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Trust to work, Trust at Work: Relationships of Trust in Belgian Active Welfare State

par Duhant, Valentine
Référence World Congress on Political Science (24: 23-27 juillet 2016: Poznan, Pologne)
Publication Non publié, s.d.

Communication à un colloque

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Résumé :

This paper aims at investigating the definition and implementation of relationships of trust in the field of social assistance in Belgium. The empirical data come from a six-week ethnographical study conducted in a “Public Center for Social Action” (CPAS) in Brussels. CPAS are local public agencies which provide a range of services to those who are not entitled to any unemployment benefit, from financial support to help for looking for a job. This study focuses on “socio-professional services” in charge of helping recipients to reintegrate the job market. Indeed, they are emblematic of the shift from a “passive” to an “active” welfare state, which reflects the rise of workfare-type policies in many countries over the past decades. Activation policies rely on the individualisation and personalisation of relationships between state agents and users in order to take into account recipients’ subjectivity and to develop their autonomy and responsibility. In Belgium, a law voted in 2006 officially defined individualisation as a tool to increase fairness and recognition in social assistance policies, with the aim to handle the increasing diversity of inequalities. Personal relationships between state agents and users are thus increasingly the sites of policy-making, which implies to analyse how trust concretely plays out in those relationships. Consequently, this study applies a street-level bureaucracy perspective to analyze how street-level workers are defining and implementing trust in face-to-face interactions with recipients, with a focus both on their own definitions and uses of trust and to the organizational conditions of those definitions and practices.