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The purpose of this article’s research was threefold. Firstly, it aimed to investigate how social services professionals coped during the pandemic period by comparing their involvement in five different national contexts. Secondly, it analysed how these professionals have performed their duties according to the street-level bureaucracy theory. Finally, the third question examines social workers' strategies to guide their professional role when they may have had more discretion in their actions. The research also examined whether discretion has increased during this phase and, if so, how it has been exercised.

This article is based on the findings of the project called “Theory and Practice of Social Work in the World in Times of Pandemic”, which was funded by the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW). The project involved 11 universities across five countries in Europe and Latin America, including Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Spain and Sweden. The research was conducted over 24 months to analyse the practices and measures taken to protect vulnerable people by adapting social services during the extraordinary period of the pandemic. In addition, the research explored how the awareness of emergency arose among social workers and how it influenced the services delivered from the perspective of the street-level bureaucracy theory. In different countries, the level of resourcefulness of services has varied based on their recognition of the severity of the pandemic and the impact of the government’s narratives. In some cases, these narratives have been conspiratorial or even anti-scientific. Additionally, there has been a reduction in the distance between professionals and clients, increased inequalities in access to services and a positive reassessment of the potential of new professional tools, such as digital social work, in establishing a trusting relationship.

As revealed in the interviews, the elements shaping this high degree of discretion among social workers can be classified into three levels: macro- and micro- (Saruis, 2015) plus a meso-level. Each level has four significant aspects. At the macro-level, these are legislation, public information, large associationism and integration of the social services-health system. At the meso-level, these are interpretations of role performance by managers technical equipment, self-organization and community action. The micro-level pertains to personal and family situations, emotions, ethics and social workers' direct relationships with those in charge.

This study investigated how social workers responded to the Covid-19 pandemic. The data gathered sheds light on their understanding of the situation, as well as the differences in experiences across the five countries studied. However, it is essential to note that the findings may not apply to all situations or countries. Nevertheless, this research serves as a stepping stone for future studies to delve deeper into the results and explore them in greater detail .

The study highlights the crucial role of social workers as street-level workers in managing, negotiating and creating meaning in the interaction between professionals and the people they serve. This is especially relevant in Latin America. Additionally, the study emphasizes the significance of social workers as policy actors and the political nature of social work practice. The findings also underscore the importance of effective communication and collaboration between social workers, their teams and the organizations they work for. The sources cited in the study are Barberis and Boccagni (2014) and Cuadra and Staaf (2014). The research has also underscored the potential of social service workers to build networks and cooperate. Such networking can play a vital role in implementing their acquired knowledge. The study has, therefore, emphasized the importance of social workers being an integral part of the societies they serve. They need to continuously enhance their communication skills, using all the necessary tools to gain a comprehensive and updated understanding of the evolving needs of their clients. Integrating digital social work as a mode of service provision has emerged as a crucial aspect, especially in the three European countries observed. This approach has demonstrated its potential and is expected to continue being a part of services to some extent, even after the return to normalcy. However, it is essential to ensure that the accessibility and proximity of services are not compromised in any way.

An unexpected result was observed during the research: the pandemic circumstances have led to valuable reflections. These reflections can help in rethinking and recreating social services. Social workers have been given a unique opportunity to return to the essence of their profession and develop less bureaucratic and more humane ways of working. This experience has also enabled them to recover a closer relationship with the people they serve. To sum up, this study emphasizes that social workers, when given more leeway in their work, rely on cultivating and upholding relationships with other professionals, organizations and stakeholders to stay connected with the community they serve. This is crucial for ensuring the delivery of effective and sustainable social services.

The research employed a thematic analysis approach (Bazeley, 2007) to identify themes related to the concept of consciousness as derived from the field experiences of social workers. Additionally, an in-case and cross-case analysis method (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane, 2006) was used to connect themes related to individual experiences with those gathered from the overall experiences.

This study aims to ascertain the forms of social enterprises created for public services and the dimensions of community-based management of public facilities. It seeks to understand how community-based facilities management (CbFM) can apply to the management of public services created by social enterprises in developing communities.

The study examines research studies on CbFM through a scoping review of papers published between 1997 and 2022.

The scoping review revealed that there are five dimensions of CbFM for developing communities: CbFM, urban facilities management, sustainable CbFM, urban infrastructure management and management of community hubs. It also revealed that social enterprises have been used to manage services, and for social inclusion, and to increase the efficiency of tangible infrastructure in communities.

The scoping review included literature from 1997 to 2022 to understand the development trends in CbFM in developing communities. It is possible that literature from a broader timeframe could have produced more in-depth understanding of the subject investigated.

