Various paradigms in the social work area and its typical assistance institutions

Abstracts

In order to understand what is the situation of entities that serve children and adolescents today, as well as the institutional plot that comprises these institutions, we aimed to formulate a set of paradigmatic possibilities that would allow us to understand the configuration of the dialectical field of various pulses, in which these entities are located. We detected the subjects we associate with counterparts paradigms of Charity, of Human Promotion, of Philanthropy, of assistentialist government patronage, of Social Work as a State Policy, and finally, another set of events that we propose to designate as the paradigm of Citizen Subjects we associate with the ethical perspective of People Education. These paradigmatic possibilities range from the simply various and contrasting ones, including the similar and competing ones, to the dialectically contradictory ones. Its spectrum oscillates between tutelage and citizenship. The characterization of these didactic paradigms can provide us a compass that is required in a highly complex social field, allowing us to understand the variety of ethical effects promoted by these paradigms in the social field.

Social psychology; Social work; Children and adolescents; State policies

ARTICLE

Various paradigms in the social work area and its typical assistance institutions ¹

Paradigmas diversos no campo da assistência social e seus estabelecimentos assistenciais típicos

Paradigmes d’affaires dans le domaine de l’aide sociale et entites d’assistance typiques

Diferentes paradigmas en el campo de la asistencia social y sus típicos establecimientos asistenciales

Silvio José Benelli; Abílio da Costa-Rosa

Universidade Estadual Paulista "Júlio de Mesquita Filho" - Campus de Assis

ABSTRACT

With the objective of understanding what was the situation of entities that take care of children and adolescents today, as well as the institutional fabric that composes those establishments, we sought to formulate a set of paradigmatic possibilities that would allow us to understand how is configured the dialectic field of diverse pulsations, in which the entities are situated. We detected the figures that we associated to the homologue paradigms of Charity, Human Promotion, Philanthropy, Welfare Care, Social Care as State Policy and, finally, another set of happenings that we propose to be called as the Citizen Subject paradigm, that we associated to the ethical perspective of Popular Education. Those paradigmatic possibilities go from the ones just diverse and contradictory, including those similar and concurrent, until the dialectically contradictory ones. Its specter oscillates between tutelage and citizenship. The didactic characterization of those paradigms may provide a compass, needed in a highly complex social field, allowing the understating of the variety of ethical effects that they promote in the social field.

Keywords: Social psychology. Social Care. Children. Adolescents. Public policies.

RESUMO

Visando entender qual seria a situação das entidades que atendem a crianças e a adolescentes na atualidade, bem como a trama institucional que compõe esses estabelecimentos, procuramos formular um conjunto de possibilidades paradigmáticas que nos permitisse compreender como se configura o campo dialético de pulsações diversas, no qual as entidades estão situadas. Detectamos as figuras que associamos aos paradigmas homólogos da Caridade, da Promoção Humana, da Filantropia, do Clientelismo Assistencialista, da Assistência Social como Política de Estado e, finalmente, outro conjunto de acontecimentos que propomos designar como paradigma do Sujeito Cidadão, que associamos à perspectiva ética da Educação Popular. Tais possibilidades paradigmáticas vão das simplesmente diversas e contrárias, incluindo as similares e concorrentes, até as dialeticamente contraditórias. Seu espectro oscila entre a tutela e a cidadania. A caracterização didática desses paradigmas pode fornecer uma bússola, necessária num campo social altamente complexo, permitindo compreender a variedade dos efeitos éticos que promovem no campo social.

Palavras-chave: Psicologia social. Assistência social. Crianças. Adolescentes. Políticas públicas.

RÉSUMÉ

Afin de comprendre quelle est la situation des entités qui s’occupent des enfants et les adolescents d’aujourd’hui, ainsi que les structures institutionnelles qui composent ces établissements, nous recherchons un ensemble de possibilités paradigmatiques qui nous permettrait de comprendre la configuration de la variété d´impulsion du champ dialectique, dans lequel les entités sont situés. Nous avons détecté des élements que nous associons a des paradigmes homologues et organismes de bienfaisance, humanitaire, la philanthropie, du clientélisme de l´action sociale, l´assistance sociale et politique de l’État, et enfin une autre série d’événements que nous proposons de désigner comme un paradigme du citoyen, nous associons le point de vue éthique de l’éducation populaire. Ces possibilités paradigmatiques comprennent: les diversifiées et les opposées, les similaires et les concurrentes, même les dialectiquement contradictoires. Elles oscillent entre la tutelle et de la citoyenneté. La caractérisation didactique de ces paradigmes peut nous fournir une direction necessaire dans um domaine sociale très complexe, permettant ainsi de comprendre la variété des effets éthiques promu.

Mots-clés: Psychologie sociale. Assistance social. Enfants. Les adolescents. Les politiques publiques.

