Power and Welfare

Understanding Citizens' Encounters with State Welfare

Nanna Mik-Meyer, Kaspar Villardsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136286636
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Public Finance
• Index: Economics

In the welfare provision of today, power takes both the shape of juridical sanctions and of attractive offers for self-development. When state institutions punish criminals, remove children at risk, or enforce sanctions upon welfare recipients the question of power is immediately urgent. It is less readily evident that power is at stake when institutions educate, counsel or 'empower' citizens. This book offers a framework for understanding and analyzing these complex and implicit forms of power at play in the encounters between citizens and welfare institutions.

Taking as its starting point the idea that power takes many different shapes, and that different approaches to power may be necessary in the diverse contexts where citizens encounter welfare professionals, the book demonstrates how significant social theorists, spanning from Goffman to Foucault, can be used for inquiries into these encounters. Guiding the reader from their epistemological foundations to lucid 'state of the art' case examples, the book unpacks each of its six theoretical perspectives, and explains selected key concepts and explicates their potential for analysis. The final chapter discusses the usefulness of the theoretical approaches, their weaknesses and indicates some possibilities of theoretical integration.

Including case studies of patients, nursing home residents, unemployed people, homeless people, and young offenders, from the USA, Denmark, France, Sweden, Canada, and Australia, Power and Welfare is designed for students and researchers of social policy, sociology, anthropology, political science, education, nursing and social work.

1	Introduction

Power is very much at the heart of contemporary debate about the encounter between state and citizen. Nowadays, whether you are a researcher, lecturer, practitioner or the head of an institution, you are required to reflect on the forms of power that come into play when citizens encounter the institutions of the state. On the one hand, you are required to reflect on how to place certain limits on the scope of power exercised by the state and its institutions vis-à-vis individuals and groups whose autonomy must be maintained and respected. Such reflections on the limits of power are accompanied by forms of governing that are often presented to citizens as attractive offers, using positive terms such as empowerment, coaching, self-realisation and partnership. One example of this is when social work and health care use dialogue-based initiatives designed to make clients’ and patients’ own words and values the basis for interventions. The aim of dialogue-based initiatives is, in this case, to avoid welfare institutions imposing goals and values on people that do not stem “from within”, in other words from the individual’s own free will (Karlsen & Villadsen 2008). A widely held conviction in public policy debates is that welfare institutions must avoid the conventional action plans and expert targets that too readily lead to accusations of “clientisation”, “learned helplessness” and “hospitalisation”. The ideal often voiced to avoid this risk is a form of power that promotes and increases the individual’s capacity for self-government or taking up an “active citizenship”. On the other hand, we witness, in contemporary welfare policy, trends towards an increasing use of sovereign, paternalistic power in relation to specific individuals and in specific contexts.

A number of authors have pointed out that the contemporary dominant form of governing, referred to in this book as “neo-liberal governing” or “advanced liberal governing”, does not imply that sovereign power is completely abandoned, but rather that the exercise of sovereign power constitutes an inherent feature of modern Western societies. Sovereign power, in the form of coercion, incarceration and domination, can, for instance, be exercised by referring to the absence of willpower in the subject – alcohol and drug abusers, people suffering from mental illness or “uncivilised” people in the former colonies etc. (Valverde 1996, Dean 2002). However, sovereign state power is also exercised in relation to individuals and groups deemed to pose a threat to the health, integration or economic well-being of society, illustrated by the way some states treat immigrants and refugees.

The coexistence of these two forms of power creates ambiguous forms of governance. Politicians talk about the desirability of reducing the role of the state and promoting the autonomy and self-determination of institutions and citizens, while at the same time, central government tightens control and imposes sanctions in a number of spheres. Examples of this include the requirement for curricula that are formulated centrally but must be enacted locally in schools and educational institutions. Other examples include calls for local authorities and institutions to develop their own integration initiatives at the same time as the government places specific requirements on the content, objectives and sanctions of integration policy.

Critical evaluations of the recent reforms of public services, grouped under the heading New Public Management (NPM), identify a tension between political targets for imposing uniform standards (rationalising costs and ensuring compliance with legislation) and the need to allow local institutions to adapt services to local needs, develop new procedures and establish their own values. The governing paradox consists of how the state can act in an authoritarian “top-down” fashion at the same time as it guarantees local autonomy (Clarke & Newman 1997). Institutions therefore often treat people both as administrative cases to be processed by reference to sovereign state law, and as individuals with particular needs and potentials that must be given specific attention.

