Nanna Mik-Meyer is professor at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Her main areas or research is identity work in organisations, micro-sociology, qualitative methodology and processes of marginalisation (the sociology of the body, disability, homelessness). Besidde a large publication record in Danish, she has publish books with SAGE, Routledge and Manchester University Press as well as approx. 25 peer-reviewer articles in journals such as Human Relations, Work, Employment, Society, Sociology of Health and Illness, Gender, Work and Organization, British Journal of Sociology and Journal of Classical Sociology. 

Nanna Mik-Meyer will discuss three (partially) contradictory rationales in welfare work today. These are rationales linked to the bureaucracy, to new public governance (NPM) and to psychological theories that assume that human beings have a universal drive towards self-development. The three rationales constitute the context of welfare work – including the work with families. They each make good sense, but in their coexistence they create lots of dilemmas and challenge the ambition of a coherent social effort.