3 Social Policy in a Transnational World
The Capability Approach, Neediness,
and Social Work
Lothar Böhnisch and Wolfgang Schröer
“Flying blind with spectators” was the title that the futurologist Bolz (2005) chose for his attempt to forecast social developments at the start of the twenty-first century: “Modern society is moving forward as though flying blind. This is saying more than that evolution operates blindly, which is simply a statement of the obvious. Flying blind also means flying with instruments only. If you look out of the window, you can see nothing—but you can rely on the dials on the instrument panel [ . . . ] The instruments and the crew are reliable, but no one knows the destination” (9).
If we apply this to the future of social work, it could mean that under the influence of current trends, social work in western industrial societies is finding itself increasingly abandoned by the national social state, carried along by the transnational blurring of boundaries into an uncertain societal future. At the same time, in some regions it has reached an unprecedented level of professional quality and infrastructural development and feels itself strong enough not only to legitimate itself normatively and in terms of social structure, but also to prove itself transnationally in terms of its efficacy. “What works?” is now the self-confident question it asks. Or, what share of credit can social work claim for the success of a once endangered biography or of a sustainable social community?
But no sooner do we venture to consider such a perspective than the framework disappears from view, and the positional lights which should help the instruments to work become hazy on the global horizon. How will social work position itself in the future? One thing can be confidently predicted: It will be a blind flight that encounters turbulence. Social work is dependent on normative guidelines, and instrumental justification alone is not sufficient: How social work is able to develop its sphere of activity nationally and transnationally depends on the policy of social justice, on the level and clarity of the prevailing ethic of justice and responsibility, and on the equilibrium between humans and the economy. Turbulence arises not only when all this is equivocal, but when paradoxes rule the societal scene and social orientations are obscured. Bourdieu (1997) made a prediction along these lines: “More than ever before, we need to practise paradoxical thinking” (189).
When trapped in paradoxes, it is difficult to make pronouncements about the future. “Every future is the self-reflexive image of the present. And the future reconstitutes itself afresh in every present” (Bolz 2005: 17). In view of the paradoxical present, however, we are more conscious than ever that society does have a future, but that we cannot imagine what path this future might take. In the idea of ‘reflexive modernisation,’ which dominated the social-scientific thinking in some European countries during the transition to the twenty-first century, we were fairly confident that course corrections were possible in the confrontation between the early history of the modern age and the present time. The dynamics of globalisation seem to have negated this reflexive reference transnationally.
At the same time, we see that for the development of social work there was and is always a need for critical Zeitdiagnosen [diagnoses of our time] of the socio-historical developments with a socio-political dimension. Among others, Fraser (2009) follows in this tradition. In doing so, she not only uses, quite consciously, the German concept of Zeitdiagnosen, but also goes beyond it and remarks that the diagnoses to which, for example, the debates about a theory of social justice relate are, at present, inappropriate, or insufficiently grounded in social history. They often continue to refer to twentieth-century models of national state welfare. Many models of justice take no account of the social processes involving the dissolution of boundaries and the current field of tension between transnationality, the national state, and locality.
Naturally, a diagnosis of our time is always controversial, but it is also an essential component of critical approaches to social work. In social work, socio-political diagnoses of our time are thus currently faced with the challenge of catching up with the processes of dissolution of boundaries and of acquiring a new understanding of the dimensions of transnational, national, and local social policies: “In a world of transnational societies, the causes of—and, presumably, the solutions to—the problems of social order and security are not confined to national territories and national social structures and institutions. These problems need to be reconceptualised to account for the impact of globalisation on the capacity of the state to recreate national histories within the boundaries of national territories” (Baltodano 1999: 39).
TRANSNATIONAL CHALLENGES TO THE NATIONAL SOCIAL STATE
At the start of the twenty-first century, in many regions the social is being refashioned more radically than anyone could have imagined twenty years ago. In globalisation, the accelerating dissolution of the boundaries of space and time has rendered the compass of the twentieth century useless by building a transnational field of magnetism in which the compass seems to swing constantly in an uncontrolled fashion. The talk of the risk society, which—in the context of ‘reflexive modernisation’ and in light of the incalculable consequences of modernisation—characterised the social discourse from the 1980s, has long since expanded to embrace the global risk society (cf. Beck 2007). It has given way to the fear of no longer being able to assess the new threats by means of the now obsolete crisis discourse. It seems that two worlds have arisen: a socially embedded world and a transnationally disembedded world.
