Three Decades of Social Work in France: from Security within the Welfare State to a State of «Disembedded Modernity»

This article gives an overview of trends in policy on the functions and role of social work in French society over the past twenty years. The author suggests several reasons for the current feeling of crisis of professional identity among professionals and the complexities of the political demands made on social work. These are analysed as a consequence of the specific French context of decentralisation of the State and of the multitude of approaches to organisation and to professional training programs. On a broader level, it seems that French social work reflects many characteristics of “modernity” being concerned with difficulties in defining a clear identity, lack of a clear territorial and institutional base (or “disembeddedness” to borrow Giddens term) and difficulties in finding a clear voice to make its values heard in an increasingly politicised arena of public debate.

Citizenship Education – Between Social Inequality and the Promises of Modernity

For several reasons citizenship and democracy has moved into political and research focus. Socio-cultural tensions and inequalities created by globalisation processes boosted by neo-liberal modes of government seem to inspire a concern with “social cohesion”, and the European Community assigns a key role to education in engendering European democratic citizenship. It can be questioned whether it is within the scope of educational programmes to ensure social integration and democracy. However, to clarify the perspectives of the educational issue, the article discusses the conflicts and relationships between cultural identity and democracy within a framework of modernity before returning to the issue of education for democratic citizenship. It is shown on the basis of empirical studies that family background interacts with school factors in the reproduction of democratic inequalities. It is also indicated, however, that this must not be considered an unchangeable pedagogical fact, and the article briefly sketches a set of pedagogical and research challenges concerned with educating for democratic empowerment at different levels of school practice. Although this paper focuses on education and the educational system, the arguments and findings presented can also claim relevance for social pedagogy and social work, esp. in respect of recent developments that stress the educational dimensions of social work.

Modernity Strikes Back? A Historical Perspective on the Latest Increase in Interpersonal Violence (1960-1990)

There is a plethora of criminological explanations why criminal violence increased during the three decades between the early 1960s and the early 1990s. This paper argues that most available interpretations are lacking in three respects: they lack a historical perspective that anchors the three critical decades in a wider understanding of long-term trends; they take the nation-state as their unit of analysis and disregard important commonalities across the Western world; and they pay insufficient attention to different trends in broad categories of physical violence.This paper therefore takes a macro-level and long-term perspective on violent crime, focussing on European homicide during the past 160 years. It demonstrates that the period of increase was preceded by a long-term decline and convergence of homicide rates from the 1840s to the 1950s. Also, it shows that both the decline and the increase primarily resulted from temporal variation in the likelihood of physical aggression between men in public space. It argues that explanations of these common trends need to take into account broad long-term cultural change common to Western societies. In particular, the paper suggests that shifts in culturally transmitted and institutionally embedded ideals of the conduct of life may provide an explanation for long-term change in levels of interpersonal violence.