Reproducing or Counteracting Inequality: Challenges in Social Work with homeless/ness

Social work with homeless/ness in Sweden is usually performed by social services in local municipalities highly dependent on local, non-state actors, especially landlords’ goodwill, to cooperate with social services and support vulnerable peoples’ housing. The social services dependency on such actors is challenging and exploitation by landlords can affect the actual organization of social services as they might incorporate, rather than counteract, inequality. Tilly's “categorical inequality” is used analytically to highlight how social services handle external pressures from landlords in an ongoing process of implementing Housing First (HF). Building on interviews and data collected 2019-2022, results show that negotiations across social services organizational borders are critical for the organization of social work. It shows how inequality may manifest in different organizational layers once incorporated into the social services organization, by example mapping organizational inertia. Inequal categories and the effect of such are reproduced in layers of the organization during an implementation process and counteract the implementation of HF. The hope is that this knowledge will enhance the understanding of organizational inertia as well as work as a backdrop to develop strategies to resist incorporating and reproducing inequality.