Doing Without State and Civil Society as Universals: ‘Dispositifs’ of Care Beyond the Classic Sector Divide

Abstract

This article poses questions of power to social services provided by voluntary organizations. In particular, it examines the assumption that voluntary and local organizations represent ‘containers’ for a radically different social work rationality, where the marginalized are met in a more equal and attentive fashion, ‘on their own terms’. Thus, the world of volunteering and ‘friendly amateurism’ has been seen as a source of instructive ethics from which government policies should take their lead. While recognizing that this discourse on voluntary rationality has had a number of positive effects, it has almost completely blocked discussions of the forms of power exercised in voluntary services. It is suggested that questions of power, rationality and organized welfare can be fruitfully re-formulated within a Foucauldian register. Applying Foucault's concept of ‘dispositif’ to services for the homeless, the article demonstrates that social work rationality is not linked to the public/private divide but rather to a specific service domain. The article questions the widespread belief that public social services are always permeated by power, whereas those of civil society provide a more power-free domain where ‘genuine human’ meetings may take place.

Keywords:

• Voluntary organizations
• rationality
• power
• Foucault
• dispositif
• homeless

Acknowledgements

I wish to warmly thank the members of the research group on political management at the Department of Management, Politics & Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School, and two anonymous referees for their fruitful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Notes

A number of studies acknowledge differences between the degree of resistance and bargaining power that voluntary organizations have in relation to statutory agencies. These may, for instance, differentiate between large organizations with independent economic resources as opposed to smaller and more vulnerable organizations (for the Danish context, see Henriksen, 2004)

Evers and Laville (2006) substantially developed the definitions of the third sector. They also point out that underneath a seemingly shared international body of theory, the approaches used by voluntary sector researchers are shaped by particular national and regional traditions.

Foucault contends that to the extent that the state ‘governs’ it can only do so on the basis of already existing power relations operating in civil society. For Foucault, civil society is thoroughly traversed by power relations, and to such an extent that some critics have claimed that he turns upside-down the concept of autonomous voluntary association. Cohen and Arato thus describe Foucault's position on civil society as purely negative as he conceives of civil society as ‘a strategic field constituted by disciplinary apparatuses’ (1992, p. 295). While Foucault could be said to describe mainly the dark backside of modern civil society, he could hardly be said to be against public debate, citizen's initiatives, grassroots organization, and so on.

Foucault says that his motive for focussing on practices was ‘to study this interplay between a “code” which rules ways of doing things (how people are to be graded and examined, things and signs classified, individuals trained, etc.) and a production of true discourses which serves to found, justify and provide reasons and principles for these ways of doing things’ (1991, p. 79). Thus, his analysis of practices highlights the interdependence between what can be done and what can be known, the interrelation between how space is arranged and knowledge produced.

These practices are at the intersection of the concomitant production of knowledge and the regulation of people, and so, constructing a dispositif is a way of describing how producing knowledge (the visualization and categorization of particular objects) and exercising power (segregation, detainment, intervention, etc.) is interwoven and follows a particular logic, a ‘non-subjective’ strategy.

The skepticism towards professional intervention, expressed in most shelters, reflects a broader transformation in modern social work which has been described as ‘from depth to surface’ (Howe, 1996). From the 1980s onwards, the structural analysis of various background variables has been receding at the expense of social work methods that are less analytical, increasingly performance-oriented and focused on the present.