Do citizens trust your welfare work? Does it keep its promises to the citizens and are they met with dignity, respect and ability to respond to the various interpretations that may arise? These issues concern the legitimacy of welfare work, which in short means a consensus-based authority to apply laws and regulations democratically. To succeed, professionals1 need to develop capacity to meet new communicative requirements of globalized and individualized service users.2 These challenges are the main theme of this book.
The analyses are made from the communicative action3 perspective (Habermas 1981), which show how to reveal a deficit of legitimacy, as well as clarify approaches that reconstruct and strengthen it. The perspective differs significantly from those inspired by bureaucratic or psychodynamic approaches, which have been the usual models of interaction in welfare work. Those approaches focus on the individual either as object or subject. In the bureaucratic perspective, the individual’s position is determined by the functions of the system, expressed in its roles, goals and directions, while neutralizing subjective experiences (Denhardt 1981; Beetham 1996). In the psychodynamic perspective one appeals to the consciousness of the individual as a solitary subject, to the individual’s feelings, desires and inclinations (Payne 2002). Thus, the bureaucratic perspective builds validity on externally accepted objective conditions, while the psychodynamic, with its purely internal access to truth, reduces validity to a subjective opinion (Habermas 1984). Both perspectives are problematic as a basis for examining legitimacy. They are too narrow and cannot identify a truth that is objectively true (truth) as well as normatively right (rightness) and subjectively sincere (truthfulness). That is, the kind of truth that underlies everyday life and legitimacy building.
By contrast, the communicative perspective of action is intersubjective. It means an interaction based on subject–subject relations for establishing a mutual validated, collective truth. This model is based on new insights on the power of language: it coordinates both understanding and a rational action, which also clarifies the moral which affects the action. All in all, these open both for identification and rectification of legitimacy deficiencies (Habermas 1987).
Legitimacy deficit has been discussed for a long time, but the knowledge of how to counteract it is fragmented (Denhardt 1981; Beetham 2013). This book focuses on the latter in a context of democratic welfare work, where the legitimacy deficits can be hidden behind legality, but nevertheless undermine trust (Habermas 1997; Rothstein 2017). The classic study Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Service (Lipsky 1980) relates to these problems. According to the author, they appear as a paradox when the public welfare worker should treat all citizens equally while being “responsive to the individual case when appropriate” (Lipsky 2010: xii). From that it follows that “the exercise of discretion”4 could not be performed in accordance with the “highest standard of decision making” (Lipsky 2010: xi).
By comparing various professions that involved client contacts, Lipsky saw different strategies for dealing with uncertainty in discretion situations; strategies that sought to minimize tensions and maximize approved compliance. At best, they were characterized as “public fairly, appropriately and thoughtfully” at worst they were reduced to “favoritism, stereotyping, convenience and routinizing” (Lipsky 2010: xiv). Clients were also pressured to “strike a balance between asserting their rights as citizens and conforming to the behaviors public agencies seek to place them as clients” (Lipsky 2010: xvi). However, it is important to keep in mind that Lipsky’s study is based on an American context, where, according to him, citizens are expected to show gratitude for the help offered. That side of citizenship is not so pronounced in English or Scandinavian welfare work.
In this text welfare work is strongly connected to ideas about equality, recognition of all citizens and a right to say yes or no to claims, without being excluded. The communicative action perspective indicates that opinions, experiences and expectations can be clarified between the parties in the situation in question. This means that they validate the expressed claims of legitimacy and can act in accordance with them, or argue for a change that better fits the intentions of the legal social order. The process strengthens them as citizens, even though they are vulnerable as clients, and that can increase confidence in the welfare work and democracy.
However, strengthening trust is complicated for many reasons. In his reflection over the study, thirty years later, Lipsky (2010) highlights some of them. He notes for example that “support for government has been eroded, and the very purpose of government is deeply contested” (Lipsky 2010: 214). This, together with budget cuts, makes it difficult to demonstrate responsiveness and accountability, which are the links between bureaucracy and democracy. Therefore he believes that accountability must mean more than just answering to people’s superiors. The key question is whether there is any “reliable relationship between what the superior seeks and what subordinates do” (Lipsky 2010: 160). Since accountability is based on a concrete relationship between people or groups, he calls for changed “patterns of behavior” among the public workers. It should hopefully include the development of professional standards and organizational incentives, but also appropriate responses to individual clients and their situations, which require “fresh thinking and flexible action” (Lipsky 2010: 160, 161).
These are necessary but provocative ambitions in the development of welfare interactions (Denhardt 1981; Habermas 1997). Necessary, because citizens and clients demand increased participation and co-determination, not only in terms of the law itself, which they already have, but also when it is implemented in welfare. Provocative, because it interferes with the kind of instrumental5 rationalization that traditional bureaucracy maintains. Today’s young people want more freedom, respect, human rights and independence. At the same time they become more isolated, more extradited from their own abilities and more dependent on what the system offers. This paradox intensifies the need to interpret and understand the arguments that favour constructive social actions, those which are both legal and legitimate. Since a communicative action perspective is based on reciprocity, equality, non-authority and non-hierarchy, it provides opportunities to do that through the validation of arguments, rooted in the lifeworld of individuals as well as in the collective will of the welfare system. Such a process can strengthen both self-determination and self-realization, and makes the system even more efficient and credible, and as a result more democratic. So much is at stake!
1.1 An Illustration
During my postgraduate studies, I sometimes went to the Department of Social Work for supervision, and then quickly returned to my work in social welfare services. On one occasion there was a...