Institute for social policy and the organisation of social services

Within the modern welfare state, social and other publicly regulated human services have become a wide-reaching area of professional work. They address a huge variety of individuals and groups who need counselling and social support and/or live under social conditions defined as problematic; in the same vein, they are embedded in support schemes regulated by the political system and codified by law, with these schemes being processed or run by various agencies. Both the research and teaching activities of the Institute engage with the infrastructure of those processes and basically address structural preconditions of social work and social welfare. These preconditions embrace regulations originating in social policy and law as well as those contexts taking shape at the level of both organisations (e.g. youth help departments of local authorities or agencies run by the voluntary sector) and social interaction (e.g. in the encounter of professionals and users). They are assessed by theoretical, empirical and practice-oriented work, including with an eye on historical backgrounds and international differences. A particular point of reference are transformative processes triggered by social change, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, by the restructuring of funding and governance schemes alongside a reorganised social economy of managing and service-providing agencies. This includes not least a focus on the consequences such change may have for the actors involved and concerning the impact of social work and social welfare systems.

Over recent years, Institute II (of the department of social work and social welfare) has embarked on three basic research areas, that is: a. History and theory of social work and social policy, b. Problems of independent and public social services and agencies (including social management), and c., Governance and social interaction in the health care system. Recent or current research projects have been funded externally or by the department:
 

• Collection of documents on the history of German social policy, 1967-1914 (Prof. Dr. Florian Tennstedt)
• The building of identity by bodily disabled men (Prof. Dr. Gerd Göckenjan/Dr. Stefan Dreßke/Katja Lüke)
• Deaconesses (Prof. Dr. Gerd Göckenjan/Dr. Stefan Dreßke)
• Palliative care in the hospital (Prof. Dr. Gerd Göckenjan/Dr. Stefan Dreßke)
• Comparative perspectives on person-related social services in England and Germany (Prof. Dr. Eckhard Hansen)
• Biographical encyclopaedia of the history of German social policy (Prof. Dr. Florian Tennstedt, Dirk Hainbuch)
• Coping with ambivalence in the German hospital sector. Regulatory and organizational balances in the process of transformation, embedded in a European Concerted Research Action (COST): Medicine and management in Europe, coordination: Prof. Ian Kirkpatrick, University of Leeds), funding: European Union
• Social system, endangered child welfare und processes of professional intervention (Prof. Dr. Ingo Bode, in collaboration with the University of Wuppertal, Germany)
• Work, quality and governance in elderly care systems of Western welfare states (Prof. Dr. Ingo Bode, in collaboration with the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, and the Regional Institute of Social Work Lorraine, France)