ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the approach that seeks to pull and stretch a series of welfare words, to view them from different angles and to defamiliarise and disrupt their taken-for-granted meanings within mainstream social work. The word neoliberalism is frequently used in a casual way as ‘shorthand for a prevailing dystopian zeitgeist’. However, neoliberalism is a historically specific form of capital accumulation endeavouring to engineer a ‘counter-revolution against welfare capitalism’. Importantly, neoliberals have been the curators of neo-welfare with the main aspiration being to eradicate any of the more benign attributes associated with post-war welfare states. A pervasive plethora of powerful discourses, whilst failing to extinguish the possibility of oppositional meanings, can contribute to the maintenance of what Antonio Gramsci might have called a neoliberal hegemony. ‘Self-care’, a notion so prominent within social work and similar ‘caring’ professions, is often mobilised to promote ‘neoliberal objectives to dismantle public welfare resources and shift responsibility for care onto individual citizens’.
