Achieving equity in welfare provision depends on accurate understandings of the work of street-level bureaucrats. We explore the role of emotions when caseworkers prioritise cases. While creaming of clients whom street-level bureaucrats consider ‘likely to succeed’ is acknowledged as a way of rationing scarce resources, research tends to reject emotional involvement as bias, or neglect emotions in creaming-practices. This may produce inaccurate portrayals of how street-level bureaucrats prioritise cases. We challenge existing perspectives by bridging the literature on creaming and the sociology of emotions. We did ethnography and interviews with Norwegian caseworkers tasked with integrating migrant clients into the labour market. These caseworkers cream cases according to institutional/discursive understandings of ‘star candidates’ and rely on their emotions as embodied knowledge. We conceptualise such processes as emotional creaming, which unpacks a central, yet overlooked part of how street-level bureaucrats prioritise cases. This modifies the depiction of emotions as mainly personal bias.

中文翻译：

---

情感奶油：街头官僚优先考虑移民客户“可能在劳动力市场整合中取得成功”

实现福利提供的公平取决于对基层官僚工作的准确理解。当个案工作者优先处理案件时，我们探讨情绪的作用。虽然街头官僚认为“可能成功”的客户被认为是分配稀缺资源的一种方式，但研究倾向于拒绝将情感参与视为偏见，或者在奶油实践中忽视情感。这可能会产生不准确的描述街头官僚优先处理案件。我们通过弥合关于奶油的文献和情感社会学来挑战现有的观点。我们对负责将移民客户融入劳动力市场的挪威个案工作者进行了民族志和访谈。这些个案工作者根据对“明星候选人”的制度/话语理解来筛选案件，并将他们的情绪作为具体知识。我们将诸如情感奶油之类的过程概念化，它揭示了街头官僚如何优先处理案件的一个核心但被忽视的部分。这改变了对情绪的描述，主要是个人偏见。