Beyond Managerialism: Social Love, Recognition, and Caring Emotions In Helping Professions

Helping professions are increasingly shaped by managerial reforms, performance indicators, accountability requirements, and resource constraints. Yet helping relationships often involve dimensions that exceed technical procedures, organizational rules, and measurable outcomes. Emotions, trust, recognition, commitment, reciprocity, and moral responsibility continue to play a crucial role in professional practice, particularly when working with vulnerable individuals and groups facing complex and often chronic situations of need.

This session explores what remains beyond managerial approaches in contemporary helping professions, such as social work. How can we understand the relational, emotional, and ethical dimensions of helping practices? What forms of professional action emerge when social workers confront situations that cannot be adequately addressed through standardized procedures and organizational rationalities alone? To what extent do helping relationships generate forms of solidarity, recognition, and social connection that exceed institutional expectations and formal professional roles?

Particular attention will be devoted to broader theoretical and empirical reflections on social love, care, emotions, commitment, vocation, recognition, relational work, and democratic professionalism in contemporary welfare systems.