This ambition to treat the citizen as unique is illustrated by the current ideal in treatment facilities, schools and social work offices etc., of accepting the citizen “as he or she is” – in other words, as a whole and unique human being who must be taken into account in his/her particularity (Villadsen 2007). However, these institutions are characterised by distinct professional logics or rationalities, which guides how the staff observe and encounter the citizen (Mik-Meyer 2007, 2010a). What is considered an ailment requiring treatment, a barrier to integration, a factor motivating the individual to change or measure their capacity to work etc., is fundamentally conditioned by the professional codes applied by the social workers. In other words, particular discursive and practical frameworks shape the encounter between the citizen and the professional – and condition decisions on eligibility for benefits, for placement on job-creation schemes or education/training courses, as well as for diagnosis, treatment and so on. In this way, power, knowledge, intervention and professional logic are closely interwoven in the encounter between the citizen and the state.

Gubrium and Holstein’s 2001 anthology, Institutional Selves – Troubled Identities in a Postmodern World, offers an excellent description of the impossibility of separating the institutional setting – and its specific forms of power, knowledge and intervention – from in-depth analyses of the encounter between the citizen and the state. These are elements that create specific “institutional identities”. “Authentic selves” do not lurk deep inside the individual (Gubrium & Holstein 2001: 1). What we currently understand as our “personal self” is “increasingly deprivatized […], our most private essence is now being constructed and interpreted under the auspices of decidedly public going concerns”, as Gubrium and Holstein put it (2001: 2 – italics in the original).

Advanced liberalism

Extensive empirical evidence of encounters between professionals and citizens in various welfare institutions across advanced liberal societies reveals that values such as efficiency, personal responsibility, freedom, empowerment and self-help presently play a key role in professionals’ encounters with the citizen (Dean 1995, Howe 1996, Mik-Meyer 2007, 2010a, Villadsen 2007, Michailakis & Schirmer 2010). We choose the terms “neo-liberalism” and “advanced liberalism” to refer to these values and new practices. Advanced liberalism is used by Rose (1996a) to point out several tendencies in contemporary Western, liberal societies. First, he observes that a new relationship between expertise and the subjects of government has emerged. Increasingly, experts must exercise a facilitating form of power that makes alliances with its citizens. Experts must seek “to align the self-governing capacities of subjects with objectives of political authorities by means of persuasion, education and seduction, rather than coercion” (Rose 1996a: 50). Second, advanced liberal forms of governing give preference to indirect mechanisms of power, or to political action that keeps the subjects of government at a distance. They use a range of techniques that can translate the objectives of welfare authorities into the choices and commitments of both professionals and their clients. Examples of this include instances when the expert adviser gives way to self-help manuals, ambulant “self-treatment”, and the telephone helpline “as practices whereby each individual binds themselves to expert advice as a matter of their own freedom” (Rose 1996a: 58).

While we wish to pay attention to these “advanced liberal” forms of exercising power in the encounter between welfare institutions and citizens, we also wish to maintain that the emphases on self-help, willpower and responsibility are not exclusive, and we are thus attentive to how these new ways of exercising power coexist, intertwine or contrast with sovereign and disciplinary forms of power. Apart from taking inspiration from the diagnostics of Rose and other governmentality writers, we emphasise that the concept of neo-liberalism in this context does not refer to a coherent political programme, a distinct historical epoch or a political philosophy. Instead, the purpose of the concept of neo-liberalism is to focus on a particular way of reasoning regarding the exercise of government and the practical invention of particular technical means of governing. We thus wish to invite the researcher or student to avoid an abstract, a priori and too hasty critique (“this is simply neo-liberal domination”) and to give priority to the careful study of practices.

In line with Howe (1996), we also detect changes in the more specific conditions that characterise welfare institutions’ – and their professionals’ – encounters with the citizen. It is a process that has been changing the nature of social work since the 1980s, succinctly described as the transformation from “diagnostic caseworker to care manager, from applied social scientist to service coordinator” (Howe 1996: 77). Howe may arguably describe this shift rather bluntly but it is relevant nevertheless to consider his key question: “What form does social work take when it no longer finds itself in a ‘discourse’ of discipline but rather one of radical liberalism?” (Howe 1996: 78). Commentators like Howe identify that a new context is emerging, one that increasingly places what are referred to as neo-liberal values at centre stage in current welfare provision. This is not, of course, a development that completely removes the professions and their particular codes of social work from the equation. It does, however, affect the professions’ room for manoeuvre, and reconfigures the authorised assumptions about the type of individual that they are to fabricate. Research indicates that welfare recipients are assumed to be capable of developing and freeing themselves from need and dependency – a form of a self-actualising that revolves around personal responsibility, choice and autonomy (Rose 1999, Cruikshank 1999, Villadsen 2007, Mik-Meyer 2010a). There is a widely evident idea that the citizen in the role of a welfare dependent should recognise him or herself as the author of (and the potential rescuer from) his or her misfortune.

