The framework of this master’s thesis is a disability department of a Danish municipality where the employees are expected to co-create together with the citizens to evolve the welfare of tomorrow. Co-creation, co-production, empowerment and social innovation are activities that within the past 20 years have been introduced to and tested in the public sector in the attempt to improve the economy of public services based on a New Public Governance paradigm, where the citizens and the civil society are seen as active participants in controlling and evolving the welfare system. According to Professor Hanne Kathrine Krogstrup this means that the employees in the public sector have to change their perspective of the citizens with whom they work and also to change and find a new professional identity for themselves.
In this master thesis we therefore study the relations between individuals and community and how these relations influence on the opportunity to learn in our days of liquid modernity. In order to give an answer to our main problem we introduce two areas of investigation:
First we focus our investigation on the social practice where social workers with professional pedagogical qualifications and a manager for an interdepartmental unit within the disability department. All are asked how they articulate co-production in their own Practice and how they perceive it challenging. We ask this question to obtain knowledge on how co-production is constructed between workers in a professional social practice and where they see its complexity. Our method to uncover articulated discourses within the social practice is described in the Critical Discourse Analysis by Norman Fairclough. We supplement this theory and method with the Discourse Psychology as interpretated by Marianne Winther Jørgensen and Louise Phillips in order to locate the assumed consequences of these discourses for the ability to co-create.
Secondly we investigate the learning perspective from a Transformative Learning theory by Sociologist Jack Mezirow and by Professor Knud Illeris. From this perspective we intend to investigate whether the complexity in co-production may be found in the neglect of the workers’ learning preconditions of co-production processes.
Speciale 2019 - Kandidat i læring og forandringsprocesser, Institut for Læring og Filosofi
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Our study showed that processes targeting “the masses” may influence the self being of the individual professional, because professionals experience initiated processes as derogatory and of no importance to them. Furthermore we found that the language has significance for the ability to create meaning between individual and community. Skepticism towards the system may inhibit learning for the professional whereas dialogue, critical reflection and action may create opportunity for the individual to change habits and patterns in their practice. Finally we found that the community is imprinted with structures of power that influence on how management constructs the verbal communication with professionals. We argue that these findings are of significance for the individual professional’s learning opportunities in the community which will also be externalized in the work with the end user - the person with the disability.