certain representations were. Moreover,
the quality of the interviews varied due to various factors, such as my ability to create
rapport and the participants’ perceptions of the research project. Although my overall
impression is that most participants were willing to answer my questions and elaborate
on their statements, there were examples where participants refused to offer further

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information about their work (for instance, I was not able to obtain any detailed infor-
mation about the variables used to detect fraud using data-mining techniques).

Theoretical Framework
The analysis presented below is informed by the governmentality perspective. In gen-
eral, this framework has significantly expanded our understanding of how political
power is exercised by directing our attention to the link between broader political

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rationalities (e.g. liberalism and neoliberalism) and technologies (e.g. Foucault 1991;
Miller and Rose 1990; 2008; Rose and Miller 1992). Indeed, the insurance institution
and insurance-based technologies have emerged as central themes in Foucauldian and
post-Foucauldian analyses of the welfare state, particularly in studies of the rise and de-
cline of welfarism (see e.g. Rose 1996; 1999: Ericson et al. 2000; Ericson 2007). The neo-
liberal rationality—characterized by market relations, risk management, responsibility,
efficiency, uncertainty, privatization, activation and a critique of the welfare state—oc-
cupies a central position in this literature. In addition, and as researchers (O’Malley
2010; Lacey 2013; Wilcock 2019; Hörnqvist 2020) also point out, neoliberal rationalities
and policies are often linked to growing levels of criminalization, policing and repres-
sion (see e.g. Chunn and Gavigan 2004; Ericson 2007; Waquant 2009; Gustafson 2011).
However, this general and programmatic account of the neoliberal political rationality
has also been questioned on a number of points. The governmentality framework in
general, for instance, has been criticized for paying insufficient attention to issues such
as legitimacy and human agency and for having an almost theological approach to
neoliberalism (see e.g. Garland 1997; O’Malley et al. 1997; O’Malley 2001; Dean and
Villadsen 2016). In a provocative statement, Mark Bevir (2017: 6) goes so far as to argue
that examples of governmental analysis associated with Nikolas Rose, Peter Miller and
Graham Burchell do little more than ‘identify the familiar pattern of the individual-
ization of responsibility through a spread of market relationships’. Moreover, the con-
nection between neoliberal rationalities and criminalization has also been questioned.
Writing about welfare reforms and the policing of welfare fraud in Australia, Scarlet
Wilcock (2019: 1515) demonstrates that this link is far from ‘inexorable’. Granted, it
would be faulty to suggest that this critique applies to all examples of governmental
analysis. I  would argue, however, that outlining and mapping the complexities and
plurality of governmental power is an important task in order to avoid the risk of pre-
senting neoliberal rationalities as inevitable and inescapable (see also O’Malley 2001;
Wilcock 2019).
In light of this, I  draw on scholarship that has expanded our understanding of
governmentality and neoliberal rule by attending to its flexibility, coexistence and re-
lationship with other logics (e.g. O’Malley 1999; Garland 2001; Lippert and Stenson
2010; Soss et al. 2011; Wilcock 2019). The neoliberal rationality, then, is here viewed as
co-existing—sometimes in conflict, at other times in alignment—with other govern-
mental programmes (Hanna-Mofatt and Marukowa 2012). In keeping with this line
of argument, I  will seek to clarify how different governmental logics interweave and
shape the policing of welfare fraud at the administrative level by using the following
programmatic descriptions of neoliberalism, neoconservatism and bureaucracy as a
heuristic device:

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• Neoliberalism. Although it comes in many versions (Larner 2000a), when viewed as

a mentality of rule, neoliberalism might be understood in terms of economic gov-
ernment, marketization, fiscal efficiency, competition and choice. The overall aim
is to turn subjects (individuals and organizations) into entrepreneurs. This desire is
buttressed by an imagery that views these subjects as rational, calculating actors who
compete, constantly perform, seize opportunities and realize themselves through
risk-taking and responsible choices (Lazzarato 2009). In organizational life, the
technologies used by neoliberalism to accomplish its goals are subsumed under New
Public Management regimes. State intervention is rhetorically represented as being