In the meantime, worldwide debates about a transnational social policy are focusing on how a connection to this disembedded world can be created, in order to exert influence. It is no longer a matter of using new technological models to regulate globalisation, but of power, and of the shift of power relationships that impacts social developments on a worldwide scale. Since the 1990s, the emphasis in social policy has been placed mainly on universal rights; local and transnational communities and new ‘global’ and ‘grassroots’ movements are being invoked (cf. Morales-Gómez 1999; Jones Finer 1999).
In social work, it can be observed that such ‘classical’ crystallisation points of its development and socio-political reflexivity as care, commons, and citizenship are being affected in a new way by the tension between transnationality, the national state, and locality. Thus, care is currently stressing the need to look beyond the national framework, and the same thing is happening in relation to social and civil rights (citizenship) and the responsibility for public goods and the shaping of the local community (commons). The national social state ought to regulate social care arrangements (care), guarantee social rights (citizenship), bear social responsibility for public goods (commons), and must, in appropriate ways, ensure and shape the social integration and development of a society. However, currently in many countries of the West the state finds itself confronted with the dynamics of disintegration, and driven by socio-political forces into the strait-jacket of situations where social development seems scarcely possible.
For social work, this can have the effect that its perspective for integration loses any connection with society. This means that if the national social state gets into a transnationally induced integration dilemma, it must necessarily shift its integration policy away from marginal groups and into the heart of society. So if it continues to act according to the previous template of social state delegation, social work could be relegated to the functional sphere of the administration of social marginality. All in all, it is clear that in many places social work reflexivity must extend beyond the national social state if this new magnetic field of the rise and shaping of social problems and their transnational relationships is to be recognised.
A start has been made by means of the concept of social work as a ‘human rights profession’ (cf. Staub-Bernasconi 1998). We shall say no more, at this point, about how this concept relies on the optimistic view that social work can be tied more strongly to international social movements and institutions, and that it proposes a normative superstructure that is professionally non-specific, because it crosses professional boundaries and must be shared with other professions. In general, the concept is part of the mainstream of many discussions surrounding transnational social policy, which often look for a universal justification beyond the social. The national social state is no longer considered to be capable of very much. The term ‘post-social state’ is gaining currency in the profession.
Although the death knell might be sounded for the national social state, this does not, of course, mean that the state will not exist in the future. Social regulation and basic background security will continue to be indispensable for certain groups of persons. But the weakness of recent conceptions of national social states, from the viewpoint of social work, is the changed social developmental force. This goes hand in hand with a highly charged political change—indeed, each is conditional on the other. The social state is becoming increasingly reduced to the repressive dimensions of the politics of order and control. “The post-social state regulation of social problems is one in which it is not a question of the redistribution of resources and the guaranteeing of rights, but of a ‘politics of behaviour’; an ethos politics for the changing and production of attitudes, life plans and lifestyle practices” (Ziegler 2008: 173).
Lessenich (2008) suggests a complex approach to this question. His argument focuses not only on welfare cuts, social privatisation, and regressive state policies in European countries, but also—from a dialectical perspective—raises questions about the shift of societal exchange relationships in which the social complex is embedded. In a historical-sociological discourse analysis, he shows how the social state's programme of practical politics, “by converting numerous institutions of the social state into enablement agencies for active self-responsibility” (84), is already being implemented in many European countries. The relationship between individual, state, and society is undergoing a major shift. “Where once there was public protection of the individual against social risks, [ . . . ] there is now individual risk-provisioning in the interest of society” (95).
Thus, we are not simply talking about political control in the form of reorganisation of the social state, but about a new governmental order of the social—one which is compatible with the demand for flexibility from global capitalism. Social regulation no longer takes place principally through the social state, but through the activation of all citizens, including those who are unemployed or retired. For Lessenich, the activating programmes for ‘lifelong learning,’ related to the politics of the labour market and education, represent the core of an activation policy in which “institutional strategies and individual ways of acting” merge into a “new form of government of the social (in the broader sense)” (ibid.: 116).
The social state is becoming a socio-technological medium, which keeps citizens on the move in such a way that they do not become a burden on the state and, if possible, generate a surplus that will benefit the common good. The social state is then reduced to the function of regulating this surplus in a community-oriented manner. It is no longer the old model of social state regulation of collective demand and collective feasibility, but one of self-interest with a community-oriented surplus. This correlates to a view of humanity in which both “market-oriented and socially acceptable subjects” (ibid.: 85) are created at the same time.
