ABSTRACT
Introduction Responsibilities and responsibilisation are among the core topics in current socio-political discussions on the transformation and new directions of Western welfare states, although the latter term is not necessarily used in this context. They are also strongly present in the professional conversations and social policy literature concerning the expected roles of workers and clients in the welfare services. This chapter focuses on these discussions and the related scholarly work that form and analyse influential welfare discourses. These discourses, along with the governmentality literature, are potentially important when developing further a theoretical and empirical understanding of the issue of responsibilisation (see Chapter 2). The welfare discourses introduced in this chapter are based on “keywords” in the sense that Ferguson (2007; see also Clarke et al. 2007: 27) understands them when he refers to Williams’ (1976) book Keywords – A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Keywords, such as “participation” and “empowerment”, carry multiple meanings and can be used in contradictory ways in different settings. The meanings related to them are positive and hard to resist (Ferguson 2007: 387-388). Furthermore, they are used in justifying certain directions of change that are argued to be inevitable in the current welfare states and services. These features make keywords powerful and applicable both in policy level argumentation and in the everyday welfare practices. They can belong to the vocabulary of service user movements promoting full citizenship for everyone, of social and health care professionals describing how they support and help their clients, or of managers and politicians seeking new ways to organise services or reduce costs. Also, researchers promote and reflect the keywords in making sense of the current welfare systems, welfare work and the realities of clients. We will concentrate on the influential welfare discourses, and their underlying keywords, that (re)organise responsibilities between clients, workers, communities and the state. We do not make a thorough review of the roots or of the multiple meanings of the discourses. Instead, we will concentrate on how the discourses bring forward and problematise responsibilities between different stakeholders, particularly between clients and welfare workers in public services.
We have grouped closely related keywords together so that, altogether, six of them form three pairs of keywords, each pair representing a larger cluster of discourses. Each cluster has certain common features. The clusters are: (1) participation and empowerment discourses, (2) consumerism and personalisation discourses and (3) recovery and resilience discourses. Despite this grouping, the discourses are also interconnected and often refer to each other in the literature.
