The Power of Citizens and Professionals in Welfare Encounters: The Influence of Bureaucracy, Market and Psychology by Nanna Mik-Meyer

Author:Nanna Mik-Meyer [Mik-Meyer, Nanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History & Theory, Social Science, Political Science, Anthropology, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781526110312
Google: km-5DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 38532803
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2017-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

7

The psychology-inspired context: coach–coachee

Introduction

The doctor [is] not just a physician but adviser, the nurse [is] not just [a] carer but trainer, patients [are] more than consumers – [they are] partners. (Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown cited in Needham 2011: 141)

Today’s welfare work is not only influenced by principles of the bureaucracy (Chapter 5) or the market (Chapter 6), as the quote from former Prime Minister Gordon Brown illustrates; both welfare workers and citizens are expected to take on the roles of advisers, trainers and partners as well. Current welfare work can as such be seen as equally influenced by norms from psychology. This has led to an increased research interest in how psychology and more therapeutic person-centred approaches affect the welfare work. The title of this chapter – ‘The psychology-inspired context’ – seeks to cover a range of both different and partly overlapping discussions regarding various ways of identifying the welfare state, such as therapeutic (Polsky 1991; Chriss 1999), psychological (Jones et al. 2013), maternal (Pykett 2012), or pedagogised (Pykett 2010; Singh 2015), alongside discussions of the so-called personalisation and co-production approaches to welfare work (e.g., Bovaird 2007; Needham and Glasby 2015).

The focus on norms from psychology does not imply that one should turn one’s back on the classic issues of the welfare state altogether. However, a research focus on the therapeutic, pedagogical and more person-centred approaches to the citizen will allow for analyses that supplement those of the bureaucratic or market-oriented approaches. Thus, when applying a psychological perspective to the welfare encounter, particular themes and ways of perceiving the citizen come to the forefront. From this perspective, we are no longer dealing with the client of the bureaucracy or the consumer of the market, and welfare workers are neither bureaucratic administrators nor service providers. Instead, scholars emphasise the prevalence of norms from psychology in an effort to show how the roles of welfare workers, such as facilitators, coaches and therapists, are at play even in welfare areas such as employment, which traditionally are not associated with the so-called ‘psy’ disciplines (such as psychology, psychiatry and medicine) (Rose 1998).

Similar to the market approach, an individualised psychology-inspired approach regards the citizen as someone who is able to voice his or her problems and knows (or will learn to know) how to solve them in a manner consistent with the evaluations and judgements of the welfare worker. Similarly, this approach perceives the welfare worker as someone who strives to become the best possible personal adviser, coach, counsellor and support for his or her clients (Leadbetter and Lownsbrough 2005: 38). We are, in other words, dealing with Habermas’ (1984) description of an ideal speech situation, which entails a position of equal power between the communicating parties, a position free from both physical and psychological coercion. However, much research has shown that this description bears very little resemblance to real-life (welfare) interactions: welfare workers are expected to be able to manage the ambiguous position of being both an empathic coach or facilitator (who refrains

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