Social Service Professions Towards Cross-European Standardisation of Qualifications
Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: Entrepreneurship may need to be included in the qualifications of professionals, at least as an option for further education. The neoliberal tendency to consider personal services as ‘products’ whose productivity need improvement might be reflected on critically from the perspective of service users and service staff. As seen in many countries, efforts to increase service productivity means limiting individual and personal considerations in the services and increasing the size of care groups and number of cases per staff member. This also concerns staff qualifications and to what degree they can communicate a particular character of social services in relation to the industrial production of goods and services. At the same time, strong tendencies to medicalise, juridise social services and ‘curricularise’ childhood by ‘early education’ necessitate a clarification of one’s own qualification profile in social professions. In this article, which is based on a more comprehensive report (Family Platform 2010), I maintain a comparative cross-European view in order to map out the qualifications of the core
Source: Social work & society
Author: Aila‐Leena Matthies
Institution: University of Jyväskylä
Language: English
Subfield: Public Administration
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2134449541