The Politics and Policy of Welfare Service Professions in the Era of Workforce Shortage

In recent decades, healthcare, social, and educational professions in Western countries—particularly in Europe—have faced increasing levels of distress and crisis, driven by socio-economic, demographic, and public policy changes. This crisis is most notably reflected in severe personnel shortages and recruitment difficulties, which are significantly undermining the capacity of welfare systems to meet growing service demands. Despite the centrality of workforce issues in these labor-intensive services, the governance of personnel policies in welfare services and the corresponding policy arenas has rarely been the subject of dedicated investigation in the social and political sciences. This oversight has hindered a comprehensive understanding of these policies. As observed by Kuhlmann et al. (2023) in relation to healthcare, workforce policy has seldom been treated as a distinct area of investigation. Furthermore, the typologies commonly employed to analyze health, social, and educational systems tend to neglect the specific policy networks and arenas of welfare service professions.

This paper aims to make an initial contribution by proposing a conceptual framework for analyzing the governance of welfare service professions and the networks shaping this policy domain from a comparative perspective. In this context, the focus is on the healthcare, social, and educational sectors in Europe. To achieve this, the paper mainly draws on methodological and conceptual tools from two strands of literature: the first is neo-institutionalist theory, as applied in comparative social policy, to reconstruct policymaking processes and sectoral policy arenas from a multi-level perspective; the second is neo-Weberian theories in the sociology of professions, which employ concepts such as jurisdiction, social closure strategies, exclusion, and inclusion to analyze professional groups and their strategies in confronting the other political and social actors.