Introduction

During recent decades, Western welfare states have gone through a number of substantial transformations. One such transformation was the turn to active welfare states, based on the neoliberalist ideas of limiting the role of the state in welfare provision and emphasising citizens’ responsibilities instead of rights. Along with this, there has been a transition to a managerialist mode of governance, calling for more effective and efficient welfare services, and an increasing demand to understand service-using citizens as active participants in service provision. Common to these kinds of transformations is that they travel across countries and are often defined as indispensable steps to maintaining welfare states and to securing effective, fair and flexible responses to citizens’ wishes and needs. In other words, these are globally promoted and shared policies of welfare states, which are then realised in national legislation and guidelines.

New managerialist modes of governing have, among a range of other features, facilitated an increasingly specialised organisation of work in health and social care services. The idea is that specialised units of professionals will be able to develop more effective and productive service delivery due to both a specialisation of professional skills and an optimisation of procedures guiding work. However, this specialisation has produced fragmented services, which lack coherence and coordination in individual cases and between services more broadly. This has led to a call for collaborative and integrated welfare services across service sectors and national contexts. The resulting collaborative and integrated welfare policy and its accomplishments and implications in frontline social welfare service practices are at the core of this book. This policy stems from the aforementioned welfare state transformations, but it also has specific roots and justifications. It is promoted as a solution to overcoming the challenges of ineffective, dispersed and professional-led health and social care services. ‘Collaboration’ in this book refers to both collaboration between different professionals and organisations, and collaboration between professionals and citizens as service users. ‘Integration’, for its part, refers to the view that health and social care services should be seen as a whole, responding comprehensively to people's complex problems and service needs, in contrast to segmented sections concentrating solely on strictly targeted issues (Cameron et al, 2014; Fenwick, 2016, p 112).