Marcus Knutagård

Innovation in Social Welfare and Human Services

1. Innovation in Social Welfare and Human Services: Introduction 2. What is Innovation? 3. Social Innovations: A Diffuse Concept? 4. Innovations in Public Service 5. Public Innovation: A Question of Power? 6. Levels of Innovation 7. Obstacles to Innovation 8. Innovating: Not Easy, but it is Imperative

Mending the gaps in social work education and research: two examples from a Swedish context

ABSTRACT The gap-mending concept is an analytical tool that helps teachers and researchers in social work to reflect upon what, in their practice, increases, maintains or mends gaps between professionals and service user groups. The article suggests a theoretical background on how gaps in social work practice can be challenged. This includes theories about power and recognition. It then moves on to describe the development of gap-mending strategies in research and education at the School of Social Work at Lund University. Lund University was one of three partners that took the initiative to the international network PowerUs that has focused on gap-mending strategies in social work education. The authors have been working over 10 years in collaboration with service user participation in the education of social workers and in different research projects. In the article, they give examples of gap-mending practices and of challenges that they have faced. The first example is an experimental course that has been given since 2005 where social work students study together with students from service user organizations in a university course. The second example is an attempt to combat homelessness in several Swedish municipalities. Supported by researchers, the development project has been a collaboration between homeless groups, politicians and social workers.

The Janus face of social innovation in local welfare initiatives

The aim of this chapter is to understand the relationship between local welfare initiatives and social innovation and how it varies across places. Since welfare policies must tackle increasing needs with scarcer resources, the topic of social innovation has become relevant. Social innovation expresses a shared hope for making things better in the future (Evers, 2015). It is a semantic magnet that attracts many different meanings and is charged with many positive connotations (Bergmark et al., 2011). As Martinelli (Chapter 1, in this volume) suggests, social innovation is an important dimension of the restructuring of social services and must be integrated into the analysis. To explore the role of social innovations in the restructuring of social services, we analyse four local welfare initiatives in health and social services. By ‘local welfare initiatives’, we refer to collective practices that arise at the municipal or neighbourhood level for creating or sustaining the welfare of individuals, groups or communities through the provision of services. The local initiatives under study take place in four municipalities in different European countries and aim to renew social policy practices and services in neighbourhoods or for particular groups of people. Our focus is on the variations in the way social innovation is created and sustained in these local welfare systems, which we define as ‘dynamic arrangements in which the specific local socioeconomic and cultural conditions give rise to different mixes of formal and informal actors, public or not, involved in the provision of welfare resources’ (Andreotti et al., 2012, p. 1925). As a result, new local combinations of social activities emerge in the welfare diamond (Martinelli, Chapter 1, as well as Leibetseder et al., in this volume), i.e. among state and municipal services, social entrepreneurs, third sector organisations, and community and family networks (Evers and Ewert, 2015).