ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the participatory rhetoric of Finnish welfare governance. The focus is on the question of how the status of citizens' participation and user involvement is understood in the governmental key strategy papers of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and the Ministry of Employment and Economy. The chapter explains that there is a danger that the politics and policies behind the current rhetoric of active citizenship expand the inequality in society. It describes methodologically based on content analysis of the participation-related conceptual framework of recent strategic key papers of the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health and the Ministry of Employment and the Economy in Finland. It mirrors the first phase in the social work research project. The Role of Welfare Services in Participative Citizenship of Marginalized Citizens financed by the Academy of Finland.
