ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the social policy model and proposes a way of understanding it in relation to the detailed analyses of the institutional ways of thinking and practicing welfare work. It suggests that the inclusion of an ethnological way of understanding the development and outlook of the welfare model in Denmark. The chapter looks at the policy-oriented way of understanding the Nordic model, stemming from international comparative research. It examines an ethnological understanding of the Danish state and its life modes in order to problematise the ideology of the social policy model, in particular the universalism and neutrality linked to it. The ethnological theory adds a relativising approach as opposed to the social-policy-oriented theory’s and the welfare ideology’s way of universalising. It problematises the welfare state’s universalism and identifies it as a cultural battle which managed to appear not as a cultural battle, but as neutral and objectively better ways to organise society.
