Detective Work and Invisible Assessments: Unpacking Discretionary Processes in Welfare Decision-Making

Frontline discretion serves as a core function in welfare delivery. However, little is known about the process between input and output of discretionary assessments. As welfare administrations increasingly explore automated decision-support systems to improve consistency and efficiency, it becomes crucial to understand the mechanisms and reasoning that underpin caseworkers' decisions. Such understanding is essential to inform future discussions about how automation can coexist with or complement human discretion effectively. Based on extensive fieldwork at frontline offices in Norway's largest welfare institution, Nav, this paper explores how caseworkers use discretion when they gather and interpret information in the assessment of a person's need for welfare services. Our analyses show that caseworkers engage in detective-like searches for clues across multiple sources of information and that the reasoning guiding these searches often goes undocumented and, therefore, remains invisible. The discretionary assessments are built from numerous small judgements about how to interpret contextual factors and subtle nuances in information, each contributing to the final decision. Unpacking these processes, the article reframes discretion as a continual, situated and interpretive process, moving beyond traditional frameworks in the street-level bureaucracy literature. The findings contribute to an ongoing scholarly conversation that challenges portrayals of street-level work as a routine or easily automatable process.