Publication year: 2011
Source: Social Science & Medicine, In Press, Accepted Manuscript, Available online 27 May 2011
Vibeke Asmussen, Frank , Bagga, Bjerge
This article analyzes how and why welfare policies focusing on empowerment as users’ self-management create dilemmas in medically assisted drug treatment in Denmark. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the article points to two sets of dilemmas by focusing on the relationship between legal and institutional setups and staff and user possibilities for agency. The first dilemma concerns how to provide user self-management and individualized services and the actual possibilities of effectuating this in welfare institutions imbued by limited resources, manpower, and local rules. The second, how to create a balance between notions of user self-management and legal demands of control regarding…
Highlights: ► Empowerment regards the individual citizen as a free, active and self-managing user. ► Agents manage these dilemmas in an interplay between local institutional settings, social processes and legal framework. ► Implementation of policies as empowerment in social welfare institutions is integral to not a separate domain in policy studies.