In the Rhythm of Welfare Creation: A Relational Processual Investigation Moving Beyond the Conceptual Horizon of Welfare Management

Eva Pallesen

Research output: Book/ReportPhD thesis

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Abstract

This dissertation investigates welfare creation and leadership from a radically processual thinking as a basis of imagining other conceptual horizons than the ones feeding current governmental rationalities. It basically argues that since welfare is not an entity delivered, but is continuously becoming in an unfolding middle between managers, employees and citizens, we need to go beyond conceptual frameworks that draw their assumptions from a thinking which basically treats welfare as a thing. The dissertation therefore starts out by denaturalizing the assumptions and divisions of an entitative, extensive reasoning and discusses how this thinking frames the idea of creation in a welfare context. This leads to a discussion of the idea of welfare creation as the realization of a mental model: Here, the dissertation locates as a problem that when ‘the new’ is placed in changing mental models of practice, creation tends to slip out of practice. Creation then becomes a matter of separating oneself from the situation in order to be able to decide upon a new way to relate to practice at a time and space distance of it. So, at the same time as creation slips out of practice, the relational also slips out of creation. In an attempt to push back together what has been split in this reasoning, the dissertation activates process philosophy as a lever of imagining other conceptual frames of welfare creation - how welfare creation may be thought radically relationally-processually beyond the idea of realization a mental model. By taking the path from Bergson’s distinction between intensive and extensive multiplicity to Brian Massumi’s concept of newness and the deleuzian-spinozian concept of affect, the dissertation aims to carve out a notion of creation that can be helpful in this endeavor.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationFrederiksberg
PublisherCopenhagen Business School [Phd]
Number of pages245
ISBN (Print)9788793339101
ISBN (Electronic)9788793339118
Publication statusPublished - 2015
SeriesPhD series
Number14.2015
ISSN0906-6934

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