It is not, however, about returning to the concept of the ‘old’ nationally bound social state, but about seeking new dialectics and balances in the relationship between the economic and the social—now against the background of local, national, and transnational structures. The heart of this reflexivity must be, in our view, that we rid ourselves of the notion that the national social state was and is the only institutional form of the sociopolitical. Rather, the national social state is one—historic—form of the institutionalisation of the socio-political, which was formed in the dialectic of the development of industrial society, in the conflict between capital and labour of the late nineteenth and the early to middle twentieth century. In the discussion about the future of social policy as a socio-political framework of social work, we are therefore asking not about the fate of the national social state, but about how social policy today is being set free in new and different ways and what transnational perspectives are being thereby opened up for social work.
THE CAPABILITY APPROACH AND SOCIAL WORK
An approach that can claim for itself a transnational socio-political perspective of understanding is what is known as the capability approach. We propose to use these discussions of the capability approach to indicate the challenges of a socio-political understanding of social work in the transnational context. With the capability approach, a number of different developmental possibilities will be considered and social inequality with respect to individual opportunities will be objectively measured. It is a model that is not limited by national and social state boundaries, but conforms to transnational processes of socialisation. At the centre is the ideal of a good life, the attainment of which must be measured by the relation between opportunities of realisation and barriers to such opportunities.
In general, the capability approach developed by Sen (1999) in the last third of the twentieth century today has become the credo of development politics in the transnational fight against poverty. The approach can be briefly defined as attempting to establish a connection between the resources within human beings and what they can (or could) make of them. It is embedded in a programme for the ‘good life,’ in which, in a spirit of democratic understanding, everyone aspires to primary goods in a globally shared understanding of humanity (approximately analogous to that of the Convention on Human Rights). Sen stresses that the attainment of these primary goods is not only envisaged in the longer-term perspective; rather, it is necessary to tap the individual abilities that might help to bring it about, “the relevant personal characteristics that govern the conversion of primary goods into the person's ability to promote her ends” (Sen 1999: 74). Central here are the degrees of freedom available to achieve the desired end: What options do I have to make something of what I have in me? How can I develop and implement the options for a good life for myself? A prime example of this is the lack of availability of an exit option for women in many regions. Can they achieve the freedom to opt, in principle, for an autonomous life outside gender-hierarchical family structures?
A fundamental feature of Sen's argument is that he looks closely not only at individual diversity of lifestyle, but also at the deviations from the prevailing social norm, and sees that societal institutions are oriented towards a socially conformist average of the population and that they therefore consider conditions of life and lifestyle patterns that deviate from this not as resources but as liabilities. Here the argument comes close to the paradigms (established in social work) of destigmatisation, of empowerment, and of reframing (seeing the strengths behind imputed weaknesses): “With adequate social opportunities, individuals can effectively shape their own destiny and help each other. They need not be seen primarily as passive recipients of the benefits of cunning development programs” (Sen 1999: 11). “(They are) active agents of change, rather than ( . . . ) passive recipients of dispensed benefits” (Sen 1999: xiii). Social work, however, has always pointed out that resources are not simply present in the human being, waiting to be retrieved, but they must be enabled to develop and be socially liberated.
THE SUBJECT AS TRANSNATIONAL FIGURE OF UNDERSTANDING
Ultimately, in the capability approach, subjective opportunities of realisation become a transnational structure of understanding, and an idea of subjective freedom is universalised. From the perspective of social work, the question is asked whether the idea of the subject having control over itself can be correspondingly universalised. The fundamental question of ‘what chances do people have of leading the life that they would like to lead?’ (cf. Sen 1999) is based on the premise that those concerned have their own subjective goals to realise, and can be motivated and supported from the outside to realise them. In contrast, social work addresses the question of people's differing life situations and the way they cope with everyday life and the everyday care problems that arise from the ambivalences of their situation in life. Seen in this light, social work always points to the different dynamics that people grasp for themselves when they are subject to the daily pressure of social conditions and are in a care situation: the dialectic of wish and denial.
Of course, we can state that all persons desire a good life for themselves—this is accepted as an anthropological axiom; but the subjective perspectives of development and denial frequently do not meet on the same level. There are social dynamics in operation that lead to the rise of ambivalent constellations in subjective schemes; these can be dealt with individually but are regularly ignored by universalised subjective ideas and approaches to enabling. Thus, social services amount to nothing if they are not founded on the experience of coping with everyday life (Lebensbewältigung).
