Social Diagnosis in the Labour Administration – Working More Efficiently? German Experiences since Hartz IV

For the past several years the German labour administration has classified unemployed persons according to the probability of their return to the labour market into special groups and assigned them to various action programmes. The conceptual relationship of this procedure to social diagnostics was largely ignored by the professional public. This article introduces some approaches to an adequate and differentiated classification. Against the backdrop of presently practised customer differentiation/profiling, we discuss future developments and propose practical solutions.