This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the community and voluntary sector participation in social partnership and explores the gap in Irish social science research. It also explores the unique and problematic entity known as the Community and Voluntary Pillar (CVP, the Pillar), which brought a range of new actors into a tripartite system of social partnership in Ireland from 1996. The book also examines the theoretical level, mainstream interpretations of Irish social partnership, and their limitations in relation to understanding the CVP. It provides an account of the Pillar as a whole, its origins and component organisations, and its broad evolution over time. The book discusses a fresh perspective and broader basis for understanding some of the unique properties of the Pillar. It describes the use of a case study methodology.

This chapter addresses behavioural issues and introduces the variety of scholarly work on the therapeutic state, the psychological state, the pedagogical state and so forth. It then discusses the approaches of personalisation and co-production. Psychology-inspired welfare work, including the personalisation and co-production approaches to the citizen has received much criticism. The chapter also discusses the agency of both welfare workers and citizens and how they each respond to the particular framing of the welfare work. Citizens and welfare workers may be able to adjust the expectations of the encountering party but will fail to change the overarching agenda of the encounter in any profound ways and must therefore accept the roles or positions of coaches and coachee. However, the psychologisation of welfare work implies that citizens are in need of empathy, compassion and other types of help from facilitators, coaches or even therapists.

This city which centralizes spatially inland mobility infrastructure it also centralizes spatial mobility socially as almost one third of its pre-1990 population lives in Greece. So unsurprisingly in the city and on the road one hears many narrations which locate their action is the 29km cross-border highway. Some of these stories are well known to a lot of Gjirokastrits and were repeated many times during my stay there. They are tales of car crashes, supernatural events, assassinations which occurred on the motorway during the violence of 1997 and of the ‘dangerous’ inhabitants of Lazarati village who are supposed to commit their various criminal activities on the highway. I suggest that in the case of Gjirokastër the highway and the related practices signify the novelties of postsocialism. These novelties combine simultaneously positive and negative implications, although the informants seem to focus on a number of negative incidents which occurred on the road, in fact the Kakavijë-Gjirokastër road emerges as the scene on which the various episodes of an uncertain daily life are located. This is the uncertainty of the entire Albanian postsocialist transitional project.

The reason for using J. S. Nye's concept of soft power is that this concept makes it possible to show how power shapes agendas, attracts and makes others cooperate. Power consists of both structural elements and agency. The use of the concept of soft power directs attention to the complex practices of welfare work, which include principles, norms, rationales and ideals, as well as the specific strategies, interests and preferences of the involved individuals. Welfare work takes place within organisations that belong to a particular field, for instance, the fields of education, health and care. According to Bourdieu, these fields are all relatively autonomous and each field operates in accordance with a specific rationale or logic that is different from the rationales or logics of the adjacent fields. With inspiration from a Bourdieusian framework, W. Schinkel and M. Noordegraff examine the battle over (professional) power among welfare workers and managers.

This chapter sets out the reasons for undertaking a case study of the Community and Voluntary Pillar (CVP). The study of the CVP provides a focus for examining one of the most innovative elements in the Irish social pacts that emerged from 1987. New conceptual tools are needed to capture the distinctive character of the Pillar and the different modalities in effect. Case studies are particularly suited to exploratory analysis of seemingly unique and unknown terrain, which applies to the Pillar. Yin outlines four broad types of study design based on this approach comprising: single-case holistic design; single-case embedded design; multiple-case holistic design; and multiple-case embedded design. In relation to the timeframe, it was necessary to limit the period covered by the study but difficult to fix an exact cut-off point for all organisations.

This chapter locates the importance of the anthropology of road and infrastructures at this stage of European history in order to understand the phenomena that are ongoing in the region and the importance of studying roads but also postsocialist migration and flows in the case of Albanian-Greek borders.

This chapter explores the broader theoretical issues of Community and Voluntary Pillar (CVP), and considers the efficacy of associations and social mobilisation in a wider context of power. The use of the case study approach should shed light on each of these interpretations. Many political scientists expressed concern about declining interest in politics and participation in the democratic process, and about the increasing dominance of the 'new right' in politics. Crouch's panorama may be viewed in the Irish case as part of a wider intellectual context for examining the 'new' social groups and identities which have become actively engaged in political processes and policy change. The chapter looks at the concepts of power and legitimacy. The CVP might be considered as lacking leverage, as compared to the state or the other social partners, who have real bargaining power.

This chapter explores some of the paradoxes of Commission of the Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI) Justice's circumstances and attempts to identify the formula of its successful ascent in the Community and Voluntary Pillar (CVP) of social partnership. It looks at the origins and in particular the distinctive outlook and analysis of CORI Justice. In particular there is a brief examination of its interpretation of Catholic social teaching. Catholic social teaching is infused with a pragmatic social reformism that goes well beyond the dominant approach of Irish Catholicism or the historic corpus of Catholic social teaching that informed social policy in continental Europe from the 1890s. The chapter reveals how CORI Justice proved adept not only in relation to the macro environment but also in the conduct of its tactics vis-a- vis allies in the CVP.

This is the key ethnographic chapter of the book: According to local mythology, danger influxes via the road and wealth outflux. It is by no coincidence that all these oral discourses in Gjirokastër locate their action on this particular road section. In postsocialism the Kakavijë–Gjirokastër road section has become a material and physical continuation of the Greek road system. The mythology of this road section comprehends three phenomena: the motif of the old hostility between Greece and Albania; the politics of international aid, but also the practices of transnationalism.

This chapter presents an overview of the circumstances and steps leading to the emergence of the Community and Voluntary Pillar (CVP). It sets out how, from the late 1980s, new elements of civil society began to engage with parts of government. The chapter identifies the key political and economic circumstances and institutional developments in relation to CVP. It describes the composition of the CVP and a significant component of the CVP, the Community Platform. The chapter presents a brief overview of how Pillar and Platform evolved over time. Irish social partnership was also very consciously constructed in the shadow of developments at European Community level, including the recognition given under the European Union (EU) Commission, led by Jacques Delors, to 'social dialogue'. One of the distinctive features of the new phase of social partnership in Ireland was its hybrid character.

This chapter addresses how the principles of bureaucracy, values of the market and norms from psychology influence welfare encounters in practice. Bureaucratic principles and new public management (NPM) may affect the welfare areas of employment and health more than, for instance, the welfare area of social work. The dominant principles and norms of powerful actors constitute the doxa of a field and thus affect which diagnoses are perceived as meaningful and legitimate. Diagnoses and other categorisation tools create a new way of perceiving and understanding a person, which also defines the way in which welfare staff ought to respond. The professional backgrounds and habitus of the welfare staff cause them to employ certain social categories and diagnoses when trying to solve the problems of citizens. Stress and depression were diagnoses, which were often brought into play when talking about what it meant to be busy or ill.