Professional Transformations in Public Sector/Social Services Management: Trends and Challenges – between Managerial ‘Governmentality’ and Authoritarian Governance?

Disregarding the national configuration of Welfare systems built in the post-WWI, governments have been undertaking a wide restructuring of their public sectors; following the socio-economic crises, social policies undergone significant rescaling processes. If the Southern European literature is rich on such reshaping trends, the Latin American research was dealing with, according to the socio-political and economic breakdowns known by the region. The scalar policies reorganisation seems an ambivalent outcome of reforms searching to contrast the spread of urban poverty and rising social inequalities, as well as cutting costs and devolving the burden of cuts to the local level –facing to new social demands within neoliberal strategies, and moreover after them. This session proposal aims at update the debate on public ‘social intervention models’ emerging in Western Europe by recalling the Latin American experience, and putting their ‘social development’ trends (since the structural adjustment) into analytical perspective with the contemporary evolutions and challenges of professional transformations in public sphere/social services. We invite to explore, with some regional/comparative scope, or throughout singular cases studies, the institutional consequences in terms of managerial ‘governmentality’ and/or authoritarian governance potentially arising from the neoliberal regimes, and the frame of reference and values beyond. Regarding the ‘referentials’ underlying the dynamics towards a ‘multilevel management’ of social policies, or the ‘contractualisation’ of social aids. Or by questioning their impact on social workers’ practices, at the forefront of ‘targeted’ strategies addressing ‘the social question’: ‘monitoring’ assistance devices and beneficiaries –and the constraining transformation of its public ways of management.