http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1793-1031
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ABSTRACT
This article investigates the micro-level practices of subject-construction in Finnish participatory social policy. Through a governmental ethnography on projects that invite former beneficiaries to become ‘experts-by-experience’ in social welfare organizations, I discern the possibilities for freedom in the participants’ self-construction. By making use of Michel Foucault’s conceptual tools of care of the self and confession, I illustrate how, contrary to the projects’ emancipatory promise of providing the service users the freedom to reconstruct themselves, the projects entail practices that curb the participants’ way of ‘knowing themselves’. They require the service users to reframe their raw experiences as neutral and objective knowledge, making alternative ways of knowing appear ‘irrational’, and hence easily discountable. I conclude that despite the user involvement initiatives’ promise of incorporating different forms of knowledge, the participants are in practice required to realign their way of knowing with the dominant knowledge paradigm in order to be accepted as participants.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Dr Lauri Siisiäinen as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their thorough feedback and insightful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. A first draft of this article was presented at the Interpretive Policy Analysis Conference in Lille, France, July 2015. My thanks for the conference organizers for their encouragement and help in earlier phases of the publication process.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Cressida J. Heyes (Citation2007, 37) questions the idea that the normalizing practices either limit or enhance the subject’s freedom. Instead, she suggests that while the practices certainly are used to construct docile, ‘normal’ subjects, it is possible that people may willingly choose to follow them and cultivate themselves in a way desired by the administration, in an attempt to ‘feel normal’.
3. The projects studied are as follows:
Finnish Central Association for Mental Health: establishment of expertise-by-experience and evaluation-by-experience in the development of mental health and substance abuse services (2011–2015).
The Federation of Mother and Child Homes and Shelters: Miina – participation and empowerment of women who have encountered domestic violence (2008–2012).
No Fixed Abode: The utilization of expertise-by-experience in the design and production of services for the homeless (2012–2015).
Muotiala Accommodation and Activity Centre Association: The project of preventive mental health work – experience-based knowledge about mental health issues for the working-age population (2005–2009).
Sininauhaliitto ry: A low-threshold information and support center for gambling problems (2010–2014).
City of Vantaa: Key to the Mind – project for developing mental health and substance abuse services in Southern Finland (2010–2015).
City of Tampere: SOS II – To Social Inclusion through Social Work (2013–2015).
4. I conducted the interviews between 4 April 2014 and 16 October 2015 I initiated contact with the projects by sending them an open invitation to participate in the study, along with a request to forward the invitation to all relevant people in their organization. All experts-by-experience and practitioners who expressed interest in participating in the research were subsequently interviewed. The interviews were conducted in Finnish and the excerpts were later translated into English by the researcher.
5. Documents include the projects’ own material concerning expertise-by-experience, and the funders, particularly the Ministry of Social Welfare and Health’s key documents sketching out the policy.
6. In quoted interviews, the abbreviations E1–E23 refer to the experts-by-experience, P1–P14 to the professionals and TM to the interviewer.
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Taina Meriluoto
Taina Meriluoto is a PhD candidate in political science in the department of social sciences and philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She is interested in participatory democracy, especially with regard to marginalized groups, changing notions of expertise within participatory processes and ethnographic methods in policy studies. She currently conducts her research as part of the project ‘Superdemocracy – Critical Assessment of the Participatory Turn’ funded by the Academy of Finland.