Social services are currently involved in attempts to ”de-silo” welfare services through collaboration. Weare also witnessing a movement for increasing trust, often expressed in ambitions to utilize the local skills andcompetencies of welfare professionals while still upholding high quality of monitoring and control. The socialinvestment perspective is one example upon ambitions to reconcile these ideas of trust and collaboration withcontrol and value for money. At the core of this perspective lies the notion that investing in social services,youth policies and health care is an investment which will lead to reduced governmental costs in the future.
We aim to analyze the institutional and organizational conditions for municipalities to use social investmentsto utilize the situated knowledge of welfare professionals as well as to de-silo social service delivery throughcollaborative efforts. Our research is guided by two questions targeting the relation between a public sectorcharacterized by predictability, stability and long-term solutions on the one hand and trust in the knowledge andinnovative capacity of welfare professionals and organizational flexibility on the other:
Which are the enabling factors and obstacles for local administration to maintain the flexibility to utilizethe situated knowledge of welfare professionals in the field of social work through flexible andinnovative organization - while still maintaining requirements of monitoring and control?
Which are the conditions, opportunities as well as obstacles, for local administration to work for long-term effects in temporary organizations?
To answer these questions, an institutional ethnography is conducted. The empirical core of the project is astakeholder network in Skåne which allows us to study social investment practices in the involvedmunicipalities. The study is based on 10 Swedish and one Finnish case/s and combines up-close longitudinalstudies with a comparative approach.
