Reforming youth transition support with the multi-agency approach? A case study of the Finnish one-stop guidance centers

Finland is trying to expedite and support young people?s transition to productive adulthood in various ways. Face-to-face guidance in multi-agency service points, the One-Stop Guidance Centers, has formed a central means for the last three governments. In these centres, a young person under the age of 30 can get help from different professionals in matters related to work, education and everyday life. This study asks how the centres define their tasks and target groups, and how the centres relate to the service reformation. The data consists of peer-learning surveys for the employees of the centres, conducted in 2015, 2016 and 2017.The research approach is inspired by membership categorisation analysis (MCA) pointing out that institutions think and act by means of categories: they produce client classifications and problem definitions, which define their service provision. The data analysis mixes MCA and content analysis. The centres have no dominant administrative sector or profession that would provide the target settings and categorisations to be directly applied in their work. Instead, these are negotiated inter-professionally and locally. The analysis shows that the employees reflect their task against the problems of the old service provision system. The centres want to stand apart from the bureaucratic and siloed service provision system as a youth-centred and holistic service. Developing a new way of working necessarily means questioning the conventional categories of clients and actions. Yet, the possibility to develop the ?new? varies between the professional groups and the geographic areas. The detailed and detached legislation of different administrative branches also delimit it.