Special Issue: "Social Work and Social Control"

Content

Editorial: Social Work and Social Control

Sylvia Kühne, Christina Schlepper and Jan Wehrheim

Full Papers

Hilfe als Konditionalprogramm: Eine Systematisierung sozialer Kontrolle als Kernaufgabe Sozialer Arbeit (German)

Support as a conditional program: A systematization of social control as a key principle of social work

Bernd Dollinger

The contribution resumes a ‘conventional’ issue of social work, viz. the connection of support and social control. After earlier (critical) debates have long evaporated, it has become textbook knowledge to assume a duality or dialectic of support and social control, which seem to be inseparably intertwined in social work practice. There are good reasons to doubt this conjecture as its prevailing understanding insinuates a ‘pure’, ‘ingenuous’ concept of support, which appears to be unwittingly burdened with the implementation of social control. I argue that, in contrast, social work is primarily a particular mode of social control. In most cases, social work assumes a semblance of benevolence, but it still embodies an exercise of control, which it cannot abandon. I illustrate this supposition using systematic, historical and empirical references.

Warum ich mich für den Umgang von Sozialarbeiter_innen mit Devianten
interessierte. Biographische und soziologische Anmerkungen (German)

Why I was interested in social workers’ handling of deviants. Biographical and sociological notes

Helge Peters

In “Die sanften Kontrolleure” Helga Cremer-Schäfer and I showed that social workers at the beginning of the nineteenhundredseventies it’s true practiced social control. Nevertheless they acted mostly in the subjective interest of their clients. The social workers did not try to ascribe responsibility of their clients or to blame them. Findings of present investigations are different. I try to explain this change by comments on developments of post-welfare states. Social workers are more subjected to polit-economically founded influences than social workers have been in the time of “Die sanften Kontrolleure”.

Wie Sozialarbeiter_innen Devianz zuschreiben. Eine diachrone Analyse von Praktiken des legal reasonings in der Jugendgerichtshilfe (German)

How social workers ascribe deviance. A diachronic analysis of practices of legal reasoning in the field of youth court assistance

Sylvia Kühne and Christina Schlepper

The article examines changes in practices of ascribing deviance in the field of youth court assistance. By comparing data from the early 1970s and 2016 our results indicate that social workers’ practices are rather still guided by their occupational mandate for action than by an orientation based on increased control and punitive attitudes as current discourses of transformational changes in Social Work are suggesting. Nevertheless, the results also reveal transitions riveting on these practices according to which a shift of social works mandate towards cooperation with other institutions of social control is superseding a once critical attitude of social workers towards these agencies and partisanship for their addressees.

Die Allianz von Verbrechen & Strafe und Schwäche & Fürsorge zwischen sozialer Kontrolle und sozialer Ausschließung oder: weshalb soziale Kontrolle doch untauglich wurde, Ausschließung zu kontrollieren (German)

The alliance of Crime & Punishment and Weakness & Care between social control and social exclusion or: why social control could not be used to control social exclusion

Helga Cremer-Schäfer

The idea of civilising politics of criminalization and punishment via transferring delinquents in institutions of social control is reconstructed as a difficult and demanding “social artifact” in welfare states. Preconditions in the fields of politics and ideology existed just in a short period of prosperous Fordism. Institutionalising (since the second half of the last century) a coexistence of benevolent (“soft”) forms of social control by professionals of social work and “wars” on crime, terrorism, violence, drugs etc. as an instrument of symbolic politics and authoritarian populism terminated in the abolition of power to resist the neoliberal instrumental turn: the rehabilitation of punitivity. Critical research that gives conflicting “underlife” practices a voice is needed and possible.

Special Contributions in celebration of 50 years  Kriminologisches Journal

Soziale Kontrolle (German)

Social Control

Birgit Menzel

Sociology defines all actions and mechanisms intended to sustain social norms and/or societal order as social control. By contrast (critical) criminology has a limited understanding of social control with a restricted focus on criminal law. Based on two examples this paper shows how this criminological "reductionism" in the understand of social control undermines the scientific possibilities to understand and analyze social developments.

Conference Reports

„Abschaffung des Rechts“. Bericht über den vierten Kongress der
deutschsprachigen Rechtssoziologie-Vereinigungen vom
13. bis 15. September 2018 an der Universität Basel (Busch/Zech)

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