This transformation of social policies, which we are currently witnessing in advanced liberal societies, involves not only a shift in power structures (from state to market) and responsibility (from public to private domains), but also concerns who the citizen is fundamentally imagined to be and which obligations are considered legitimate in relation to citizenship. The increasingly pervasive process of individualisation allegedly experienced across modern Western societies (Giddens 1991, Bauman 1992) means that citizens are increasingly held responsible for their own situation – their health, learning, treatment or integration. The ideal citizen is one who acts responsibly, is strong-willed, and acknowledges that he or she plays the essential role in solving his or her own problems (Miller 2001, Mik-Meyer 2010a, Lessenich 2011). These normatively loaded conceptions of the ideal citizen create new conditions for the welfare institutions’ encounters with him or her. As mentioned previously, it is the conditions for this encounter – and their consequences for the relationship between citizen and welfare provision – that will be studied in this book.

The changes in social work can also be related to a series of parallel trends that impact on both the professionals’ encounter with the citizen and the institutional conditions for the professionals’ activities more generally. We use the term social worker in a broad sense that includes integration workers, therapists, health advisers and other professionals who provide care and encourage individuals to undertake lifestyle changes. We wish to be able to study how ideals for personal development are at play both in relation to the citizen (demands for self-development) and in relation to the requirements placed on professionals to undertake a particular type of self-government. Welfare institutions are therefore required to use particular techniques that regulate practices and promote a sense of personal responsibility in the institution’s users. The challenge increasingly evident in welfare provision is that the citizen is expected, voluntarily and freely, to take up politically determined development goals and obligations. As such, although services and projects that target the unemployed, the ill, immigrants and disaffected youngsters etc. are rooted in political goals stipulated centrally or by local authorities, social work now expects the targeted individuals to take up active responsibility for these goals.

Both authoritarian and facilitating

Rather than view this conflict of interests as the clash between irreconcilable demands that it appears to be, we believe mutually opposing trends such as the above-mentioned should be seen as reflecting a new kind of ambivalent or even paradoxical governance (Clarke & Newman 1997, Villadsen 2012). Contemporary welfare policies display liberal ideals of freedom by emphasising the need for the reduction of state control and expenditure, and for institutions and citizens to be made more self-responsible (Mik-Meyer & Roelsgaard Obling 2012, Villadsen 2012). At the same time, more and more governing techniques are being devised from central authorities, the purpose of which, in addition to ensuring the optimal utilisation of resources through detailed management, is to propel the institution/citizen towards the ideal state, to become: responsible, strong-willed and in complete self-control (Mik-Meyer 2010b). Howe would appear to have identified important changes in the encounter between professionals and clients when he asserts that the nature of the encounter has evolved: “From interpersonal to economic, from therapeutic to transactional, from nurturing and supportive to contractual and service-orientated” (Howe 1996: 93). These are transformations that give rise to new – and often mutually contradictory – conditions for the welfare institutions’ encounter with the citizen, as the logic of economic efficiency and standardised services seeks to breach the former enclosures of welfare expertise. This means that we need to pay attention to how the goals of welfare reforms are weighed against professional discretion and specific values, including for example, holistic care.

As the analyses presented in the book will show, such conflicting trends are not only discernible in the structural conditions for the work carried out, but they also reappear in the practices that seek to define the problems and needs of the institutions’ target groups. However, it should be remembered that political goals are not introduced into professional practices in a mechanical and uncontested manner. In the specific encounter between the welfare institution and the citizen, the professional staff, who have professional loyalties insofar as they refer their decisions to their professional values and guard their right to define the specific content of their work, remain a highly significant factor (see Fox 2001, Loseke 2001, Mik-Meyer 2011).

This complex, structuring aspect of the encounter between citizen and professional is the theme of the book. We engage with this theme by demonstrating how selected sociological approaches can be used to identify and analyse how power is at play in the structuring of the encounters and is actively played out in the specific encounters. A key relevance to our concerns is that traditional forms of professionalism and welfare services are affected by and intertwine with neo-liberal governance strategies in new and complex ways. Studies carried out in this contemporary terrain of conflicting political and professional rationalities that interact the demands of service-users, require, we believe, a complex concept of power.

