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Since the 1990s, European welfare states have undergone substantial changes regarding their objectives, areas of intervention and instruments of use. There has been an increasing move towards the prioritisation of the involvement of citizens and the participation of civil society. This book focuses on the altered (powerful) conditions for encounters between citizens and welfare workers. It uses the concept of soft power, which, inter alia, allows for the investigations of the ways in which individuals manipulate each other in an effort to achieve their desired goals. The first part of the book discusses extracts from state-of-the-art research on professions and expertise, and the perception of power that guides the analyses. It also discusses the overall theoretical positioning when analysing encounters between welfare workers and citizens as co-productive and interactionist. The second part presents analyses to show how a bureaucratic context affects the encounter between administrators and clients, and how a market context affects the encounter between service providers and consumers/customers. The analysis of how a psychology-inspired context affects the encounter between coaches and coaches is also provided. All three contexts are to be perceived as Weberian ideal types, in other words, theoretical constructs based on observations of the real world. The concluding part of the book emphasises on the role of the principles of the bureaucracy, the norms from psychology, and the values of the market in the welfare encounter. Key points of the book are summarised in the conclusion.
’ encounters with welfare workers. In his famous book Asylums first published in 1961 (1974) based on fieldwork in a US state hospital, Goffman presents a thorough critique of a service ideal in work with psychiatric patients, a theme he readdressed some 20 years later in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association in 1982. Here he problematised how the interactional order of service implies the rule of equal and courteous treatment, which cannot always be practised in service transactions and even less so in the encounters between clients/ patients and
have been given too little attention and that studies such as Lipsky’s classic work on street-level bureaucrats and research inspired by him have focused too narrowly on these encounters as inherently problematic (Bartels 2013). For this reason, Bartels (2013: 470) urges researchers to pay more attention to what happens ‘in-between’ welfare workers and citizens than is currently done, as public encounters are indeed a relational, situated phenomenon. Although this call for more research that takes a relational approach to the study of welfare encounters is important
shift towards governance – and the inclusion of a more complex network of agencies in welfare work – has challenged the former dominant status of the bureaucracy in public institutions (Goss 2001: 1). Not only has this change altered the ways in which welfare work is organised, but it has in addition affected the encounter between citizens and professionals/welfare workers. This books focuses on the altered (powerful) conditions for encounters between citizens and welfare workers. However, the three key concepts of citizen, professional and welfare worker need to be
9 Conclusion Within the field of social sciences, it is widely recognised that current welfare states operate by a rationale of steering their citizens, which is vastly different from the approach of welfare states in the 1970s and 1980s. The shift of the 1990s towards a so-called governance approach to the citizens has gradually and over time increased in strength and has resulted in a particular framing of the encounter between welfare workers and citizens. A governance approach to the citizen has, among other goals, to do with prioritising the involvement of
5 The bureaucratic context: administrator–client Introduction Most welfare work takes place in organisations which resemble or have traits from bureaucracies. The principles and norms of bureaucracies are an important context for welfare work and have therefore resulted in the production of a great amount of scholarly work by political scientists and sociologists on how bureaucratic rules, procedures and principles affect the encounter between welfare workers and citizens.1 A dominant approach within this literature is to examine how welfare workers resolve the
7 The psychology-inspired context: coach–coachee Introduction The doctor [is] not just a physician but adviser, the nurse [is] not just [a] carer but trainer, patients [are] more than consumers – [they are] partners. (Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown cited in Needham 2011: 141) Today’s welfare work is not only influenced by principles of the b ureaucracy (Chapter 5) or the market (Chapter 6), as the quote from former Prime Minister Gordon Brown illustrates; both welfare workers and citizens are expected to take on the roles of advisers, trainers and
3 Soft power and welfare work Introduction Investigations of the encounter between welfare workers and citizens must use a concept of power that does not automatically privilege, for instance, the particular profession of welfare workers, as is done in much literature on professions. The concept of power must be based on a dialectic relationship between what can be called the objective structures and the subjective experiences of these structures (Giddens’ [1984] concept of structuration). To situate analyses of welfare encounters within the structure
Irish migrants was sometimes viewed as an opportunity to expand numbers by the Church in England, Catholic observers repeatedly expressed concerns over rural migrants’ ability to navigate the moral dangers of English culture at a time when the Church was anxious about the combined effects of welfarism, suburbanisation and rising affluence upon the cohesion of working-class Catholic life. 34 Involving the activities of parish priests and Catholic welfare workers, lay groups such as the Legion of Mary and the Young Christian Workers, post-war migrants formed the
What were schools for, why did they matter and what do they tell us about society? In this compelling account, the lived experience of the classroom illuminates the social history of interwar Britain. Drawing on a rich array of archival and autobiographical sources, it captures in vivid detail the individual moments that made up the minutiae of classroom life. Focusing on elementary schools in London – where global, imperial and national identities competed with local and family interests – it creates a mosaic of the educational experience across the capital between the wars. Interwar schools were not cut off from their surroundings: they were lynchpins of social life. This book charts the growing role they played in communities, the lives of young people, and the lives of their parents. It builds a story of the social relationships that shaped modern Britain: the overlapping interests of children, guardians, neighbours, teachers, school managers, inspectors, welfare workers, medics, clerics, local businesses and government officials. In doing so, it centres schools as key drivers of social change. By exploring crucial questions around identity and belonging, poverty and aspiration, class and culture, behaviour and citizenship, this book shows that schools were an integral part of interwar society. It provides vital context for twenty-first century debates about education, exploring how the same concerns were framed a century ago.