The Housing Dimension of Welfare Reform - the ICCR

the experience gained through the provision of services and feedbacks
gained from clients and other relevant actors. In some way the
programmes run by social services are thus treated as ‘social
experiments’ and on this basis quality criteria and monitoring procedures
are elaborated for future projects.
Indeed, the case studies undertaken in the EUROHOME-IMPACT
project have revealed that social services running programmes targeting
the socially excluded have over the years developed an evaluation culture
along the lines outlined above. However most have not succeeded in
systematising or routinising related procedures. Seen from this
perspective, the over-reliance of many of these social services on key
resource persons (usually their directors) is at the same time a strength
and a weakness. It is a strength because social programmes often
necessitate the personal commitment of individuals to ensure their
successful operation. It is a weakness because this over-reliance
sometimes also means that adequate attention is not given to routine
procedures that ‘outlive’ so-to-speak the personal commitment of
specific individuals thus also ensuring that expertise is transferred topdown
also to middle-management or lower levels of staff, thus becoming
institutionalised towards the avoidance of the negative unintended effects
of personal discretion practices.
Role of users
Within social services we can observe that attention is increasingly
placed on receiving feedback from users or clients about how services are
run, their strengths and weaknesses.
There are two types of user involvement: first, through the organisation
of standardised surveys among the service’s clientele; second, through
structured dialogues between users and providers of services that
emphasise empowerment. The second approach is recognised in the
literature as a better way to promote a deeper understanding of decision
and implementation processes and how they affect users and thus to
effect relevant organisational changes of the services. This second
approach is however more difficult to organise in practice given that the
users’ of social services are not organised in any way and not used to
providing feedback to service providers in a structured dialogue setting.
Nevertheless, the experiences made in the course of the EUROHOME-
IMPACT project, which involved as already mentioned group
discussions with users and service providers following the ‘focus group’
method, are extremely encouraging in this connection. Our research has
shown that it is possible to set up and organise such structured dialogues
and that the users of social services are able, with some mediation
support, to both articulate concerns and problems as well as engage in
EUROHOME-IMPACT FINAL REPORT 58