The paper articulates a framework of CbFM models for public services in developing communities and developed a database of the relevant studies, which can further guide future researchers, stakeholders and policymakers in this area.

The comprehensive review produced a framework for community management of public services. It also identified that there is a paucity of literature on social infrastructure. It highlighted the need for skillsets to support community-based enterprises. There are limited studies that touch on the development of performance indicators for developing communities.

This article analyses a major healthcare and social welfare reform establishing new regional and integrated wellbeing services counties in Finland. The authors approach the reform and service integration as a knowledge management (KM) issue and analyse how KM appears and contributes in the context of integrated care, specifically in the process of integrating social and health care.

The article analyses the case organisation's KM initiatives in light of the integrated care literature and recognises the tasks and requirements for effective KM when building integrated health and social care system. The empirical research material for this qualitative study consisted of the case organisation's strategy documents, the results of an external maturity assessment, KM workshop materials and publicly available documentation of the Finnish health and social care reform.

This study identifies the mechanisms by which KM can support health and social services integration. At the macro level, national coordination and regional co-operation require common information structures. At the meso level, a shared regional strategy with shared objectives guides both organisational decision-making and collaboration between professionals. At the micro level, technology supported and data-driven planning of service chains complements the experiences of professionals and may help remove obstacles to integration.

This study contributes to the literature on integrated care by providing a more comprehensive view of the role and tasks of knowledge and KM when reforming health and social services than approaches focussing solely on health informatics and internal efficiency.

This study aims to identify the street-level approaches of professional workers in complex public social service organisations when attending to social assistance claimants.

The study employed a multifaceted approach comprising documentary analysis, semi-structured individual interviews (17) and focus group discussions (8) with qualified frontline social workers from primary care social services in Tarragona.

Social workers embodied three specific sets of cognitive, normative and emotional dispositions when attending to people with low incomes. First, the compassionate approach conceives clients as defensive regarding social services and emotionally vulnerable because of deprivation. Second, the instructional approach frames clients as being baffled by a new, precarious, institutional and economic context. They also lack information, abilities and the proper mindset to conceive of and attain available welfare and occupational resources. Third, the enforcement approach tends to define clients as suspicious, trying to obtain an excessive and unfair advantage of the welfare system that would eventually hamper their social opportunities.

Research thus far has tended to define public social assistance programmes in Southern welfare state contexts as mostly inefficient and hardly relevant residual social policies. The street-level approach shows that social workers try to resist the mere administrative processing of benefits, which is a professionally troubling and organisationally unsustainable way to proceed. They attempt to help clients by providing inclusive content in order to implement their benefits.

This study aims to examine whether social capital contributes to service firms' resilience during crisis.

This study measures social capital via environmental and social (ES) ratings and firm performance via buy-and-hold-abnormal returns derived from Refinitiv ESG and CRSP databases. Using a sample of 404 US service firms, this study runs cross-sectional regressions to estimate the effect of social capital on service firms' crisis returns.

This study finds that high-social capital service firms outperformed in the first quarter of 2020. The crisis response is heterogeneous among service sub-sectors and diverges (i.e. calming or deepening) over time depending on social capital. Service sub-sector analysis notably posits that social capital impact is positively related to returns of Health- and Business Services and firms with utilitarian nature. The study also indicates that ES commitments targeting internal stakeholders contribute more to resilience. Overall, social capital might be a relevant value driver, generate real impact and provide insurance-like protection for service firms during turmoil.

The service industry is one of the most severely hit industries during COVID-19. However, there is limited knowledge about whether and when social capital creates value in the service industry during crises. This study makes two main contributions: first, it extends to the continuous efforts toward the role of social capital in firm performance, and second, it provides important insights related to the resilience search for service firms.

Many people with dual diagnosis present with social complexity that impedes service access. The role of social work support in such service navigation is poorly understood. This study aims to characterise client presentations to an Australian telephone-based social work alcohol and other drug (AOD) service navigation and linkage program, with consideration of presentation complexity compared between those clients who present with or without self-reported mental health (MH) concerns and a history of MH diagnoses, to identify differences in baseline characteristics, and linkage outcomes.

A retrospective audit was conducted of routinely collected clinical information from a six-month period, selected to capture the social and health challenges experienced during the mid-pandemic period (mid-2021) in Victoria, Australia, during which a number of lockdowns resulted in a reliance on telephone-based services. The audit focused on client and presentation characteristics, and compared clients with and without a history of co-occurring MH and AOD concerns.

It was found that three in four people accessing an Australian telephone-based AOD service navigation and linkage program presented with dual diagnosis. Individuals with dual diagnosis required more support from the service compared to those without a co-occurring MH disorder; but overall, were just as likely to achieve a successful linkage to services, when offered holistic, long-term social work support.

