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Welfare as social investment: Framing marginalized citizens as objects of investments

Author(s): Ditte Andersen

Thursday 15  |   13:00-13:20

Room: TP41

Session: Nordic welfare states

At the turn of the millennium, leading social scientists suggested a new welfare state architecture centered around the rationale of social investment. Policymakers across Europe have since made it a well-established policy paradigm with Nordic welfare states often depicted as frontrunners. In this paper, I consider the political, ethical and social consequences of translating the rationale into operative policies and instruments. Empirically, the paper focuses on Denmark and draws on more than a decade of research on welfare services for marginalized citizens experiencing drug problems, mental illness and homelessness. Theoretically, the paper combines a Foucauldian analysis of governmentality with a Goffmanian orientation to the framing of face-to-face interaction. The paper suggests that the rationale of social investment works on a continuum of manifestation. Sometimes policymakers, welfare professionals or citizens use the concept of investment as a metaphor to argue that allocating resources today will pay off in the future without actually calling for a measurement of return; at other times the social investment rationale manifests in tangible contracts that explicate expected economic return. The power to define value and make decisions on welfare allocation remain pivotal but the investment framing risk camouflaging political judgements as technicalities. The paper ends with a discussion of how the investment rationale may impact lay perceptions of the social contract in a welfare state, and marginalized citizens’ sense of deservingness. The discussion outlines two competing frames for investment rationales: One embarking from the market and an economic conception of returns; and one commencing from a democratic society and a social conception of value.