Governmentality in social security system

Abstract

Social work as a specific field of practice leading, on the one hand, to establish institutional support as well as ways of solving people’s problems and, on the other hand, as a field plunged into bureaucratic mechanisms, whose implicit aim is to control and govern social problems. Social security systems include a kind of ambivalence from the beginning of their existence. Modern state that is the historical basis of the contemporary social order consisted of disciplinarity and pedagogization. It begins its social reform by increasing productivity and effectiveness of labor power. The aim of this paper is to look at the genesis of modern welfare state and public service from the Foucauldian perspective of governmentality, which enables in historical processes the identification of tendencies existing in contemporary society under neoliberal constraints. The question of governementality is very much up to date in the context of social security system research and analysis. Taking into account Foucauldian applicable perspective, one might say that social work agency is an appropriate place of soft disciplinarity and formation of the individual according to arbitrarily conditioned social expectations.