The Power of Citizens and Professionals in Welfare Encounters

Abstract

This book addresses the crucial issue of the interrelation between macro and micro structures within citizen-professional encounters of the modern welfare state. Since the 1990s, European welfare states have moved towards a so-called governance approach; a bottom-up approach that emphasises the activeness, engagement, coproduction, and cooperation of citizens. This framing of the encounter means that citizens are no longer best described as the passive clients of the bureaucracy and welfare workers are no longer automatically the powerful party of the encounter. However, the welfare encounter is structured by other powerful factors as well; factors such as market values and bureaucratic principles which often pull in different directions than the governance approach to citizens. This book sets out to explore how these various factors in combination affects the client-professional encounter. Aside from chapters on the sociology of professions, symbolic interactionism, power in welfare encounters, bureaucratic principles, market values, norms from psychology, the book includes a double-length chapter that qualifies the conclusions through empirical analyses of encounters between citizens and doctors, caseworkers and social workers. The book is aimed for academics, post-graduates, and undergraduates within sociology, anthropology and political science.