The power of citizens and professionals in welfare encounters: The influence of bureaucracy, market and psychology

Kevin Ryan

摘要

Nanna Mik-Meyer's The power of citizens and professionals in welfare encounters is the latest addition to the Manchester University Press (MUP) series on Social and Political Power. One of the book's particularly striking features - though this doesn't appear in the title - is how it appropriates and reworks the concept of 'soft' power. As originally used by Joseph Nye (1990), soft power is framed as a seductive mode of power whereby a state's field of influence is said to operate not through coercion but through 'attraction'. Mik-Meyer scales this down from the macro-political arena of world politics, thereby applying it to the micro-politics of welfare encounters. This is a novel move to make, yet I must confess to a certain degree of initial scepticism, and for two reasons. Firstly, because Nye's concept has itself proven to be attractive to policy actors, and in the realm of practice the benign language of 'soft' power may well serve as a convenient veil for the machinations of power politics. The second reason is not entirely unrelated to the first, in that the specific focus of Mik-Meyer's book is how welfare encounters have been reconfigured by the shift from government to governance, meaning the influence of neoliberalism along with New Public Management (NPM) reforms to the public sector. The upshot of this, as noted by Mik-Meyer, is that welfare workers and citizens enter into relations described in the policy literature as co-production, active citizenship, co-responsibilisation, and user participation (p. 3). Taken at face value, this would suggest a symmetry of power whereby welfare workers and citizens meet as equals to resolve problems. However, Mik-Meyer also notes that this can have the effect of individualising social problems. Loiec Wacquant (2009) puts it in much starker terms, arguing that the 'neoliberal government of social insecurity' punishes the poor by making them responsible for their own misfortune. In a situation where the welfare state is becoming stingier even as penal systems become harsher, the field of contemporary welfare practice has seen a proliferation of techniques to activate those deemed to have become 'passive' and overly 'dependent'. What does activation entail in practical terms? In the context of NPM reforms, whereby the citizen (once?) endowed with social rights is transformed into a customer/consumer of public and private services, it means access to resources may be conditional on the service-user providing evidence that she or he is actively seeking work, attending parenting classes, presenting for drug-addiction counselling, and so forth. I thus found myself wondering whether governmentality theory would have been a more suitable fit, that is, given that it is focused explicitly on ways of structuring the field of possible action as well as on how actions can be (indirectly and unobtrusively) acted upon. My concerns quickly abated however, and Mik-Meyer makes a compelling case as to why she adopts a soft power approach. Her main reasons are three-fold (pp. 7, 29-30): 1. this affords a way of examining power relations without assuming that power always operates through coercion and domination, 2. precisely because soft power is used primarily in the field of international relations, so it is not burdened with preconceptions when adapted to other fields (which would certainly be the case, for example, with governmentality theory); and 3. soft power can be used in such a way that it spans agency and structural constraints, and this point is particularly convincing with regard to the governmentality literature, which is without doubt deficient on the issue of agency.

机译：Nanna Mik-Meyer的《公民和专业人士在福利方面的力量》是曼彻斯特大学出版社（MUP）关于社会和政治力量的系列文章的最新内容。该书特别引人注目的功能之一-尽管没有出现在书名中-是它如何适应和改造“软”功能的概念。正如约瑟夫·奈（Joseph Nye，1990）最初所使用的，软实力被构筑为一种诱人的权力模式，据称，国家的影响力领域不是通过强迫而是通过“吸引力”来运作。 Mik-Meyer从世界政治的宏观政治领域缩小了这一范围，从而将其应用于福利遭遇的微观政治。这是一个新颖的举动，但是我必须承认一定程度的最初怀疑，这有两个原因。首先，因为Nye的概念已被证明对政策参与者具有吸引力，并且在实践领域中，“软”权力的良性用语很可能会成为权力政治阴谋的方便面纱。第二个原因与第一个原因并不完全无关，因为Mik-Meyer的书的重点是从政府到治理的转变如何重新配置了福利问题，这意味着新自由主义和新公共管理（NPM）改革的影响到公共部门。正如米克·迈耶（Mik-Meyer）所指出的，这样做的结果是，福利工作者和公民之间建立了关系，在政策文献中被描述为共同生产，积极公民身份，共同责任和用户参与的关系（第3页）。从表面上看，这意味着权力的对称，福利工作者和公民平等地开会解决问题。但是，米克·迈耶（Mik-Meyer）也指出，这可能会导致个性化社会问题。洛伊克·瓦奎特（Loiec Wacquant）（2009）用更为鲜明的话说，“社会不安全的新政府”通过使穷人对自己的不幸承担责任来惩罚穷人。在福利制度变得越来越严厉甚至刑法制度变得更加严厉的情况下，当代福利实践领域已经看到了许多技术来激活那些被认为已经变得“被动”和过度“依赖”的技术。激活实际上意味着什么？在NPM改革的背景下，拥有社会权利的公民（一次？）转变为公共和私人服务的客户/消费者，这意味着获得资源的条件可能取决于服务使用者提供其本人或他人的证据。正在积极寻找工作，参加育儿班，进行戒毒咨询等。因此，我发现自己想知道政府性理论是否会更合适，也就是说，鉴于政府性理论明确地侧重于构建可能采取行动的领域的方式以及如何（间接且不干扰地）采取行动。但是，我的担忧很快消除了，Mik-Meyer提出了一个令人信服的案例，说明为什么她采用了软实力方法。她的主要理由有三点（第7、29-30页）：1.这提供了一种检查权力关系的方式，而不必假设权力总是通过强制和支配来运作，2.恰恰是因为软权力主要用于该领域在国际关系方面，因此在适应其他领域时，它不会受到先入为主的观念的负担（例如，政府性理论肯定是这种情况）；第三，软权力的使用方式可以跨越代理和结构约束，这点在有关政府性文献方面尤其令人信服，这无疑在代理问题上是不足的。

The power of citizens and professionals in welfare encounters: The influence of bureaucracy, market and psychology

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