The emergence of neo-philanthropy in relation to the metamorphosis of the social question

During the last few decades, the dependency of citizens on the social welfare system is regarded as a vital social risk in many European welfare states. Welfare state systems have gradually shifted their emphasis on social protection and social security and reconfigured into a system of social insecurity. In social policy rhetoric, poverty has been scrutinized under the social and political microscope as a problem of people living at the bottom of the social and economic scale while dynamics of inequality and wealth are largely ignored. Critical social work scholars have argued that social policy and social work have increasingly focused on welfare recipients’ merit rather than securing their citizenship and rights, resulting in a focal concern in the behaviour of the poor and echoing a binary and pre-welfare state distinction between deserving and undeserving citizens. In that vein, we see a recently emerging and alarming critique on social work being involved in the production of so-called charity economies in the shadow of the welfare state and expressions of ‘neo-philanthropy’ in frontline social work practice. The objective of this symposium is to tease out historical roots as well as contemporary manifestations of this recent shift in the normative value orientation of social policy and social work.