Institutional logics and coordination of basic social services

Abstract

Early childhood educational and care services have been considered a key tool for reducing inequality and breaking the intergenerational transmission of poverty (European Commission, 2013). This article proposes an institutionalist perspective to analyse the regulatory and organizational conditions that frame how social workers promote the access of users of social services to public schools for children aged 0–3. The study is based on semi-structured interviews (17 individual and 8 group) to social workers from basic social services in the city of Tarragona. The results show that, in the absence of sufficient school places, the institutional context of social services provides various rationales to prioritize the children that may attend schools: the need to supervise or temporarily replace family functions in cases of “children at risk” (family logic); or as an opportunity to free the user from family burdens in order either to achieve other specific measures of the social intervention plan (professional logic) or to realistically aim obtain job (activation logic).