Should I tell the City Council about this? Social Workers between Vocation and Bureaucracy. An Ethnography of a Public Social Welfare Network in Madrid

Abstract

Starting from an ethnographic description of how a public social welfare network in the center of Madrid works, paying special attention to the testimony and an analysis of the practice of its social workers, this article seeks to show, empirically, how and in what sense public policies reproduce social marginality and how social workers, located at the institution’s frontier, experience very intimately all the contradictions implicit in the system.