A job like any other? Working in the social sector between transformations of work and the crisis of welfare

The aim of this article, introducing the Special issue is to shed light on the restructuring of social work in the context of more general transformations of work. Social work represents an important share of the contemporary job market, especially in the field of services, both in the public and private sectors (mainly education, health, social services). To grasp the extent of the transformations taking place and the main directions along which they manifest themselves, it is useful to underline the traits of the broader sector of care work, which social work belongs. If social work presents some general trend of restructuring that are common to most contemporary job sectors, it is by looking at care work that it is possible to better frame its specificity. Care work refers to those paid professional services that relate to supporting the satisfaction of human needs (under varying circumstances depending on the age or the state of health of the recipient of the care service) and well-being, to maintaining the physical, emotional and social skills of individuals. Work in health and social care is characterized by a high degree of dependence of the well-being of clients on the support of care workers; besides the quality of care services, it is based on a stable and trusting relationship between care workers and clients (England et al., 2002; Müller, 2019). Furthermore, gender-stereotypical perception characterizes the helping and caring care jobs and occupations, perceived as ‘typically female”. The skills involved in undertaking care work are often not recognised and visible because they are often not formally certified and/or considered as ‘natural skills’ deriving from women’s essence as mothers and carers (Folbre and Smith, 2017; Farris and Marchetti, 2017). This led to a partial invisibility of caring “skills” and an undervaluation of female jobs (Balbo, 1978; Saraceno, 2009), influencing the regulation practices and more generally the occupational configuration, through a plurality of mechanisms. The different waves of transformation of welfare have had a significant impact on social work: Firstly – from the ‘90s onwards –the provision of services is increasingly dominated by economic considerations of cost containment and improving the cost-effectiveness of the system. This dominance of economic considerations has been reinforced after 2009 by the handling of the economic and financial crisis; Secondly, the growing importance of local welfare systems and the diffusion of complex local systems of governance with the increasing role of non-public actors in them (Bifulco 2015); Thirdly the austerity-led stretching of the concept of “social”, with the growing importance of private organizations and entrepreneurial models of social interventions. These changes have had an impact on values, roles, professional profiles, professional cultures and practices. Emerging practices challenge existing institutional arrangements, but their ability to build public value and public goods and services independently from the State is highly questionable.