The newcomers’ perception of social assistance provision and its organisation

Costa Santos, Adriana;Vertongen, Youri
(2023) Newcomers Navigating the Welfare State. Experiences of Immigrants and Street-Level Bureaucrats with Belgium’s Social Assistance System — ISBN: [9789462703827], p. 245-270, published

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This chapter aims to explore newly arrived immigrants’ perceptions of the PCSW services they receive. Three aspects of this perception will be analysed: services, practices, and self-perception. The first part looks at the perception of the rights and services at the moment of registration at the PCSW. The second part will analyse the representations that newcomers have of the concrete practices of social workers, who are responsible for opening up rights and who embody the face of the institution being in the front line of contact with newcomer beneficiaries. This section will be analysed from the perspective of the notion of appropriateness (Parkhurst & Abeysinghe, 2016; Weber et al., 2004) of the services provided in relation with the expectations preceding the access to them. Finally, the third part analyses the impact of the (perceived) practices of PCSWs’ social workers on the beneficiaries’ perception of themselves. This part will be approached from the angle of the notion of deservingness (Ratzmann & Sahraoui, 2021; Laenen et al., 2019; Laenen, 2018), imported into street-level bureaucracy literature to analyse the conditions under which citizens are willing to share access to welfare resources. This notion appears to be a relevant analytical tool for studying the moral considerations by which social workers would determine access to social support for migrant beneficiaries (van Oorschot, 2008; van Oorschot et al., 2017). The notion of deservingness was often studied from the perspective of the street-level bureaucrats. In our fieldwork, we observed that it was an important feature to analyse the interactions between the social workers and the beneficiaries, from the perception of the latter. Hence, in the present chapter we propose to examine deservingness from the perspective of the beneficiaries, namely through the discussion of the discursive processes by which the migrant beneficiaries try to give substance to this notion (HalluinMabillot, 2012).
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Costa Santos, A., & Vertongen, Y. (2023). The newcomers’ perception of social assistance provision and its organisation. In Hanne Vandermeerschen, Elsa Mescoli, Jean-Michel Lafleur, Peter De Cuyper (Eds) (ed.), Newcomers Navigating the Welfare State. Experiences of Immigrants and Street-Level Bureaucrats with Belgium’s Social Assistance System (p. p. 245-270). Leuven University Press. https://doi.org/10.1353/book.112814