Access to social services as a rite of integration: Power, rights, and identity

Abstract

Access to social services is a multifaceted and multifactorial process, involving social policy lines, services organization, and professional front line practices. It appears to have a crucial role in how personal social services work: depending on the way the process is handled, access to social services could provide a bridge to an inclusive and solidarizing community or worsen discrimination and marginalization. Many underline how studying the actual encounters between citizens and practitioners can provide a privileged site to highlight the interconnections between the abovementioned factors. This is the focus of our research that explored access in a specific Italian region using a case study strategy. After a pilot study, the main points of access to social services were identified, and three units were selected as best examples of different approaches. The three units were explored using mainly qualitative methods inspired by ethnography. We were able to gain in depth understanding of three cultural approaches to access, defined as the “ethical duty,” the “good organization,” and the “professional approach” and reach an in‐depth understanding of their impact on access. There is a vast literature on the power of street‐level bureaucrats, seen as similar to gatekeepers. However, our research suggests that specific organizational cultures also play an important part: different organizational cultures may impact the implementation of local social policy, the organizational procedures, and social workers' practices.

The Sustainability of Public Social Services: A Qualitative Study

“…With respect to the lack of coordination reported by study participants and in the literature, there is an evident need for more collaboration between the various services that make up the social services in order to provide quality care for users [5], and for more collaboration in health care, as demanded by healthcare professionals [18]. Inter-professional collaboration in health care is a fundamental tool in user services [38].…”

“…Since the global economic crisis in 2008, social inequality has increased and equality of opportunity for many people has dramatically decreased [1,2]. The negative consequences in social regulation have also been affected in many European countries [3,4], which have dismantled their social policies [5,6]. The countries of the European Union face a constant challenge of economic progress, social cohesion and political stability [7,8].…”

“…The literature on Spain indicates that these constant changes in social policy are undermining the fundamental pillars of social protection provided through the public social services system [18,19]. This system is intended to guarantee social welfare and well-being [20,21] and is implemented through public social policies [5]. However, years of austerity measures and cutbacks have limited the system's capacity to meet user needs [22,23].…”

Mothers' negotiation of welfare support: the emergence of privatized entitlement

“…A recent empirical study was able to substantiate Acker's (2008) view in the German context, exposing the power of social location (class/ethnicity) and life course turning points on the likelihood of being deemed eligible for supportor, otherwise, to be left in poverty (Fuchs, 2017). Such an empirical assessment of reasons underlying the ongoing failure to secure support contradicts, to a certain extent, the analytical insight presented by Fargion et al (2019), which attributed a professional approach to Italian social workers. These authors see social workers as utilizing their power to influence other SLBs into taking a positive approach, listening to applicants and securing their access.…”

Negotiating Quality for Social Work: A Participatory Research Project in South Tyrol

“…The generation of practice-oriented knowledge has lately been the subject of much research and points in the direction of transdisciplinary approaches (Choi & Pak, 2006; Nicolescu, 2008; Uggerhøj, 2011); their high relevance for social work has been recognized (Evans, 2017) because such approaches do justice to the multifaceted nature of social processes. Therefore, the criteria to identify best practice in a variety of situations cannot be defined in reference to the same fixed indicators but have to be determined through interactive processes, just as very few social work situations can be resolved by standardized forms of intervention (Fargion et al, 2018).…”