Thinking of who will (not) come: access to public social services and the imagination of the „ideal" user

The access to social services is a crucial moment in the transformation of private troubles into public issues and as such an important element for the creation of a sphere of publicness which recognises social problems and... [ view full abstract ]

The access to social services is a crucial moment in the transformation of private troubles into public issues and as such an important element for the creation of a sphere of publicness which recognises social problems and provides answers in terms of professional services.
Processes of planning and organising this access to social services go beyond the definition of formal criteria. They are complex processes which involve different political, organisational and professional questions. All these questions are intertwined with each other and constitute the operational side of access policies, which actually determines the real accessibility of services to different people in need.
These processes of planning and organising access necessarily involve the thinking of potential service users (and indeed their „making of“) and of how they could and should be reached by public social services.
The proposed paper will discuss these questions drawing empirically on a research project carried out in the Province of Bozen/Bolzano – South Tirol in Italy. The research project mapped the organisation of access in all local welfare agencies in South Tirol and involved an in-depth study of three local welfare agencies as three different cases of access. Data were collected by interviews with service managers, professionals and service users and by ethnographic observation.
The paper will particularly a) focus on different representations and myths of the „ideal service user“, b) point out the different normative references in imaging (and constructing) the potential service users and c) critically ask how these images might influence different models and practices of access to local welfare agencies and, thus, how they might eventually advantage or disadvantage different user groups.