Social service facing the capabilities and ambiguities of the contemporary social policy: contributions for reflection on the portuguese and brazilian contexts

O serviço social face às potencialidades e ambiguidades da política social contemporânea: Contributos para a reflexão sobre o contexto português e brasileiro

This communication intends to highlight the underlying potentialities and paradoxes of current social policies, emerging in an increase in contexts of exclusion and austerity of the welfare state and the respective impact on practices and guidelines of Portuguese and Brazilian Social Work. To do this, we begin by critically reference the great principles of the new generation of social policies, with special attention to those called activation policies in Portugal and Brazil, to reflect, then in retrofits of social intervention that arise and possible effects such adjustments entail. Therefore, as we will discuss, the teleological dimension of Social Work begins to transform. Increasingly, the goal of social workers, in certain contexts, is to be present to manage, continuously, a new integration. Therefore, the social effects can become a continuous, series of small steps; ultimately, a strategy of containment and acceptance of what psychologizing or a form of social inequalities, now analyzed from the perspective of the natural experiences of social contempt. Thus, social intervention is reduced to a palliative role and in many cases neopaternalistic-, thus neutralizing logic, historically conquered social citizenship.