First, this concept of power needs to be capable of encapsulating the particular rationality of government that characterises advanced liberal societies. It has to be capable of encapsulating the fact that the freedom citizens are encouraged to practice will always assume certain programmatic forms. As a consequence, government in neo-liberal societies inevitably, and always, operates with certain naturalised images of who the citizen is and what he or she is capable of (Gubrium & Holstein 2001). Since the idea is to ensure or realise what is assumed to pre-exist governmental intervention, at least latently, for example self-responsibility, the will to work, and the desire to be social (Michailakis & Schirmer 2010), neo-liberal forms of government must always keep a sceptical eye on the limits of its own power. This type of government tries to shape, facilitate and influence the actions of individuals and their self-relations, yet must avoid assuming responsibility for them or stifling the willpower assumed to reside in each individual. Neo-liberalism, then, should not be viewed as a monolithic or totalising programme that enforces its values upon society in a uniform and pre-specified manner (Gordon 1991). Rather, neo-liberalism uses forms of government that recognise that their results cannot be imposed or predetermined, but that they depend fundamentally on the activities of the governed, who are, after all, “free individuals”. There is a recognition that power does not emanate from a centre, but that the exercise of power is rather about installing certain tendencies and norms into individuals’ relationships with each other. These kinds of reflections on the power evident in contemporary programmes for the reform of welfare services are rather advanced, and call for analytical tools that match their complexity (Villadsen & Karlsen 2012).

Second, our concept of power must also be able to grasp the complexity in modern welfare provision. Hence, our object of analysis is a heterogeneous range of institutions, divided into distinct professional and institutional systems, each characterised by a significant degree of autonomy, a particular field of discretion, and a certain professional blindness. When different groups of professionals encounter an individual – for instance, a homeless person with a substance-abuse problem or a pain-afflicted patient – they simply do not see, in some cases, the same problem, or the same needs and potentials, for that matter (Mik-Meyer 2010b, Mik-Meyer & Obling 2012, Villadsen 2011a). In other words, the power exercised in encounters between the citizen and welfare professionals is not uniform, coherent or predetermined in a modern society with a differentiated division of labour between welfare specialisms. Modern welfare services are permeated by a range of distinct professional logics and practices, and the researcher must take into account their different rationalities, forms of co-operation, mutual support and occasional rivalries.

To that end, we need an analytical perspective that can view power as shaped in the particular institutional-professional context as well as in the specific encounter between the citizen and the institution. In brief, power must be seen as immanent to its context and should not be regarded as overarching, unidirectional or essentially repressive. In this book, different forms of power are conceptualised by terms such as discipline, government, pastoral power, dominance, symbolic violence, strategy and more. Common to these theoretical concepts is that they view power as productive, in the sense that both citizens and professionals continuously reproduce specific practices and institutions that set frameworks for the relationships that both professionals and citizens may establish with each other and with themselves. Or, in other words, power produces subjectivities, (dis)positions and relations.

Choice of analytical approaches

Common to the sociological approaches presented in this book, is that power is not reduced to a prevailing ideology that happens to have installed itself in the mentalities of professionals, nor do the approaches attribute the source of power to a single source such as the state apparatus, class relations or modes of production. Our choice of constructivist and predominantly post-structural approaches brings to the book the idea that power must be viewed as intrinsic to social relations, including the use of language, institutional practice and micro-interactions that give shape to welfare provision. This implies that there are not encounters between professionals and citizens “and then, in addition, alongside or on top of these relations, mechanisms of power that modify or disturb them, or make them more consistent, coherent, or stable” (Foucault 2007: 2 – our italics). Or, putting it differently, encounters between professionals and citizens inevitably involve plays of power. Moreover, we do not work with a single theory of power, but with a framework of different analytical strategies that highlight different problematics of power in relation to the encounter between welfare professionals and the citizen. We wish to demonstrate that this encounter may be explored from a variety of analytical approaches that produce different research questions, including how the encounter between the citizen and the professional plays out as micro-interaction, how the encounter is shaped by specific power technologies or organisational frameworks, how it is embedded in particular social fields or guided by certain perceptions of risk, and how certain historical forms of knowledge re-emerge in professional practice.

We have selected a number of theoretical approaches that we consider particularly relevant and effective as critical tools for analysis. These perspectives assume that the actors are woven into social structures that limit and shape the ac...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Foucault: The flexible critique of welfare
• 3 Goffman: Interaction and identity negotiations
• 4 Bourdieu: Field, symbolic violence and domination
• 5 Luhmann: Welfare in communicative systems
• 6 Neo-institutional theory: Myths and legitimacy
• 7 Risk theory: Normality, deviation and neo-liberalism
• 8 Integrating the approaches
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index