ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book provides intertwined analyses of seven symbolic resources: “social rights to welfare”, “individual human rights”, “cultural modernisation”, “scientific reasoning”, “human development as technically governable”, “the human being as economics-oriented”, and “the local community as a moral resource”. It offers an ambiguous portrait of welfare work addressing immigrants and refugees in a social democratic welfare state and has indicated welfare work’s social functions in a global society. Welfare work is interpreted as a complex endeavour of benevolence, supremacy and critique and each of these societal forms are complex structures of distances and proximities, which together produce and reproduce the social myths of society. Welfare work makes and remakes society through symbolic resources and societal forms in complex and ambiguous ways by use of proliferating and fixating images, which is part of how race works in modern welfare.
