Social Work in and around the Home: Using Home as a Site to Promote Inclusion

Abstract

This chapter offers an exploration in to how the home and the local milieu are activated as sites of intervention in social work with families at risk and local community work with the purpose of promoting inclusion underpinned by shifting ideas of what is considered a normal orderly life. Where early social work interventions in and around the home were primarily concerned with creating home as a space for dwelling and the amelioration of material wellbeing of the working-class family living in poverty, contemporary interventions are primarily concerned with creating family relations and practices enabling individual inclusion in society emphasizing mobility and participation. Such shifting ideas reflect an ambiguity or tension inherent in the Danish welfare state with regard to how inclusion is approached. On the one hand, the notion of class, inequality, and the need to combat poverty has been at the core in the shaping of the Social democratic welfare state. On the other hand, this notion has also had a strong subtext of normalization and discipline problematizing cultural practices of the working class through ideas of individual freedom, empowerment, and self-realization (Villadsen, 2005). The way this ambiguity between collective and individualistic approaches to inclusion is balanced becomes pivotal in understanding responses to and potential consequences of neoliberal trends. Neoliberalism emphasizes the rationality and responsibility of the individual, rather than collective rationality and responsibility for solving social problems including problems of inclusion (Hagen, 2006). The question is, how does a Social democratic welfare state respond to this and what may be the consequences? One way to address this question is to explore how welfare rationales are unfolded in social work interventions in and around the homes of families. It is well known that interventions in and around the homes of families are bearer of ideological constructions pertaining to ideas of social order as well as the distribution of responsibilities between the state, the market, and the family in particular the parents (Donzelot, 1979; Nissen, 2017b). Furthermore, interventions in the home can be considered a