Social services as critical infrastructure – conceptualising and studying the operational core of the social investment state
| Published date | 01 June 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13882627231175566 |
| Author | Tanja Klenk,Renate Reiter |
| Date | 01 June 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: Social services as critical infrastructureGuest Editors: Renate Reiter and Tanja Klenk |
Social services as critical
infrastructure –conceptualising
and studying the operational
core of the social investment
state
Tanja Klenk
Faculty of Economy and Social Sciences, Helmut-Schmidt University Hamburg,
Germany
Renate Reiter
Faculty of Cultural and Social Sciences, Department of Political Science: Public
Policy & Environmental Policy, FernUniversität in Hagen, Hagen, Germany.
Abstract
‘Social investment’as an idea to justify social policy reforms has become more and more accepted
in recent years and has decisively shaped agenda setting and policy formulation in European wel-
fare states. The effectiveness of this new welfare state model, however, depends highly on the cap-
acity to provide social services. Social services –job training, counselling and support for care
work –are a key component of the social investment model. Drawing on the policy capacity
approach, the article provides an analytical framework to study the ‘operational core’of the social
investment state. This implementation perspective allows us to assess whether governance actors
actually have the resources to fulfil the social investment idea of enhancing citizens’freedom to act.
Empirically, the article concentrates on two selected European welfare states, Germany and
France, countries with similar welfare systems but very different politico-administrative systems,
and on two fields of social service provision that are addressed differently in the social investment
debate: early childhood education and care (ECEC) and elderly care. Empirically, we use system-
atic content analysis to intensively study policy documents and secondary analyses. We show that
both countries (still) lack policy capacities in these two sectors as a basis for resilient implemen-
tation of the social investment paradigm.
Corresponding author:
Tanja Klenk, Helmut-Schmidt University Hamburg, Faculty of Economy and Social Sciences, Holstenhofweg 85, 22043
Hamburg, Germany.
Email: tanja.klenk@hsu-hh.de
Special Issue: Social services as critical infrastructure
European Journal of Social Security
2023, Vol. 25(2) 115–138
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/13882627231175566
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Keywords
Social services, social investment state, capacity, resilience, critical infrastructure
Introduction
Social services –job training, activation, counselling and care work –have been an important com-
ponent of public social policy ever since the emergence of the welfare state. Social service provi-
sion, however, has always received much less attention than social transfers, both in the scholarly
literature and in political debates (Bahle, 2008). The situation, however, has changed since the
beginning of the 2000s. The EU and its Member States have reconsidered the role of social services
in the welfare state, especially those services expected to ‘pay off’as a social investment in the
current and future workforce. Today, against the backdrop of diverse crises, most recently the
Covid-19 pandemic, well-functioning social services are considered an essential part of the envi-
saged new social investment state (Esping-Andersen, 2002).
The proponents of the social investment state refuse purely functional interpretations that justify
the need for social services by pointing to the increased need for labour supply to ensure inter-
national competitiveness (Hemerijck, 2018: 812). On the contrary, following their critics (cf.
Bothfeld and Rouault, 2015; Jenson, 2009; Saraceno, 2015), they point out that the provision of
social services such as child or elderly care also serves a goal of gender and social equality. The
overcoming of social problems such as unequal division of labour, the poverty risk of single
mothers, or uneven access to education has developed into a major objective of the social invest-
ment state (Plavgo and Hemerijck, 2021).
However, many preconditions must be met for successful implementation of a social investment
strategy which takes these perspectives into account: such a strategy requires substantial investment
in what we call the ‘operational core’of the social investment state, that is, in the state’s capacities
to ensure the provision of social services in a comprehensive and resilient manner. To perform this
policy function, a range of different capacities are necessary: as well as resources, competences,
skills and capabilities to actually provide services, governance capacities to plan, organise and
evaluate service provision are essential. The literature clearly states that high levels of capacities
are linked to better policy outputs and outcomes, while capacity deficits, on the other hand, are con-
sidered as a major cause of policy failure (Howlett and Ramesh, 2015). The effectiveness of the
social investment model, and in the long run also its legitimacy, thus depends on what happens
in the implementation phase of the policy cycle. Against this backdrop, we ask: How has the oper-
ational core of the social investment state developed in the last two decades? And what impact does
this have on social and gender equality as the main legitimising principles of the social investment
state?
To answer these questions, we study social service provision in the elderly and early child-
hood and education care sectors in Germany and France. The operational core of the social
investment state is conceptualised by drawing on the policy capacity approach (Wu et al.,
2018). This approach enables us to assess the ability of providers to deliver services, as well
as the ability of governance actors to plan, organise and evaluate social service provision.
The following initial assumptions guide our work: first, while social services are a key compo-
nent of the social investment state, they can be linked to different interpretations of this model
(Bothfeld and Rouault, 2015); second, to identify the different interpretations of the social
116 European Journal of Social Security 25(2)
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