With Georg Simmel we could ask the broader question whether, in the reception of the capability approach, the focus is on the poor themselves—their coping with everyday life and conditions of care—or on those who are supposed to enable them. In his classic essay on the poor, published over a hundred years ago in 1908, Simmel wrote that the individual poor person was not important for the support system for the poor. “The fact that someone is poor does not mean that he belongs to the specific social category of the ‘poor’. [ . . . ] It is only from the moment that [the poor] are assisted [ . . . ] that they become part of a group characterized by poverty.” Coser (1977: 182–83) wrote in his interpretation of Simmel, “Once the poor accept assistance, they are removed from the preconditions of their previous status, they are declassified, and their private trouble now becomes a public issue. The poor come to be viewed not by what they do [ . . . ] but by virtue of what is done to them.” Community “creates the social type of the poor and assigns them a peculiar status that is marked only by negative attributes, by what the status-holders do not have.”
This perspective seems to be repeated on the transnational socio-political scale. By the criterion of poverty, societies, or their leading strata, confirm their ideas of freedom and their subjective ideas of realisation as a policy of enabling. They reflect their idea of a transnational world order in the concept of the ‘capability approach.’ Poverty and social inequality are seen together—in people. From the socio-historical point of view, however, these are different threads of discourse. The social inequality discourse was always a conflict discourse, whereas the poverty discourse was a regulation discourse. Yet it is precisely the tension between regulation and social conflict that has defined the socio-political discourse of social work in the twentieth century and constituted its grounding.
Moreover, in order to be able to address the question of the ‘societal opening up’ of opportunities for realisation, the capability approach would have to be able to offer a historical and societal theory of development and enabling of life chances:
The unit according to which, following the capabilities approach, social justice and welfare can be measured, is the sum of actors’ enablements and opportunities for realisation opened up by society, i.e. the abilities and power potentials to enable them to realise their intentions and goals. Thus public practices of education, training, support etc. can be described as ‘political and economic’ practices, if political economy is understood in the classical sense of (collective) production and provision of goods that citizens need in order to achieve a good life. (Oelkers, Otto, and Ziegler 2008: 87)
It is precisely here that it becomes clear that the concept of the capability approach is moved out of the socio-historical and developmental context in which it was created in the 1970s and 1980s and into the different regional welfare-political discourses, as well as being universalised in terms of welfare policy. Sen developed the concept in a socio-historical and socio-political landscape in which a socio-political development like that of European industrial society was inconceivable. As with the Human Rights Charter, what was important—if there was no prospect of collective social processes—was to be able to make social development perspectives, beyond merely the daily struggle to survive, symbolically visible and attainable for individuals. Freedom for people to shape their own lives is the goal.
Opportunities for realisation are discussed in various contexts and grounded in everyday conflicts and problems. From the point of view of social policy, the concept of the capability approach continues to adhere to a programmatic approach, because although for it society is called upon to make the aim of its social policy the development of a better life for the members of society, similar to the policy of improving life chances in 1980s Europe, Sen emphasises democratic participation discourse, albeit in a rather unspecific manner, and overlooks the developmental dynamics of historical and social structures. Thus the socio-economic question of power cannot be debated.
STIMULI FOR TRANSNATIONAL SOCIAL WORK
If, then, with this criticism in mind, we ask which transnational challenges for social work become clear in the discussion of the capability approach, two perspectives stand out: the normative perspective and the agency perspective. The capability approach is a normative concept. It sets goals for a ‘good life,’ which comprise socio-anthropological basic figures and contents of internationally agreed human rights. Nussbaum (1999) has developed a corresponding catalogue of qualifications for a ‘good life.’ Sen is against hard and fast specifications; he prefers, in principle, to leave the choice of goals to individuals or for goals to be agreed in democratic discourse. At issue is the freedom of the actor and his options. However, “the absence of a definition of what makes up a good human life crucially [weakens] the normative force of the capability approach” (Steckmann 2008: 106). Nevertheless, we can see how difficult, even problematic, it is to combine universally and collectively grounded aims with individual ideas of a ‘good life.’
From the point of view of social policy, what we have here is a free-floating programmatic approach, as its aims and the opportunities of achieving them are not grounded in the socio-historical and socio-structural conditions and social conflicts under which they can develop and in which they can be experienced. Heimann (1929) addressed this question by looking at the dialectic of the relationship of economic and social development and social ideas. This is why we prefer the concept of the ‘better life’ rather than that of the ‘good life,’ because it can ground the normative horizon to the socio-empirical conditions of the current life situation.