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inimical and a danger to the order that neoliberalism strives to maintain. But the sov-
ereign state is far from obsolete. Neoliberal rule relies on the state for the creation
and regulation of markets in domains that were formerly in the public service sphere
(Ericson 2007).
• Neoconservatism shares much of the economic rationality promoted by neoliberals, in
particular the critique of the Keynesian welfare state. However, as O’Malley (2001)
has observed, conservative notions of the social are not only about marketization—
they are equally concerned with subservience to a collective morality and traditional
institutions such as the family, the nation and race and a perceived loss of social co-
hesion (cf. Brown 2006). The thrust of conservatism has, for instance, provided the
rationale for the past decade’s obsession with law and order (Garland 2001) and au-
thoritarian means of government (i.e. of the poor). While neoliberal policies rely on
the sovereign state to create new markets, neoconservatives promote a strong state to
enforce morality, national interests, and the rule of law.
• Bureaucracy. As with neoconservatism, the Weberian imagery of the public bureau
entails a concern for authority and the rule of law, but it stipulates how ‘the bureau’
should be organized to promote certain bureaucratic ends and duties. It envisions a
social figure—the rule-bound bureaucrat—who applies bureaucratic rules and the
law objectively using a system of standardization, rules, hierarchies, a distinct division
of labour and a clear demarcation of jurisdiction (du Gay 2000). This mentality of
rule is supported by the notion of the citizen as a person with a set of legal rights (i.e.
to equal treatment, to have one’s case processed with expediency and so forth).
Cognizant of the obvious risk of oversimplification, my intention here is to use these de-
scriptions as an exploratory tool to elucidate how control investigators are and should
be governed and govern in Sweden. Treating these rationalities as ideal types undoubt-
edly places some degree of ‘false rigidity’ (Crawford 1999: 26) on them. Nonetheless,
the rationale for this analytical choice is to try to disentangle how idealized pro-
grammes and logics relate to each other and are turned into practices in the local con-
text. The approach adopted here is similar to that of Foucault and the governmentality
approach in that these programmes represent idealized descriptions or schemes about
how to govern. The article, then, examines how these programmes are translated into
practice ‘on the ground’. In this sense, my approach differs from Foucault’s notion of
governmentality as the mere ‘reflection’ of governing (Foucault 2008: 2) by being more
interested in ‘the real’ or the processes of governing (Lippert and Stenson 2010).
In the pages that follow, I will use empirical illustrations from the Swedish social in-
surance system to show how components from all three rationalities are simultaneously
being articulated and reproduced. I exemplify this dynamic by first focussing on the

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rise of neoconservative policies, including the will to punish and criminalize welfare
fraud in order to restore a sense of obligation to the social. Having first directed atten-
tion at this dynamic, I move on to analyse how it affects the implementation of social in-
surance policies. My approach focusses on the ways in which components from various
governmental rationalities are being utilized to govern civil servants. This is, I would
argue, consistent with recent calls for the need of a focus on the social dimension of
governmentality (e.g. Martin and Waring 2018).

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The rise of the ‘Wrongful payments’ discourse
Over the course of the late 1990s, Sweden saw the rise of a conservative determination
to reduce so-called ‘wrongful payments’ from the welfare systems. The underlying
problematization emerged from a dissatisfaction with past policies, which, according
to leading commentators, gave too much consideration to the recipients’ social rights
to financial compensation and focussed too little on control, moral obligations and
accuracy. This is exemplified in the following statement, which was made by a public
inquiry appointed to co-ordinate actions against wrongful payments from the welfare
system and to propose uniform methods to measure their scope and suitable goals and
performance indicators:
An overall conclusion of the Inquiry’s investigation is that the welfare system is not designed to fa-
cilitate control nor to prevent wrongful payments. Instead, it is designed to adapt and respond to all
conceivable situations an individual or a household may find themselves in. Not enough attention
has been paid to the possibilities of guaranteeing that the correct compensation is paid to the right
person. (SOU 2008: 49–50).