This study focused on the role of social workers in this service navigation program in supporting individuals with complexity. It also highlights the challenges in operationalising social complexity factors alongside clinical MH and AOD diagnoses, and points to the need for further research to guide future service development for this vulnerable client group.

This work aims to understand how social value is created and delivered using community-based water supply projects. It examines social value creation given the enabling concepts – value co-creation and service ecosystems as business models for infrastructure.

Inductive reasoning, including qualitative research design, was applied to two water supply projects. The qualitative stage created social value co-creation features using the purposive sampling of 72 semi-structured interviews.

The qualitative analysis features social value co-creation, which includes a sense of social unity, end-user empowerment, Behavioural transformation, and knowledge transfer. Although value destruction also emerged while examining social value co-creation, the research identifies the “red flags” and value contradictions that must be avoided.

The enablers of sustainable infrastructure projects should include social value, service ecosystems and value co-creation.

There is a need for the government and non-governmental organisations to create enabling platforms that involve a planned dialogical communication process supporting the development and enhancement of relationships of stakeholders to maximise social value from infrastructure projects.

The work offers a widened perspective of social value creation and a new framework called “Social value co-creation/destruction” (SVCC/SVCD) as the business model for sustainable infrastructure projects. It is the first attempt to illustrate social value creation in construction from service ecosystems and value co-creation perspectives.

The study compares the social services functioning in two local contexts, one urban and one rural, in the same Italian region, to understand how contextual features affect frontline workers' work.

By applying the framework of the street-level bureaucracy theory (SLB) and proposing a framing of the spatial contexts under analysis, the present study adopts a qualitative approach. In particular, semi-structured interviews were conducted among street-level workers, decision-makers and privileged witnesses.

The study shows how the typical features of the rural and urban Italian contexts analyzed impact differently on the working conditions of frontline workers, leading to substantive differences in the possibility of exercise their role at the street-level.

The article contributes to a wider understanding of social services provision in a highly fragmented system like the Italian one by taking into consideration contexts that are usually little investigated in SLB and welfare studies in the Mediterranean Europe area: those rural and, in particular, those belonging to the so-called “inner areas”.

Using features of social media, peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile payment enables users to foster social interaction every time transactions are made. Given the increasing popularity of social features in P2P mobile payment applications, it is worth understanding how these components contribute to users’ switching behavior between conventional mobile payment and P2P mobile payment services. By treating sociability of P2P mobile payment as a pull factor, this study aims to extend the push–pull–mooring framework in the context of P2P mobile payment.

A questionnaire survey was conducted to obtain data. Respondents from the USA were exclusively selected due to the emerging number of P2P mobile payment users and the volume of transactions in this country. Based on a sample of 232 Amazon Mechanical Turk mobile payment users, the authors tested the hypotheses using the partial least squares structural equation model technique with SmartPLS software version 3.

The finding reveals that sociability is triggered by social presence, social benefit and social support within the P2P mobile payment platform. Moreover, dissatisfaction with perceived enjoyment of conventional mobile payment (push factor), customer innovativeness (mooring factor) and sociability of P2P mobile payment (pull factor) jointly influence users’ intention to switch to P2P mobile payment services, and subsequently drive their migration behavior.

Unlike past research that mainly focuses on utilitarian-related factors, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to thoroughly examine the sociability features of P2P mobile payment service as a form of a social-centric system.

This study investigates the drivers of social innovation in disability services with specific reference to the context of nonprofit organizations of social farming. In addition, it highlights the role of stakeholder networks in enhancing the social innovation process and the characteristics of stakeholders and networks driving and supporting social innovation.

Following a qualitative methodology, research was conducted through a case study survey with interviews to 13 nonprofit organizations of social farming for people with disability located in the northeast of Italy.

Insights gained from the interviews revealed that individual, organizational and contextual factors drive social innovation in disability nonprofits. In addition, networks play a key role in enhancing the three drivers of social innovation through the social innovation journey, from opportunity recognition to implementation of the innovation, to its consolidation phases. Characteristics of the networks and the stakeholders involved are also outlined.

Practical implications for social entrepreneurs include the need to establish cross-sectoral partnerships with diverse stakeholders, including private companies.

Implications for policy makers stress the need for ongoing support for nonprofit disability organizations. Social implications are not limited to the inclusion of socially weaker groups; rather, the entire community benefits from the social innovation process.

Social farming represents a valuable solution to meet the needs of disadvantaged people. While much research has investigated the topic of social innovation in social entrepreneurship, only a few studies have addressed social innovation in the context of disability nonprofits involved in social farming.