The field of social action is undergoing full reconstruction, argues Didier Vrancken. In his latest work he shows how social workers are spilling over from the spaces which have traditionally been assigned them. The social is being brought into general use, is gaining ground, is becoming commonplace…

‘When, through the media but also through daily experience,’ wonders Didier Vrancken, ‘life stories more and more take on the shape of aborted trajectories, ordinary disasters, when the zone of vulnerability is ceaselessly extending and is threatening people who have never had recourse to social action, a fundamental question imposes itself: has the social become barbaric, foreign to the historical context which saw social action come to the fore? Social workers today intervene in neighbourhoods, families, couples and schools and are spilling over from the spaces which have traditionally been assigned them. The social is being brought into general use, is gaining ground, is becoming commonplace…Maybe it is not enough to check the effects of a society which secretes exclusion and precarity? A barbarous society? A vicious social sector?’

The work (1) by Didier Vrancken brings up to date and transposes onto the field of social action theses developed in the author’s previous books, published over the last decade: Le crépuscule du social, 2002 (The Twilight of the Social),  Le travail sur Soi. Vers une psychologisation de la société ?, 2006 (Working on the Self : Towards a Psychologisation of Society (together with C. Macquet) and Le nouvel ordre protectionnel, 2010, (The New Protectional Order), a work written since 2008 which will come out next September whilst it was completed well before the writing of Social barbare (The Vicious Social).

The hypotheses developed in these three works (on the current reconfiguration of the social and of social policies) are transposed onto the field of social action, where it takes on a particular accent. That is to say, onto a field which has above all concerned, at the beginning, the excluded of a society, the weakest. Yet, as the book Social Barbare shows, this field of intervention has never stopped expanding, impacting on new sectors of the population, and ending up making the social commonplace. ‘I tested my hypotheses by organising over a year a discussion group with social workers with the theme ‘Social work in the quest for meaning,’’ declares the author. The group continues to be run and will become larger. The group’s work and reflections were the subject of a study day at Liège in March 2010. Moreover these analyses have been tested on the occasion of numerous other study days and conferences, but also in the context of a course I now give to second year Masters students in Social Engineering.’

(1) Social barbare, Didier Vrancken, Charleroi, Couleurs Livres, collection Questions de société, 2010.