Over the decade preceding the Inquiry’s report, ‘wrongful payments’ had become es-
tablished as an important issue in the public debate. This discourse presented the in-
tegrity, legitimacy and survival of the social insurance system as being increasingly
threatened by rising levels of both deliberate and unintentional errors. More import-
antly, the wrongful payments issue was largely problematized as being the effect of a
lack of respect for the social insurance contract and the actors’ (recipients and civil ser-
vants) failure to exercise their freedom in appropriate ways, i.e. to respect the authority
of the law and follow appropriate procedures. Reflecting this assertion, a public inquiry
noted that: ‘In order for the security systems to be able to function […] is it is necessary
for the recipients to show loyalty and diligence in connection with applications and pay-
ments from the security systems’ (SOU 2006: 15). Thus, the emphasis was directed at
‘contractual elements’ (O’Malley 2004: 30) of social insurance, whereby the social right
to compensation and the legitimacy of the welfare system were linked to insurance as a
source of obligation and moral duty.
There was nothing novel in this representation of citizens in need of social bene-
fits (see e.g. Lindqvist 1990; Berge 1995). Indeed, the issue of a lack of respect for
the duties and obligations linked to social insurance has a lineage going back to the
very inception of the Swedish—and other countries’ (Garland 1985)—social insurance
system in the 20th century. In early 20th century Sweden, e.g. undisciplined claimants
saw their compensation reduced or denied if the claimant drank excessively, failed to
submit to medical examination, acted carelessly at work, neglected to disclose financial

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statements or was imprisoned or sentenced to forced labour (Berge 1995). What was
new was the previously unequalled attention that the problem received in Sweden
(Lundström 2011). Moreover, historians point out that for most of the 20th century,
coercion, categorization and moral obligations were at the heart of the Swedish social
democratic project, in which substantial social rights were granted to citizens who ful-
filled their contractual obligations to work, support their families and behave in a dis-
ciplined manner (Lundberg and Åmark 2001).
In other contexts, previous work has generally outlined how such changes—often
painted against the neoliberal backdrop—pushed the criminalization of welfare to the

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front of the political agenda (e.g. Chunn and Gavigan 2004; Ericson 2007; Wacquant
2009; Gustafson 2011; Wilcock 2019). What I would argue is intriguing with the Swedish
case, however, is the effects that criminalization had at the administrative level; that
is to say, Sweden’s vision of how insurance should be administered and social justice
delivered. As has been mentioned, the Benefit Fraud Act of 2007 is a case in point.
This statute did not articulate a new will to punish citizens since recipients faced fraud
charges even prior to 2007. Instead, its novelty lies in the way it regulates welfare fraud
in a separate statute and, perhaps, more importantly, in the ways repression and coer-
cion came to be administered. One germane concern was the SIA’s perceived inability
to instil a sense of contractual obligation. Accompanying this was a more sweeping
criticism of the SIA’s inability to apply the law in a uniform fashion (Andersson et al.
2011). Today, the SIA has approximately 150 staff who are tasked with investigating
complaints, detecting welfare fraud and reporting it to the police. There is a sense,
then, that the SIA is today mirroring international developments, where private and
in-house policing has been a salient concern for at least the past four decades (e.g.
Ericson and Doyle 2004) and where criminal justice logics are incorporated into social
service agencies (Headworth 2019). The effects were not only manifest in relation to
the SIA’s administration of insurance. The statute has also led to the dissemination of a
system of ‘lateral controls’ (Foucault 1977: 211) within and beyond the SIA that produce
knowledge about the efficiency and inclination of other public authorities to ‘feed’
(Headworth 2021) the SIA and the police with cases. This network of control includes
a whole series of actors within the SIA (e.g. case workers and internal control projects),
public authorities (e.g. the Police, the Economic Crime Bureau, Customs, the Board of
Student Finance and the Migration Agency) and members of public and private institu-
tions (e.g. trade unions, dentists, private insurers and childcare centres), who all supply
the CUs with cases and assist them in their investigations.

Plural governmentalities and the policing of welfare fraud

I will now examine how dedicated control units enact this agenda by turning my at-
tention to how they themselves governed using the theoretical lens outlined above.
Specifically, I  interrogate how neoliberal and bureaucratic logics are interlaced in
the realization of the conservative will to use criminalization and policing to reduce
‘wrongful payments’ and thus promote moral obligations towards the social insurance
programme among the insured population. This creates a system of control in which
control investigators are, on the one hand, governed to objectively enforce rules and
detect, deter and punish recipients who fail to meet their moral obligations and respect

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the authority of the social insurance programme. On the other hand, the bureau-
cratic logic is woven together with neoliberal technologies of performance, i.e. a pro-
cess whereby the control investigator’s own actions are recoded into quantifiable and
qualitative variables that are subsequently used to assess performance and to discipline
deviant investigators. And as we shall soon see, the upshot of this amalgam of govern-
mental rationalities in the local setting is the social construction of two figures: ‘real
investigators’ who are able to perform (most notably, producing swift legal decisions)
and their stigmatized counterpart, the ‘interior designer’.1 At a more general level, this
distinction aligns with a broader pattern within the administrative level of the criminal

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justice system where professional and cultural norms are used to assess the perform-
ance of civil servants (see e.g. Van Cleve 2016).

