This chapter begins with a brief overview of a few key themes within the sociology of professions, which are particularly relevant for analyses of welfare encounters. J. Evetts has written extensively on what constitutes professionalism and puts forth the notion of two ideal types of professionalism in knowledge-based work: organisational professionalism and occupational professionalism. The chapter focuses solely on why it is important to discuss professionalism in a different way today when investigating what goes on in (professional) work organisations. It describes set of themes related to the sociology of both professions and expertise, namely the discussions of new professionalism, re-professionalisation and de-professionalisation. The chapter also describes how these characteristics may be regarded as inextricable consequences of the strong current influence of marketisation and managerialism on welfare work.

This chapter provides the number of approaches in order to set the scene for examining the Community and Voluntary Pillar (CVP). It discusses both historical and comparative perspectives. The chapter explores the variety of sceptical perspectives on the Irish model of social partnership. It also explores neo-corporatist literature approach in more detail, in historical and comparative perspective. The chapter examines the Irish experience from 1987 as a variant of the 'new social pacts' to emerge internationally since the 1980s. It describes the differing interpretations of the significance of the innovation of the CVP. Bill Roche developed his analysis to deal with the emergence of the CVP and a wider policy agenda in social partnership in the 1990s. He identified the concatenation of four key elements: centralised wage bargaining; networking subsystems; regulatory and trouble-shooting mechanisms; and social buffering.

This chapter describes discretionary practices when discussing how the bureaucratic context affects the encounter between welfare workers and citizens. It focuses on the (stronger or weaker) effects of bureaucratic rules, procedures, values and so forth in encounters between welfare workers and citizens in bureaucratic organisations. An important feature of the bureaucratic organisation is the fact that the presence of clients is involuntary. The chapter introduces M. Weber's definition of the ideal-type bureaucracy. It also introduces the work of Michael Lipsky and Lipsky-inspired scholars on the discretionary practices of street-level bureaucrats. The goal of helping citizens on the basis of individual cases often contradicts the administrative rules and structures of bureaucratic organisations. In bureaucratic organisations, as analysed by Lipsky, staff are constantly considering the ambiguities and contradictions of their performance objectives and consequently form their own ideals of how to solve their clients' problems and deliver the best service.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed on the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on how welfare workers and citizens translate and implement the principles of the bureaucracy, the values of the market and the norms from psychology in everyday welfare work. It analysis the three levels of power at play including 2-D level, 3-D level and 4-D level in the welfare encounters. The book introduces the reader to symbolic interactionism, because the tradition within sociology makes it possible to examine how welfare workers and citizens co-produce dominant powerful norms in the welfare encounter. It aims to draw attention to the techniques of new public management (NPM), such as efficiency, standards and benchmarks, as well as market values, such as service and courtesy, and business values, such as competition, choice, flexibility and respect for the entrepreneurial spirit.

This chapter starts by examining the origins and outlook of the Community Workers' Co-operative (CWC, the Co-op) in the early 1980s, highlighting its focus on community empowerment, which informed its practice over subsequent years. It focuses on the Co-op's shift from critique to engagement and negotiation by the CWC with government. The chapter reviews the process of becoming a social partner and the Co-op's initiation of the Community Platform, which it hoped would be recognised by government and the existing social partners as the community sector social partner. It deals with the implications for the Co-op of prosperity after 1997. The CWC distinguished between the self-organising community sector and the traditionally philanthropic 'voluntary sector'. The Co-op stressed the importance to democracy of a tension between dissenting communities and representative government.

This is a discussion of the relationships between roads and their links to notions of culture and material culture in anthropology and other social sciences today. Theoretically, departing from Boas’ spatially fixed cultural areas and reaching Auge’s ‘non-places’; passing through Lefebvre’s, Situationists’ and Virilio’s critiques of motorways to Baudrillard’s fascination for freeways; going through Latour’s and Castells’ analyses of culture as networks and arriving to recent questions about the ontology of culture, this chapter examines the significance of roads for the anthropological study of cultural formations. Fusing this discussion with road ethnographies including Evans-Pritchard’s and Levi-Strauss’ ‘road-less anthropology’ and the histories of motorways, available in the history of technology literature, this chapter aims to open up a new discussion among anthropologists.

This chapter reviews the origins of the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed (INOU), its aims and philosophy, objectives and relations with other civil society actors and the state, up to and in the course of social partnership. It seeks to bring out the experience of the INOU in social partnership as a good illustration of the concept of asymmetric engagement in the case of the Community and Voluntary Pillar (CVP). The founders of the INOU were trade union-minded, and regarded the employed and unemployed as sharing a broadly common economic interest. The INOU's first general secretary was Eugene Hickland and he was succeeded by Mike Allen, both originally from the Galway Association of the Unemployed. One great difficulty for the INOU and local centres was to create a positive sense of identity and motivation for the unemployed.