It should, of course, be pointed out that the normative horizon only becomes clear for the affected persons when they get the chance to experience the fact that they are affected, whether it be in the perception of contrasts with a better life or in the experience of alternative possibilities. In the practice of social work, it is therefore argued that it is not cognitive enlightenment but the offer of ‘functional equivalents’ encouraging self-value, recognition, and self-efficacy that promises a change in normative attitudes (cf. Böhnisch 1997). Only when social alternatives experienced in this way are present can normative guidelines take effect. This is true of human rights every bit as much as for the principles of a ‘good life.’
The actor's perspective, which the capability approach especially claims for itself, is also embedded in the aspiration towards the capacity for action. Here, critical reception looks for a link with socio-political debate on agency. Agency is understood as the capacity of individuals or groups to become effective in their environment, e.g., to participate actively in social networks and support groups in order to be able to gain active social control of themselves and their social environment (cf. Homfeldt, Schroer, and Schweppe 2008). Agency as capability for action—as the concept is understood in the capability discourse—forms part of a model of expanded capacity for action in coping with everyday life. This becomes clear if we consider the attempts to find a theoretical link with the capability approach based on socialisation. “From the perspective of socialisation theory, the key question is how individuals experience and interpret their conditions of life and what possibilities for action and creativity they offer” (Grundmann 2008: 132). Capability for action—it is said in this context—depends on the experiences of efficacy that a person has had. Whether the experience is of powerlessness to act or of the power to act, “Capability for action is thus directly connected to the evaluations of action and the material limitations or possibilities that prevail in the conditions of life and the social life situation” (ibid.: 137).
These perspectives link directly with the classic body of knowledge underpinning social work. They have no need of the discourse surrounding the capability approach. In many models of social work it is argued that learning experiences develop in which, against the horizon of a ‘better life,’ the aspiration towards capacity for action is ultimately grounded in the daily accumulation of experiences of coping.
NEEDINESS AND ITS TRANSNATIONAL SOCIO-POLITICAL REFLEXIVITY
We began by speaking about the three Cs: care, commons, and citizenship, which are currently being released in the field of tension between transnationality, the national state, and locality. Care, commons, and citizenship appear as socio-political vanishing points, no longer as reference factors of social work linked in with the social state. In all three dimensions it is evident that suffering in and through society is being socially redimensioned. Here, it is about the socio-historical contexts and, finally, also about how people can experience constellations of need in their life situations and socially transform them. The strategy of setting and hierarchising needs—the traditional business of social psychology—comes into effect again transnationally in the capability approach. The only difference is that here the capability aspect and therefore the development aspect are stressed. However, the approach remains undialectical, as, from the empirical point of view, it is the simultaneity of needs development and denial that can make humans incapable of action.
We attempt to express this constellation of inwardly self-contradictory simultaneity with the concept of neediness (Bedürftigkeit). Many of the problems of coping with everyday life that people in an affluent society have—a society which permanently generates needs, but where the ability to satisfy these needs is distributed in a socially unequal manner—can be summed up in the paradigm of neediness. Transnational processes of socialisation, however, generate a new dialectic of neediness.
There is therefore little point in asking about the ‘true needs’ that people ought to have or could have, with which the aims of support and intervention ought to be brought into line. Thus those engaging in capability discourse very readily speak of ‘deformation of personal self-determination,’ by which is meant that “a person [can] find him- or herself in ignorance of what his or her real needs consist of” (Steckmann 2008: 100). In this context they introduce the concept of “adaptive preferences,” which seems to imply that people adapt to inhumane conditions—sometimes unconsciously, but also, not infrequently, consciously—thereby accepting that this will involve a “deformation of personal self-determination” (ibid.).
Social work has always been accustomed to such adaptive constellations. But it will not get through to its addressees if it attempts to do so by means of a declaration of right needs and a stigmatisation of wrong ones. We therefore need a conceptual framework for a future, transnationally reflexive form of social work, which is not offered to people from an external source but is derived from the socio-historical and socio-structural developmental conditions of the relevant social conditions of life—and which does not leave it to individuals to decide how to recognise and develop their abilities. Individual patterns of coping have their biographical particularity, but in their fundamental structures they are grounded in the socio-structural conditions of the life situation and the scope such conditions provide. These, in turn, arise from the particular socio-historical development—in the dialectic of expansion or contraction.
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