Neoliberal technologies of performance

As street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky 1980), control investigators enjoy a certain degree
of freedom in their decision-making. And as the literature on discretion also makes
clear, public authorities have a long history of striving to curtail this freedom via guid-
ance, education, regulation and control (for a summary, see Pearson and Rowe 2020).
Similarly, the governmentality literature notes a broader tendency whereby neoliberal
logics induce governments to rely on ‘technologies of performance’, which serve to ‘sub-
sume the substantive domains of expertise (of the doctor, the nurse, the social worker,
the school principal, the professor) to new formal calculative regimes’ (Dean 2010:
197). Like the techniques used to restrain the discretion of street-level bureaucrats,
technologies of performance reflect distrust towards professional decision-making and
are largely used to promote the public’s trust in governmental authorities. As Dean
(2010: 197–8) notes, ‘technologies of performance…presuppose a culture of mistrust
in professions and institutions that they themselves will contribute to, produce and
intensify’.
In the present setting, the performance of control investigators is quantified and
audited in line with six variables: (1) the investigator’s rate of decisions; (2) the value
‘recovered’; (3) the number of police notifications; (4) the time it takes to complete
different tasks; (5) the economic value and number of indemnity claims and (6) the
‘amount saved’ (what would have been paid if an investigation had not been con-
ducted). Performance on these variables is used to gauge efficiency at the individual,
unit and agency levels. As we now shall see, these indicators promote a particular form
of individual responsibility among investigators, but it is also important to bear in mind
that they also play a key role in the official image of the performance of the SIA and
thus the public image of the problems that emerge in the social insurance relationship
(cf. Ericson et al. 2000; Ericson 2007).
What constitutes normality for an investigator is not given by standards since the
SIA employs a norm-based approach in which normality is defined in relation to the
aggregated performance of the members of the control unit (cf. Rose and Valverde
1998). In practice, investigators’ performance on these indicators and their normality

1
This is a semantic construction that does not make much sense in English. In Swedish, however, it makes more sense since
the Swedish word for investigator is ‘utredare’ and the word for ‘interior designer’ is ‘inredare’. The term ‘inredare’ is used to
suggest that a person is ‘decorating’ their investigations rather than making decisions.

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are evaluated in several venues, with the most recurrent forum being monthly case
assessments at which individual performance and results are visualized in relation to
the group:
The result is the number of cases that have been investigated … how long they have taken … the fre-
quency of the decision rate. If you have completed 70 investigations but only decided one of them…
‘Why does it look that way for you when it does not look like that for others?’ Instances of police no-
tifications, recoveries, indemnity claims, these are the results we review. We use graphs in which we
chart each investigator’s results, their names are masked, but you can see how you perform in com-

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parison to others, how you perform in comparison to the mean. (Control Investigator)

Based on the investigator’s performance, a team co-ordinator then formulates new in-
dividual targets to be achieved prior to the next assessment. According to the inter-
viewees, and as the above quotation also suggests, the most salient variable is the time
it takes for the investigator to make decisions. Furthermore, the emphasis placed on
time is expressed in local discourse in terms of the observation and categorization of
‘red’ cases:
We monitor how many cases are in our work-flow… 0–90 days, 91–180 days, 181–279 days and 280–
364, and how many cases are older than a year and we assign colours to each case… we see the
whole stock, my stock, my team’s stock and the unit’s, and 90–180  days are blue, they’re the ones
that we’re investigating and at the end they are red because they’re waiting for recovery or for affili-
ation to be unlisted from the insurance… so we’re able to see where the cases are in the work-flow
and what cases we can affect, that case is red... if you have a red case that is older than 365 days then
you’re questioned; what have you been doing? What have you been investigating for a year? (Control
Investigator)

