Bortom Lissabonstrategin : Om projektarbetares erfarenheter av inkluderingsarbete

Abstract

The European commission formed the first version of the Lisbon strategy in 2000. The objective was to turn the European Union into ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion’ by 2010. One of the governing mechanisms for achieving this is the Social Fund. The objective of the Social Fund in Sweden is to ‘contribute to speeding up change and renewal within working life’. The Social Fund co-finances project that either focus on giving increased opportunities to development and renewal within working life through competence development, or giving increasing job-opportunities. Projects with the latter aim should enhance for individuals that are far from the labor market to get a job and stay through ‘unconventional methods’. In this report we analyze projects with these objectives and methods, targeting groups such as immigrants, sick-listed, disabled and youths. The report contains the origin, development and current state of the Social Fund, a mapping of funded projects during 2008, a qualitative study of project worker's experiences of inclusionary work; attitudes towards the project participants, methods, collaboration with authorities and discre­pancies between project idea and actual practice. The report ends with a discussion on the consequences of project workers' encounter with project participants. Should projects or participants be adjusted? We characterise the project activities as hybridization between social work and education and discuss possible processes of inclusion and dangers of exclusion within the projects. We emphasise the importance of a non-discriminatory policy and suggest the implementation of such a policy in terms of equality mainstreaming in the applications.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.