Holger Højlund

Voluntary Social Work as a Paradox

This article is written as an invitation to sociologists to rethink the concept of voluntary social work. Rather than comprehensive theory, it is an essay seeking to explore new ways of perceiving voluntary social effort. Voluntary work has traditionally been defined according to whether or not the subject of the study is organized and unpaid. However, these formal measures overlook the fact that much voluntary work is provided by people who do not fit the categories, and they fail to recognize the special nature of voluntary social work. In this article, we employ the works of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann to examine what happens when voluntary social work is constructed as a particular form of care work. In this perspective, all care work is formed in the context of opposing expectation structures, and voluntary work is no exception. On the one hand, we have the expectation structures of the persons involved in care; on the other, the expectations of the administrative system and the political, juridical and economic layers of organization. Our assertion is that voluntary social work is fundamentally paradoxical in nature, and is formed as an impossible compromise between interactional and organizational logic. The question is not how to resolve or dissolve this paradox, but how to render it productive as a certain tension in the opportunity for voluntary work. Before we elaborate this thesis further, however, we briefly outline the background of social work and the reason why, today, it is followed especially closely by the state. This means looking at the way in which the couplings between welfare practice and voluntary work have traditionally been defined. While the article refers only to Danish social policy, very similar tendencies can be observed in many other Western welfare societies (see, for example, Wolch, 1990; Smith and Lipsky, 1993; Eikaas, 2001; Lynn, 2002; Reisch and Sommerfeld, 2003).

Det sunde fællesskab

Den aktuelle problematisering af den sociale ulighed i sundhed anvendes som anledning til at diskutere de senere årtiers danske folkesundhedspolitikker i forlængelse af det sociale spørgsmål. Diskussionerne udfoldes i rammen af en genealogi, der anskueliggør de måder, hvorpå det moderne samfund tidligere har bekymret sig om sin egen enhed. Påstanden er følgelig, at aktuelle forestillinger om et etisk funderet og sundt fællesskab, udgør seneste knopskydning i det sociale spørgsmåls genealogi. Dels vises tilblivelsen af disse enhedsbestræbelser på et overordnet niveau, og dels søges det afslutningsvis demonstreret, hvordan forholdet mellem fællesskab og ansvar udspiller sig i de konkrete, praktiske bestræbelser, der iværksættes i lokalsamfundet, familien, skolen og på arbejdspladsen.

Hybrid inclusion — the new consumerism of Danish welfare services

Over the last decade, fundamental changes have occurred in Denmark with regard to welfare structures. These changes have taken place in the sectors of social care and health where decision-making structures have been reformed to become more consumer-oriented. This article examines elderly-care services specifically in order to explore how changes in decision making have altered structures of inclusion. The analysis is based on systems theory, which allows an exploration of how each of three decision-making systems has particular conditions for participation and inclusion. The article argues that inclusion has assumed a hybrid form.

Opening Systems Theory: A Note on the Recent Special Issue of Organization

Organization recently devoted a special issue to Niklas Luhmanns systems theory. Since Luhmanns work remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world, the issue was an important opportunity to introduce Niklas Luhmanns contribution to organization theory to this audience. Unfortunately, the primarily theoretical approach to systems theory presented in the issue may leave the reader wondering what, if anything, Luhmanns work might contribute to empirical research into organizations. This note is an attempt to draw attention to the potential of Luhmanns approach in this regard.

Organizations, Institutions and Semantics: Systems Theory Meets Institutionalism

Why do organization structures appear like they do? Where do organizations import their building blocks from? How do they develop? And why is it that in some areas organizations look so much alike, when in others they differ? These apparently innocent questions evoke complex discussions concerning the interplay between historically developed institutions, cultural semantics and social structures, which have been a well discussed topic in both sociological and organizational theory over the years (Staheli, 1997; Powell and Dimaggio, 1991). Both systems theory and sociological institutionalism have been engaged in questions concerning the relationship between modern society and its organizations and have on the face of it developed very different answers to them (Kneer, 2001; Pedersen et al., 2010). Despite this, or precisely because of this, we find it worthwhile to examine how the two theoretical frameworks can enrich each other. Instead of seeing them as two closed and oppositional universes, we will in the following try to open them up in order to let them be engaged in the same discussions.

Organizational Suspensions: A Desire for Interaction

The participation and involvement of citizens in decision making is a widespread ideal in welfare services. Participation has been widely studied in political science and has been ascribed different functions, such as making public institutions more responsive to the wishes and wants of citizens, improving the quality of decision making, and mobilizing people as part of a deliberative ideal of co-optations of interests (Oudshoorn et al. 2003; Newman and Clarke 2009; Barnes et al. 2007; Pedersen 2008; Kjaer and Pedersen 2010). In welfare services, and particularly in health care, the welfare service area that will be of interest in this chapter, both political bodies and professional associations have emphasized the importance of patient participation and shared decision making.

Chapter 4 The Emergence of a Third-Order System in the Danish Welfare Sector

Purpose – To analyze the emergence of new organizational forms in the Danish welfare sector. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing on Niklas Luhmann and Gunther Teubner, the research analyzes governmental documents, policy programs, action plans, and strategic documents. Findings – A partnering structure has emerged with a new politics of voluntarism, complex forms of integration and new imaginary distinctions between voluntariness and public care. This can usefully be conceptualized as aspects of the stabilization of a “third-order system.” The research identified a number of different managerial strategies for involvement in the system. Practical and social implications – Social welfare has become a mix of public and civil society values and norms, and extensive resources have been invested from both governmental and nongovernmental sides to build up shared competences for the new forms of partnering-based organization. However, to act according to the new principles of partnering, at the strategic and managerial level, the voluntary organizations have to behave in a schizophrenic manner – as both individual organizations and cooperational partners within the system. Research implications – The concept of “third-order system” is especially useful in analyzing mixed forms of management in the welfare sector. Originality – Different forms of radical organizational analysis are combined to develop a notion of “third-order system” in the welfare sector.