This symbolic use of the colour ‘red’ inverts what Richard Ericson et al. (2003: 322) ob-
served in the North American private insurance industry. In relation to the claimant,
they found that: ‘“Red” can be read […] as someone who is a source of social infla-
tion and thus antithetical to the proper functioning of the insurance system’. Likewise,
‘Red’ in the current social context has a symbolic meaning as being indicative of an in-
vestigator who might pose a danger to the way the social insurance system is imagined
to function. As a consequence, I would argue, control investigators are encouraged to
use their professional discretion to identify opportunities to rapidly file an indemnity
claim, reduce compensation, recover a wrongful payment or notify the police. Perhaps
one effect of this form of governance is that it incites investigators to operate according
to the neoliberal logic of harm reduction, with most cases being discontinued (see also
Ericson and Doyle 2004). For instance, the SIA’s own statistics reveal that, between 2006
and 2017, seven out of ten (69 per cent) complaints were deemed to be unsubstantiated,
less than one out of ten complaints were reported to the police (9 per cent) and about
one out of four (23 per cent) yielded an indemnity claim. In sum, I would contend that
the technologies of performance reflect an image of the ‘normal investigator’ as an
active investigator who is governed to continuously produce decisions in the cases they
are assigned.

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Bureaucratic virtues
Whereas the technologies of performance visualize the investigator’s ability to apply co-
ercion at a certain pace and to find opportunities to exercise coercion, the investigator
is simultaneously governed to uphold bureaucratic ideals, such as the rule of law and
neutrality and to promote standardization and equality. This vision, as Skolnick (1966:
236) observes with respect to the police, ‘envisages the professional as a bureaucrat,
almost as a machine calculating alternative courses of action by a stated program of
rules, and possessing the technical ability to carry out decisions irrespective of personal

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feelings’. In the current case, bureaucratic ideals shape the selection of welfare fraud
by creating legal and functional boundaries. That is to say, the position of control in-
vestigators with respect to other units within the SIA and the public police creates an
important backdrop for making sense of this dynamic and the control investigator’s
self-representation. Of critical importance is the management of what in the local ver-
nacular are known as ‘impulses’. Specifically, ‘impulse’ is the term the control inves-
tigators use to denote a notification to a control unit. Notifications are received from
several sources, including, for instance, members of the public, case workers/other
units within the SIA, public authorities and private institutions. Over the course of
the past five years, control units have annually received 15,000–18,000 impulses. The
five most frequent sources were: (1) anonymous tipsters; (2) case workers; (3) known
tipsters; (4) unemployment funds and (5) the tax agency. The most fruitful sources
in terms of measures (or decisions) from the SIA are referrals from case workers and
unemployment funds (Försäkringskassan 2018). ‘Impulses’ is also an interesting term
as it reflects a notion whereby control investigators position themselves as receivers of
information garnered by other functions rather than actively seeking out suspicious
cases themselves. In this sense, then, the term reflects that the SIA’s policing of welfare
fraud is mainly reactive, after-the-fact, policing. Unlike the private insurance industry,
where fraud investigations pre-emptively aim to reduce losses by declining insurance
claims (Stenström 2018), control units mainly seek to detect and manage fraud after
the payments have been made.
In general, the investigators I interviewed said that an impulse must include proof
that a case not only suggests a wrongful payment—which should be managed by other
functions (e.g. case workers)—but some indication that it reaches the evidentiary re-
quirements of welfare fraud. But this delineation is equivocal. The ambiguity stems
from the tension associated with criminal intent. On the one hand, welfare fraud re-
quires proof of criminal intent. Thus, to fulfil their legal obligation to report welfare
fraud to the police, control investigators need to provide evidence of the recipients’
criminal state of mind. On the other hand, control investigators also told me that it is
not the SIA’s but the police’s responsibility to prove intent. What control investigator
do, according to the interviews, is to assess the recipients’ ‘awareness’ or ‘intention-
ality’. As one control investigator acknowledged: ‘When we refer a case [to the police],
we don’t have to prove intent, but we must have found something that indicates inten-
tionality’. Another investigator explained:
We’re not really supposed to assess intent, but we should make some sort of assessment of the
recipient’s awareness which is the term we use… how aware is the person in question of the legal
framework and of what you’re allowed to do and what you can’t do, about your obligations to report

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[new information/circumstances]… if we believe that this person knows the legal framework, we re-
port, but the step from awareness to criminal intent is pretty large. (Control Investigator)

