Social Welfare: Care Planning and the Politics of Trust

This book describes a study of power and power relations produced within the processes that surround care planning. It sets out to provide evidence for the proposition that welfare professionals and the organisations in which they are embedded set out to manufacture trust. This trust has a particular quality, as it is impersonal and therefore does not require knowledge of any individual involved. At the same time, trust serves as a commodity within the competitive environment of welfare and it is contested – hence the politics of trust. Using a framework developed from the work of Michel Foucault on governmentality the study defines trust as the the management of expectations. It describes the local relations of power where a discourse of trust that is articulated by professionals within organisations. The existence of differing discursive structures between organisations is linked with Foucault''s description of the ‘orders of discourse'' to produce an organisational typology of three broad forms into which the organisations involved in the study are be placed. These are described as New Wave, Pragmatists and the Old Radical.