The international 'Social Work & Society' Academy - TiSSA 2009

New culture of welfare:
the clash between managerial ideology, public image and professional identity

Call for Papers

for the 7th annual TiSSA Plenum
in Vilnius, Lithuania, August 26 to 28, 2009

Welfare regimes are facing a fundamental transformation on a global scale. The shift of paradigms, procedures and perspectives becomes obvious in analysing the dominant social political terms like audit-system, efficiency and effectiveness, self-responsibility and activating. Moreover, the contradictory constructions of citizens on the one hand as powerful, flexible and responsible members in their communities and on the other hand as unpredictable, detached and threatening individuals mark a strain in current welfare formations. Social professions are challenged to positioning themselves within this new culture of welfare. The managerial ideology squeezes social professions to become more standardized, (specialized) and fragmented in order to implement evidence-based, countable and calculable practice in social services. The public image of social professions increasingly focuses on prevention and control. Social services are perceived as institutions of policing rather than institutions of civil society, characterized by the pressure of `demand and support`. Along with these utilization, attribution and perception social professions are confronted with a degradation of their interpretative authority in the struggle of the definition of social problems. The professional identity is continuously developed in the triangle of education, organisation and individual practice. In its progressive way, it comprises critical theory and practice as well as ethical and political contexts, includes a strong mode of reflexivity and the orientation on social justice and empowerment. But within the new culture of welfare, the professional identity is a contested claim. To keep the disposal of the definition and interpretation of professional identity is the central challenge of current social professions, emancipatory social practice and social work policy.

The 7th TiSSA Plenum is aimed at bringing together experiences from different countries of Europe and beyond relating to various dimensions of the new culture of welfare and examine them critically with a view to establishing an agenda for social work which is capable of facing these challenges critically and of conceptualizing a progressive perspective for invigorating ‘the social’. It is proposed that this will mean developing an emancipatory agency perspective of social professiona and an innovative understanding of professional identity within or against current welfare formations.