This chapter looks at the dimension of gender through the lens of the National Women's Council of Ireland (NWCI, the Council), which became involved in social partnership as one of the key components of the Community and Voluntary Pillar (CVP). It begins by setting the scene in relation to the changing social division of labour and the circumstances and economic role of women in Irish society. The chapter examines the emergence of the NWCI, and notes in particular its leftward trajectory in the early 1990s. It reviews the engagement with the state initially when invited to participate in the National Economic and Social Forum (NESF), from 1993, and then in relation to Partnership 2000. The chapter deals with the NWCI experience of the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness (PPF) and its rejection of Sustaining Progress in 2003, for which it was excluded from social partnership, before its return in 2007.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the altered (powerful) conditions for encounters between citizens and welfare workers. It investigates the principles of the bureaucracy, values of the market and norms from psychology which one must highlight and foreground when analysing the powerful encounter between citizens and welfare workers. The book describes the dilemmas and paradoxes of present day welfare work. It considers the concept of soft power, which was first developed by J. S. Nye in relation to the research field of international relations and which places great emphasis on agency. The book includes research from countries that are often believed to belong to very different welfare models, such as the UK, the US, Australia, Scotland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark.

The flows of remittances and artefacts are centred upon the material entity of the house. New or totally refurbished houses in Albania emerge as the major materialisation of migratory remittances in the country of origin. The Albanian houses under research are perpetually undergoing construction, while their building materials are brought gradually from Greece, most of the time by the migrants themselves and of course, via the major cross-border road - namely the Kakavijë–Gjirokastër road. The material fluidity of these houses shows their integration into the prevalent cosmology of flows while it signifies an ontological link between the house and the roads. None of the two categories has static materiality; both are inflowing from Greece and represent simultaneously a wanted and an unwanted gain of postsocialist globalised experience. Migrants’ houses and roads are two aspects of the same process but with very different perceptions.

This final chapter summarises the previous work suggesting some links between the mass contraction projects that took place in Europe after the end of Cold War and the border securitisation processes that the book described and how these are linked with contemporary phenomena.

This chapter focuses on market values and takes a closer look at how service and other ideals affect the encounter between citizens and welfare workers. It introduces the market context and its inherent principles, followed by a discussion of how the marketisation of public administration lays the groundwork for a number of challenges and dilemmas for both welfare workers and citizens. The chapter covers the ways in which the standards, benchmarks, guidelines, incentive structures and other aspects of new public management (NPM), combined with business values such as competition, choice and flexibility, have affected the encounter between the welfare worker and the citizen. Within the frame of NPM, both producers and consumers of welfare services are seen as driven by self-interest. The chapter discusses the role of the soft power of equality and courtesy in these idealised service encounters and concludes with a discussion on agency in market-inspired welfare work.

The urban topography of Gjirokastër city, where part of the current ethnography was based, is under a continuous process of change during the last two decades. The city has in fact been relocated around the traffic infrastructure, centralising the road which leads to the Albanian-Greek border since the borders opened, in 1990. This appears to be a somewhat predictable spatial transformation for a city which has one third of its population living as migrants in Greece and consumes almost entirely imported Greek products since 1990. However, this transformation of the urban formation is a complex process. This chapter enlightens on how the postsocialist city is enlarged dramatically and how it is reconfigured spatially in reference to the road infrastructure. It will address two main processes, the postsocialist introduction of the car-related spatial practices and the relocation of the urban centre around the road.

This chapter departs from the first highways built in Albania during WWI and passing through the Italian fascist’s regime’s road project of the 1930s, focuses on the socialist period. I propose a view of socialism from the aspect of infrastructure construction and usage and an understanding of notions of manual labour as a measure of creating socialist subjects. Moreover, in this chapter I suggest a methodological division important for the historical understanding of network infrastructure: the division between the physical disposition of the infrastructure and the flows within the network, as one does not necessarily imply the other.

This chapter introduces symbolic interactionism, that is, the interactionist approach to studying the in-between as suggested by Bartels. At the heart of symbolic interactionism lie the practices and actions between people and how these can be regarded as the effects of different ideas and theories within societies and organisations. The chapter discusses empirical studies of the encounter between welfare workers and citizens, with particular attention to their respective roles, their relationship with one another and the findings of the selected studies. The concept of institutional selves reflects ideas integrated in (physical) organisations where the encounter takes place and more general ideas in society about the troubles at hand. The chapter emphasises the soft power at play between citizens and welfare workers and exemplifies how the structural elements and agency of the two parties frame the encounter.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book looks at the key components of the Community and Voluntary Pillar (CVP) to provide a more robust account of the actual dynamics at work in the Pillar. It illustrates some of the difficulties due to conflating the notion of the general will or public interest with the 'empirical will' of the demos as revealed by elections, which simply produce a government. The book explores associative domain at a more general level, covering concepts of associations, civil society, social mobilisation, the demos, social movements, democracy and even 'post-democracy'. It presents the evidence and drew conclusions based on the overall experience of the Pillar and analysis of each of four key associations in it: the INOU, CWC, CORI Justice and the NWCI.