In practice, this bureaucratic mode of governing is initiated by a so-called team

co-ordinator who plays a key role in the translation of impulses into control investiga-
tions. The co-ordinator is the recipient of impulses and decides if the information war-
rants further investigation. This selection process—or the representation of it—evinces
a strong focus on proof that a fraudulent act has been committed by the recipient:
We’ve one person who’s responsible for answering case workers and she’s very good at her job and at

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giving case workers advice on how they might proceed, and she says ‘no, this is not a control case be-
cause we should’ve investigated better, we’ve missed something obvious in our own case management
that we should’ve discovered so there’s no suspected crime…sometimes it happens that the recipient
has reported one thing on the application form under “other”… that “I also have this job” but we’ve
only seen these figures that the person has reported… we missed this even though we had the infor-
mation that this person worked extra… that’s a mistake from the SIA because the client gave us the
information but we chose not to investigate it… that’s one example. Another is that the case worker
might feel [that something is criminal]. Very well, but we must know the suspicion, it cannot only be
“but I happened to see a post on Facebook”. No, that’s not something we can proceed with because
we’re not allowed to use Facebook… or someone has seen something during their time off, someone
they’ve met and talked to… and this person did this and that, that’s also too thin depending on what
you’ve seen… is it a suspected crime?… well, that like depends’. (Control Investigator)

Evidence to indicate a crime is thus critical to how control investigators position their
role within the SIA. These processes are, I would argue, linked to the system for moni-
toring work performance, whereby bureaucratic virtues are stitched together with neo-
liberal technologies of performance. According to the interviewees, and as already
implied, the most important variable that also weighs negatively on control investiga-
tors’ own work performance and, as we shall see, ultimately their own standing and le-
gitimacy within the unit is the time they spend investigating a case (which, as described
above, is visualized on a monthly basis).
The most typical and mundane way of promoting legal certainty and objectivity may
be the collegial control that is designed into the investigation processes, whereby the
investigator’s decisions are continuously reviewed by other functions. Police notifica-
tions are a case in point. Investigators recognize that notifications are time consuming
since they must cover all aspects of the potentially fraudulent conduct. To this end, a
notification is reviewed and discussed with colleagues to make sure that all areas are
covered:
Report to the police…and prove intent… […] the police are very concerned that they receive com-
plete… everything must be there because they, they don’t know the Social Insurance Act, and that’s
why we really have to, we must supply them with everything, describe the legal framework, what has
happened, everything, everything and sometimes it’s like this, the one who writes this report, it’s
after all time consuming, so to make sure that it’s correct somebody else reviews and checks [it]…
(Control Investigator)

Other examples of how bureaucratic values are promoted can be seen in the controls
imposed by supervisors. An in-depth control is conducted by the managerial team twice
a year. This qualitative, case-based and retrospective assessment revolves around seven

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variables, which (with one exception) clearly tap into the investigator’s ability to act as
an impersonal bureaucrat. First, the SIA examines whether there were legal grounds to
initiate an investigation under the Benefit Fraud Act (i.e. indications of ‘deliberately or
grossly negligently submitted incorrect information/failure to report changed circum-
stances in relation to receiving compensation’). Second, it is determined whether the
investigator retrieved ‘relevant and sufficient’ information. Third, the use of approved
work-flow processes is examined. The fourth variable is the decision to notify the po-
lice (Have the police been notified? Was this decision appropriate?). The fifth variable
is whether the investigator has followed the Public Administration Act, which involves

