Digital Welfare and Administrative Entrapment in Guidance Systems

In recent years, European welfare systems have undergone an intense process of digital transformation, with platforms and data-processing infrastructures increasingly mediating access to services, case management, and guidance practices. While policy discourse often frames digitalisation as a driver of personalisation and empowerment, critical scholarship highlights its stratifying effects, particularly for vulnerable and racialised populations. This chapter examines how guidance policies at the intersection of education and labour market activation are reorganised within datafied welfare regimes. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research in Southern Italy across three Public Employment Service offices and three secondary schools, the study compares two platforms with different institutional configurations: SIISL in employment services and UNICA in school guidance. The chapter introduces the concept of administrative entrapment to describe how digital infrastructures stabilise unequal trajectories, narrowing future possibilities within welfare systems.