Advice from experts as the principle of European social policy

Abstract

"This paper examines the question of in which social content the increase in the significance of social science indicators in the social policy of the European Union/European Community is embedded. The proposition is made that the processing of policy in scientifically constructed and quantified numerical values is both the result and the expression of the emergence of social science policy fields that, in accordance with their logic, carry out policy advice (...). [It] is argued in this paper that advisory policy as part of the emergence and development of political fields is to be seen in the sense of Pierre Bourdieu. By way of an empirical example this is related to the field of European inclusion policy. In the following section the situation in which European social policy found itself at the beginning of the European process of unification and before the institutionalisation of a policy of inclusion is shown (Section 2). After that, an explanation is given of how the principle of advisory policy gradually developed in the 1980s (Section 3) and how it was generalized and extended step-by-step until it finally found its clearest expression up to now in the introduction of the Open Method of Coordination (Section 4). In Section 5 the course of the argumentation is briefly recapitulated." (Text excerpt, IAB-Doku)

Cite article

Bernhard, S. (2012): Beratung als Prinzip der europäischen Sozialpolitik. In: H.- G. Soeffner (Hrsg.) (2012): Transnationale Vergesellschaftungen : Verhandlungen des 35. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Frankfurt am Main 2010, p. 1-10.