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This paper examines the landscape of policy work conducted by NGOs with respect to the social inclusion agenda. Based on a qualitative case study of integration policy in a Czech city, the paper focuses on the relations between collaborative and critical policy work of NGOs. In this case, while the collaborative position is mainly justified by apolitical expertise, long-term professional experience and compliance with official standards of social work, the latter calls upon community-based knowledge and political participation. We argue that despite indisputable long-term benefits of collaborative policy work it includes risks of paternalism, accountability deficit and exclusiveness. These risks become more significant with increasing shared understanding and mutual interdependence. In this situation there is a room for the episodic external critical capacity to challenge the governance structure and enforce the accountability of collaborative networks.

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Abstract:The article explores the general question of how family members articulate the rational and moral dimensions of the economy and the role in this played by language and family discourse-how families do the economy with words. It examines the resources family members employ family discourse to interpret and justify their economic behaviour, and puts forth the hypothesis that economic terms are re-articulated through everyday practices in the family world and that conversations inoculate expert terms with specific meanings. The article introduces the moral economy as a crucial principle of sense-making in family economic discourse and highlights the perception of the future as a key distinction between financial market economies and family-specific moral economies. Three mechanisms by which finance is domesticated are identified: (1) narrativisation-where financial objects are interpreted through the narratives of family history; (2) appropriation-where financial objects are embedded in the family moral economy; and (3) affectivation-where emotions change the meanings attached to financial objects. Narrativisation situates financial objects in time, appropriation sets them in the context of the family-specific moral economy, and affectivation connects them with personal identity and authentic experience.

The article focuses on the methodological specifics of qualitative sociological studies commissioned by public administration authorities (“the client”) which aim to provide solutions to specific problems defined by the client. In conducting this kind of study, the researcher is expected not only to describe and understand the existing state of affairs but also to provide a set of recommendations for amending it. The research terrain is not defined by the sociologist herself but basically by the client. This situation reveals a series of methodological and epistemological issues. The article discusses some of them and proposes that the research strategy of heuristic investigation may be an answer to the associated dilemmas. The author argues that the correct use of reflexive methodology can help the researcher to overcome the limits imposed on the research by the client’s presence and even make the apparent disadvantages work for her.