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examining the way the investigator managed, stored, documented and communicated
information to the claimant. The sixth is the activity of the investigator, or the question
of whether the investigator has taken relevant actions at the right point in time.
The seventh and last dimension is in many ways indicative of how neoliberal logics
intersect with bureaucratic virtues. This dimension is called ‘promises to customers’
and consists of the following five statements:
(1) The case worker strives to continuously improve, simplify and develop contact
points, services and processes.
(2) The case worker possesses sound knowledge about the [social] security system and
takes responsibility to ensure that the customer receives the information, decision
and compensation he or she is entitled to.
(3) The case worker clarifies the framework and conditions for the customer and pro-
vides feedback on the consequences of choices and information about what will
happen in the next step.
(4) The case worker involves other relevant actors based on the needs of the customer.
(5) The case worker is lucid, explains and makes sure that the customer understands
the decisions.
These ‘promises to customers’, I would contend, highlight how neoliberal and bureau-
cratic logics are woven together in the attempts to steer the actions of control investi-
gators. Clearly, the idea that recipients are ‘customers’ suggests a market logic and is
somewhat odd in the Swedish context, which, as already mentioned, is largely based
on the idea that social insurance is a universal social right and not a service or good
purchased on the market. This ambiguity is expressed in an uncertainty as to how the
recipients of welfare should be defined. Throughout the interviews, control investiga-
tors referred to recipients as ‘customers’, ‘the insured’, ‘the individual’ and ‘users’. One
investigator commented:
It [the customer concept] is gone… it came and went with the former Director General, and today
there are several concepts, the person that receives assistance allowance is called ‘the user’… we
must call them what they are, this is ‘the user’ and this is ‘the assistant’ but they are not customers.
Previously, all recipients were called ‘the insured’; ‘the individual’ is now becoming a more common
concept. (Control Investigator)

Perhaps, this comment might be viewed as reflecting how different governmental vi-
sions about the SIA and the welfare recipient have been emphasized at different times
and that older ideas continue to have an effect in the present. Today, the use of the
‘promises to customers’, I would argue, suggests that the market logic plays a role in
the SIA’s efforts to govern investigators. As a governmental technique, it manifests how
785
 STENSTRÖM

bureaucratic logics are interwoven with the moralistic notion that the investigators
should also strive to constantly improve (Statement 1); communicate and provide ser-
vice and information to the person who is under investigation (Statements 2, 3 and 5);
promote transparency (Statements 3 and 5) and retrieve information from appropriate
sources (Statement 4).

The interior designer

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Up to this point, the will to crack down on fraud, cheats and other forms of wrongful pay-
ments has been described as being organized around a combination of neoliberalism
and Weberian public bureaucracy. The configuration of these rationalities serves to
produce a particular notion of the normal investigator—a figure that, as we have seen,
knows when to stop and when to continue an investigation, that makes sound legal de-
cisions, follows prescribed procedures, communicates efficiently and engages in the
liberal quest for constant improvement. Of course, if there are ‘normal’ investigators,
there must also be ‘abnormal’ investigators. In the current setting, the abnormal and
unruly investigator is in many ways represented as being antithetical to the normal in-
vestigator. In the local discourse, the term used for the abnormal investigator is ‘the in-
terior designer’. When asked to elaborate on this designation, one investigator told me:
[They] don’t do anything, some people decorate their investigations, they never get anywhere, they
never make decisions, they just keep on gathering [information] without reaching closure… but at
our follow-ups, your stacks show when your cases are getting old, and at some point you have to an-
swer and explain to your team why this case is so old. So, to a large extent it’s your own responsibility,
but you and your colleagues know who is fast and has momentum and who’s slow, and the manager
knows this too; not when you’re new, but it’ll show, and it’s no secret that some people have action
plans and are monitored by a ‘specialist’. (Control Investigator)

The assertion that the ‘interior designer’ ‘doesn’t do anything’ is not a reference to
idleness. Quite the contrary, these investigators are typically believed to investigate ‘too
much’, while, on the other hand, ‘they never make decisions’. According to one inves-
tigator, the proclivity to investigate ‘too much’ or ‘keep on gathering’ is spurred by a
reluctance to let go of a ‘gut-feeling’:
Typically, they have an impulse which they should take as their starting point, but if they don’t get the
information that confirms that impulse, then they start looking at other things ... to see, ‘I’ll probably
find something in this case’. You can investigate a person for ages but still not find anything. It may
be a fear of closing the case that spurs them to decorate it […] they say they have a gut-feeling that
something is wrong, and you have to try to make them understand that now we haven’t found any-
thing that indicates that there is a wrongful payment. And even though you are forced to conclude
your investigation for now, the claimant will probably appear in the future in a new notification and
then you might have better information to work with. (Control Investigator)

The interior designers’ tendency to follow their ‘gut-feeling’ and to strive to investi-
gate until they find something incriminating is also portrayed as constituting a threat
to the ways the SIA is envisioned as operating. That is, investigators defined their task
as that of determining whether the initial ‘impulse’ or notification was correct—to go
beyond this initial suspicion by trying to establish whether there are other grounds for