Fiery Soul Fantasies in a Project-based Welfare Setting: The Case of Project School Sports

ABSTRACT This article addresses how desire and fantasy function in a project-based welfare setting by examining a case from the context of Danish educational policy. Drawing on Žižek and others’ development of psychoanalytical concepts derived from Lacan, the paper shows through an interview-based empirical study how project managers believe in the project they manage through their fantasies about highly passionate ‘fiery souls’. However, as the paper argues such managerial fiery soul fantasies add a fantasmatic superstructure to the professional ideals in the reformed Danish public school in a way that challenges the profession category itself by eroding the difference between professionalism and volunteerism. The conclusion is that the secret of the fiery soul rather is its ability to make project-based welfare policy appear coherent than it is the almost supernatural abilities of particular individuals.

Operative links: The importance of combining perspectives in municipal strategies aimed at children’s and adolescents’ health

Aim: The subject of investigation is the ways in which the Danish municipalities organize prevention and health-promotion efforts for children and adolescents. The aim is to examine how health managerial ideas have been combined with health professional ideals concerning different health educational approaches. Methods: Mixed qualitative design: survey based on telephone interviews with health managers (n=72), personal and focus group interviews with health professionals (n=84) and pupils (n=108) from 18 school classes, and comparative case studies in five selected municipalities of various size and geographical location. The theoretical framework has three positions combining a public management perspective with a pedagogical perspective on health promotion. Results: The municipalities give high priority to prevention and health promotion directed toward children and adolescents and face a number of challenges at the management, collaboration, and knowledge levels. Missing links is one of the main points. Health managers and health professionals are preoccupied with some educational consequences of the health interventions, but they do not focus to the same extent on explicit health educational goals, learning content, or value clarification. Health pedagogy is often a matter of retrospective rationalization rather than the starting point of planning. Health and risk behaviour approaches override health educational approaches. Conclusions: Operational links between health education, health professionalism, and management strategies pose the foremost challenge. Operational links indicates cooperative levels that facilitate a creative and innovative effort across traditional professional boundaries. It is proposed that such links are supported by network structures, shared semantics, and situated pedagogical means of intervention.

Distinktion Scandivian Journal of Social Theory

Citizenship is a much contested concept and has undergone numerous transformations in its long history. The classical concept of legal and political citizenship that became dominant with the rise of the nation states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been the subject of numerous critiques and discussions (Isin 2002; Joppke 2007). The formal legal concept of citizenship has been criticized on the background of the evolving welfare states in the after war period for not taking the impact of class society and social issues into account (Marshall 1992). In Western welfare states today citizenship both as a social and political concept continues to be a major topic of discussion, especially on the background of welfare reforms in which citizens are expected to participate on both the level of decision making and services. In such an individualized setting the balance of duties and rights are tightly connected to the citizen as a single person and to a lesser degree to citizens as partakers in collective processes, critics have stated. Recognition is seen on the level of individual services, but not necessarily on the aggregated level of welfare policies and strategies (Banting and Kymlicka 2006; Boltanski and Chiapello 2005; Pedersen 2011). Another important critique has been directed against the alleged neutrality of purely formal citizenship. Citizenship has, from the point of view of its critics, always been conflated with ideologies of origin, of ethnic or racial homogeneity and culture (Yuval-Davis and Werbner 1999). The roles of cultural and ethnical diversity (Taylor 1992) as well as of gender differences (Lister 1997), not only for the practices of citizenship, but consequently also for how to depict the concept as such, have thus been subject of discussions. Formal citizenship is a rather thin concept and most of the critique of formal citizenship is based upon the supposition that citizenship as practice always rests on more substantial cultural and normative dimensions. A variety of theories of cultural citizenship thus adds thick descriptions of practices and imaginaries to the otherwise thinner concept of legal-political citizenship. These approaches to cultural citizenship encompass all types of rights regarding sexual, cultural, ethnic or other group-related specificities. But the cultural notion of citizenship concentrates not exclusively upon the execution of rights, it rather adds dimensions such as identity, cultural differences and the struggle for recognition to the concept of citizenship. Many scholars have pointed out that modern citizenship is comprised by new divides like gender, sexuality, race or religious beliefs (Lister 1997; Young 1989). How collective and individual identities are balanced with regard to multicultural and post-colonial societies poses new challenges for the conceptualization of citizenship (Benhabib 2002; Kymlicka 1996). Other current approaches that focus on alternative concepts of citizenship, such as postnational (Soysal 1994), flexible (Ong 1999), or cosmopolitan (Chandler 2003; Linklater 1998) citizenship manifest Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory Vol. 12, No. 3, December 2011, 249–253Editors Christian Borch – Copenhagen Business School, Denmark (editor-in-chief) Tiina Arppe – University of Helsinki, Finland Lisa Blackman – Goldsmiths, University of London, UK Mikael Carleheden – University of Copenhagen, Denmark Mitchell Dean – University of Newcastle, Australia Antje Gimmler – University of Aalborg, Denmark Carl-Göran Heidegren – Lund University, Sweden Thor Hvidbak – Danish Ministry of Finance, Denmark Holger Højlund – Copenhagen Business School, Denmark Lars Thorup Larsen – Aarhus University, Denmark Thomas Lemke – Institute for Social Research, Frankfurt am Main, Germany Ingunn B. Moser – Diakonhjemmet University College, Norway Urs Stäheli – University of Hamburg, Germany Svend Roald Thorhauge – Brøruphus Continuation School, Denmark Mikkel Thorup – Aarhus University, Denmark