The shifting worlds of welfare surveillance and the consolidation of criminalizing logics

This article examines institutional and ideological shifts in Danish welfare surveillance, focusing on the transition from traditional, direct control to semi-automated, remote welfare eligibility assessments. Drawing on the Pragmatic Sociology of Critique, we conceptualize welfare eligibility assessments as control tests rooted in competing ideological worlds: a domestic world of proximity and discretion, and an industrial world of professional detachment and standardization. Based on interviews and observations in municipalities and at the central payment authority, we show how the controversy surrounding municipal control tests contributed to the marginalization of face-to-face practices. We argue that the reconfiguration of control tests—rather than technologies alone—plays a central role in reshaping the conditions under which welfare eligibility control may adopt criminalizing logics.