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suspicion goes beyond the SIA’s legal mandate. We might surmise, then, that the in-
terior designers fail to accept the professional norm of sticking to the ‘impulse’. When
investigators seek to detect a violation that is not included in the ‘impulse’, they are
not able to make decisions and the case will eventually become a ‘red’ case. ‘Interior
designers’ are thus not idle, but rather they are unable to produce results that are re-
warded by the current control system.
And as the above quotation also suggests, there is a repertoire of measures that is
used to correct their abnormality and govern them through unfreedom. The control
and scrutiny of the managerial team are intensified. One interviewee in a managerial

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position e.g. acknowledged that she regularly checks what her ‘interior designers’ are
doing. There is continuous discussion and persuasion aimed at making ‘them’ more
normal. In addition, members of this group enjoy reduced discretion, are required to
follow individual action plans and have their cases cancelled by a superior. On rare oc-
casions, they are also reallocated to a different unit.
As a final remark, the main task of control investigators is to detect claimants who
wilfully seek to obtain more compensation than they are entitled to and in relation to
whom the investigator can intervene and make recovery payments, indemnity claims,
police referrals and reduce wrongful payments. But the implementation of the conser-
vative will to crack down on wrongful payments also turn investigators’ work perform-
ance and actions into a problem, which, in some cases, also means that repression is
directed inwards. Investigative work may, therefore, be viewed as precarious for both the
welfare recipient who may be reported to the police or forced to make repayments and
for the investigators who may be subjected to a whole series of disciplinary measures
if they fail to adhere to the norms conveyed by the system of controls outlined in this
article.

Conclusion
This article has examined how plural governmentalities coexist and are woven together
in the Swedish SIA’s attempts to shape the actions of control investigators. It has dem-
onstrated how the realization of a conservative agenda to promote a moral obligation
towards the Swedish social insurance scheme is translated into action via a control
system in which neoliberal technologies of performance and the bureaucratic logic
coexist and reinforce a particular image of how the control investigator should police
welfare fraud. The article has demonstrated how these rationales work together in ways
that induce control investigators to constantly act as active decision makers but also to
communicate efficiently, be transparent and seek to constantly evolve; that is to say, to
deliver on the SIA’s ‘promises to customers’. In short, by regularly quantifying and visu-
alizing each investigator’s legal decision-making, investigators are governed to avoid
inactivity and, in so doing, avoid the danger of having highly symbolic ‘red’ cases. In
this sense, then, techniques typically associated with neoliberalism are deployed to re-
inforce the image of the investigator as ‘machine-like’ (Skolnick 1966) figure.
Moreover, the article has shown that this form of governing implies that, in the
course of sorting and defining welfare recipients into subsets of rule violators (Ericson
et al. 2003; Headworth 2021: 18), investigators are themselves sorted and classified into
a subcategory of deviant investigators. In the local vernacular, this is manifested in the

787
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distinction between the real investigator and the ‘interior designer’. The latter figure
is not primarily construed as an idle investigator. Rather, the article suggests that the
‘interior designer’ is one who fails to deliver results that are valued in the local profes-
sional culture. That is to say, the interior designer fails to perform the ‘right’ activities
as they are defined by the systems of control implemented within the SIA. The interior
designer, then, mirrors what Van Cleve (2016: 58) in another context has referred to
as a ‘mope’ due to ‘incompetence or lack of motivation’ to conform with established
norms and processes.
In many respects, this style of governing mirrors the plurality and hybridity that char-

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acterizes the Swedish welfare state more generally. Undoubtedly, neoliberal governance
has transformed the welfare state throughout the Western world by promoting market
relationships, welfare retrenchment, efficiency, activation, responsibility, policing and
repression (Chunn and Gavigan 2004; Ericson 2007; Wacquant 2009; Gustafson 2011).
And as already mentioned, Sweden is by no means an exception. But the article has also
argued—as other scholars have with respect to other settings—that the neoliberal ra-
tionality does not exhaust forms of governmental power in Sweden. Rather, the article
highlights how different political rationalities work together in the broader attempt to
use criminalization and policing to shape the actions of welfare recipients.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, com-
mercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Acknowledgement
The author wishes to thank Bengt Larsson, Adam Crawford, Christina Garsten and
the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this
paper.

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