A welfare pinball machine: How immigrants with "language- problems" get stuck in the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV)

Immigrants often get "contained" in the welfare system in long-term dependency on social security benefits. Such containment is often described as the result of clients being "thrown" back and forth between services and not receiv-ing the aid they need. In this paper, we explore such mechanisms of client containment and illuminate how casework-ers' understanding and use of the category "language" contributes to disqualify (immigrant) clients from a series of services and benefits, thereby containing them in NAV. We build on five months of field work in a frontline NAV office, theories of street-level bureaucracy, and analytical concepts from institutional ethnography. We suggest the pinball machine as an analytical metaphor that helps identify and visualise how such "shuttlecock" problems create containment. In their categorization of cases, the caseworkers use institutional texts to bounce "language cases" between teams and departments. Despite efforts from the flipper team to keep the cases (the "balls") in play, cases that are defined as "language cases" end up in the drain of the pinball machine, "retired on social security benefits". By introducing the pinball machine as an analytical metaphor, we also hope to spur further investigation of the mecha-nisms by which cases can become contained within the welfare state.