Mobilising the sport-based community: the construction of social work through rationales of advanced liberalism

Abstract

This article focuses on the forms and conditions of welfare provision and social work in the transforming welfare state. The Sport Programme (SP) is a municipal sport-based social intervention launched in response to segregation causing tensions in society, crime, and social exclusion. The programme constitutes a case for examination. Sport activities for youths at risk in the SP are assumed to foster a sense of community and social cohesion. The article investigates how ‘the community’ is constructed as a space for social inclusion. A variety of statements articulated by policy makers and municipal administrators are analysed from a governmentality perspective. The analysis suggests that ‘community’ is formed by distinguishing the SP from public welfare and social work and by mobilising civil society in the intervention. Public welfare is problematised as bureaucratic and insufficient, whereas civil society is associated with the potency of voluntarism, authentic leadership, and personal relations based on common identity and shared experiences. By involving a social entrepreneur, the SP mobilises and activates civil society as a means of responding to social problems, forming ‘community’ as a space with a ‘human touch’. Such a partnership re-distributes responsibility for responding to social problems to a variety of agencies. It is discussed how the SP enables role model identification as the primary governing rationale and how this incorporates elements of de-professionalisation in social work. Consideration is given to challenges for social work and to how activating ‘community’ illustrates tendencies and transformations in contemporary Swedish welfare provision.