Activating relational welfare: insights from Supported Employment

Abstract In the face of ongoing welfare challenges, a wave of academic and policy thinking has advocated for recentring public policy around the principles and practices of relational welfare. The present paper argues that the potential of relational welfare can be further supported by sharper analytical understanding of its diverse potential forms and their varying key relational characteristics. To explore these priorities, the paper draws on sixty-one semi-structured interviews with thirty-six staff and twenty-five participants from sixteen UK Supported Employment services cast in a relational welfare mould. These grounded lived experiences highlight individuals’ universally positive experiences of these relational interventions, in contrast to past typical activation experiences, and the importance of a subset of Cottam’s relational welfare identifiers to those experiences. Rather than being homogeneous in their qualitative characteristics and requirements, the findings suggest legitimate variation in – and a hierarchical nesting of – relational welfare characteristics across more and less formalised relational interventions. Findings help to further critical understanding of relational welfare interventions and to support scholars and policy makers alike to maximise the reach, purity and potential of relational welfare approaches across diverse policy domains and approaches.