Managing Marginality in Railway Stations: Beyond the Welfare and Social Control Debate

Abstract

How to rid railway stations of the marginalized people who congregate in them? This is the problem faced by railway companies which are seeking to maximize the commercial drawing power of their spaces. The limitations of a strictly repressive policy are prompting railway companies to fund non-profit community-based organizations to carry out social policies aimed at the marginalized. Based on two studies in the railway stations of Lyon and Milan, the article analyses how this strategy was implemented. Our analysis involves differentiating our work from two hypotheses: the irenic hypothesis, which sets social policies in opposition to security policies, and the malefic hypothesis, which equates social policies with security policies. The work of the non-profit community-based organizations shows that the boundary between social policy and security policy is a tenuous one, since the principal aim is to disperse marginalized people and move them away from the station. Control of marginalized people is based on the use of incentive structures rather than on coercion. The community organizations also have to retain control of their philanthropic legitimacy, which they are selling to the railway companies, but which they are also putting at risk. Focusing on the agency of the actors allows us to avoid both an irenic analysis (in which 'human' and 'just' social policies come to the aid of the marginalized) and a malefic analysis (in which social policies are merely security policies in disguise). Copyright (c) 2009 The Author. Journal Compilation (c) 2009 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Governing Delinquency Through Freedom

“…29 This methodological stance has implications for my relationship to what is known as 'critical' sociology: rather than hypothesizing from the outset that rationales of domination or social control are at work in the LA measure, I chose instead to 'take the actors seriously' in order to see 'what they do, how, and why.' Like other authors looking to understand concrete forms of hybridization (Bonnet 2009), I believe that it is by taking a 'bottom-up' approach to the institution and thus by re-emphasizing the empirical grounding of my investigation that I can refine and complicate the dichotomous categories that shape juvenile justice policies (education versus repression, minors as subjects of rights versus minors as objects of an intervention, and so on).…”

“…Taking a more empirical approach, Bonnet (2009) suggests understanding this hybridization in terms of the concrete power relations and mutual dependencies at play between the actors involved in a given apparatus. In his view, which I share, this perspective avoids the pitfalls of engaging in a normative debate that either views social policies as necessarily better than security policies or, conversely, views the welfare state as a tool of social control (Bonnet 2009(Bonnet , 1031. In conclusion to his study, Bonnet observes that, while the balance of power is not in favour of social welfare actors, they do enjoy sufficient latitude to be able to maintain the 'social nature' of their work.…”

Countering terrorism and radicalisation: Securitising social policy?

“…To be sure, the questions of security and their constitutive relation to ethnic, racial or religious categorisations have formed a substantial part of the literature in social policy, in particular for those who have approached welfare policy through the problématique of social control (Foucault, 1977; Donzelot, 1979; Cohen, 1985; Garland, 2001 - for a contemporary elaboration, see Bonnet, 2009). The policies contained in the Contest strategy and the PREVENT programme, and the blurring of social and security policy they entail, can indeed be traced back to two key processes that have structured the UK’s social policy in past years: the managerial turn of the 1970s and the racialised reframing of social and police work in the 1980s.…”

A relocalização dos indivíduos sem-abrigo no espaço público

“…Mas é também o caso dos serviços assistencialistas onde, como foi referido, ninguém se dirige se não viver na rua ou trabalhar neles. Podemos, assim, ver que há uma complementaridade entre a forma de actuar das instituições da assistência e de repressão que, em conjunto, relocalizam os indivíduos sem-abrigo em heterotopias (Snow e Anderson, 1993;Zeneidi-Henry, 2002;Terrolle, 2004;Feldman, 2006;Bonnet, 2009). Mesmo a acção policial de expulsão dos espaços é -pelo menos, por vezes -justificada pela possibilidade de reencaminhar os sujeitos sem-abrigo para fora da rua, precisamente para os locais pré-definidos onde se encontram os serviços assistencialistas (Zeneidi-Henry, 2002;Terrolle, 2004;Bonnet, 2009).…”

“…Podemos, assim, ver que há uma complementaridade entre a forma de actuar das instituições da assistência e de repressão que, em conjunto, relocalizam os indivíduos sem-abrigo em heterotopias (Snow e Anderson, 1993;Zeneidi-Henry, 2002;Terrolle, 2004;Feldman, 2006;Bonnet, 2009). Mesmo a acção policial de expulsão dos espaços é -pelo menos, por vezes -justificada pela possibilidade de reencaminhar os sujeitos sem-abrigo para fora da rua, precisamente para os locais pré-definidos onde se encontram os serviços assistencialistas (Zeneidi-Henry, 2002;Terrolle, 2004;Bonnet, 2009). Ao existirem estes espaços próprios para esta população, a crueldade da negação do direito ao espaço público (leiase: a sua conversão em espaço público) a quem já não tem direito a um espaço privado é diminuída na representação que o imaginário colectivo cria sobre o fenómeno dos sem-abrigo.…”