RESUMEN

Para ayudar a entender cuál sería la situación de las entidades que, actualmente, atienden a niños y adolescentes, así como el entramando institucional que componen esos establecimientos, procuramos formular un conjunto de posibilidades paradigmáticas que nos permitiera comprender cómo se configura el campo dialéctico de diversas pulsaciones, en el que las entidades están situadas. Detectamos las figuras que asociamos a los paradigmas homólogos de la Caridad, Promoción Humana, Filantropía, Clientelismo Asistencialista, de la Asistencia Social como Política de Estado, y, finalmente, otro conjunto de acontecimientos que proponemos designar como paradigma del Sujeto Ciudadano, que asociamos a la perspectiva ética de la Educación Popular. Tales posibilidades paradigmáticas van desde las puramente diversas y contrarias, incluyendo las semejantes y contendientes, hasta las dialécticamente contradictorias. Su espectro oscila entra la tutela y la ciudadanía. La caracterización didáctica de esos paradigmas puede proporcionar una brújula, necesaria en un campo social, en extremo, complejo, permitiendo comprender la variedad de los efectos éticos que promueven en el campo social.

Palabras-clave: Sicología social. Asistencia social. Niños. Adolescentes. Políticas públicas.

How is it possible to understand the situation of entities that take care of children and adolescents today? What is the institutional fabric that composes those establishments? How is configured the analysis field where the welfare organizations are situated? Which are the figures who emerge from the specific field of the complex social and political reality at the municipality? Trying to answer those questions we will resort to a wide set of data derived both from the immersion of one of us had in the daily reality that we use as the analysis referent as well as from a critical study of an important part of the available literature. As part of this immersion work, one of us also took part as member of the City Council for Children and Adolescent Rights and in the City Council of Social Assistance in a middle size municipality in the countryside of São Paulo State.

The term as municipal counselor elected was exercised by one of us, between the years of 2008 and 2010, representing a segment of the civil society – the one of care entities to children and adolescents – taking part in work meetings of the City Council for Children and Adolescent Rights (CCCAR) and meetings of the City Council of Social Assistance (CCSA). Observation visits were also made in four care entities, besides helping in the organization of several events in the sector, such as the Municipal Conference of Children and Adolescent Rights and the Municipal Conference of Social Assistance in the year 2009.

This rich experience of institutional immersion in the Social Assistance sector, in a process of "observant participation" was followed by an intense work of appropriation of the proper literature, as well as of reflection, analysis and writing. We also did a critical analysis of a group of "working programs" of 25 social entities who take care of children and adolescents, considered to be in "personal and social risk situation", which exist in the municipality.

The approach we undertook comes from an institutionally critical and problematic perspective (Baremblitt, 1998; Barus-Michel, 2004; Foucault, 1979, 1999; Goffman, 1987; Lourau, 1995) of Social Care while State policy and field of knowledge, practices and production of social reality. The view adopted was guided by a set of theoretical tools to which we appropriate along an active process of formation, studies, reflections, production of researches and publications. The instrumental tools used include elements of Historical Materialism, Institutional Analysis (IA), Social Psychology and from Michel Foucault thoughts. Far from any superficial and rushed eclecticism, it should be explained that it is a multidisciplinary and transdiciplinary theoretical perspective – because complex objects also demand complex approaching perspectives – and it must be noted that each one of those items that compose the theoretical and technical assumptions adopted holds its own aspects that are irreducibly singular and exclusionary. It must be highlighted the fact that they allow the execution of different levels of analysis, which enriches greatly the comprehension of the investigated phenomena.

The literature also allowed us to reflect about reality (Assis, 2009; Marcílio, 2006; Merisse, 1996; Monteiro, 2006; Nogueira Neto, 2010; Pinheiro, 2004; Rizzini, 2008), by offering pictures of conceptual analysis that allowed us to transit dialectically between the multiple richness of the entities routine, of events that occurred in city councils and an intense work of thought, empowering our view and making possible the elaboration of a theoretical guiding map to understand the field of analysis in which we were inserted.

Along our research course, we elaborated a reflection that allowed us to organize the chaos of the daily reality that involved us in the City Secretary of Social Assistance, in the children and adolescent care entities and also in the noise of small politics to which the partisan fights in the municipality are reduced, the so called political-partisan "nitpicking". Soon it was realized the need to understand the working of the city public machine – a field until then unknown – to be able to seat with some clearness, both in the action as a counselor and in the research work.

The construction of public policies for children and adolescents and its implementation is being made by multidisciplinary teams composed by Social Service workers, psychologists, pedagogues and also by several other professionals. Those teams develop attendances and interventions with individuals and families considered to be in "personal and social situation of vulnerability", especially due to poorness. The work object of those professionals consists in the handling of "social problems" in their multiple manifestations on the social collectivity. There are multiple psychosocial components involved in this problematic, which also demand complex, creative and innovative approaches.

Therefore, this paper represents only a cut of a larger research, that was approved by the Committee of Ethics in Research from the Faculty of Sciences and Letters – Unesp/Assis, SP, protocol number 030/2008, in October 30th, 2008, with all participants signing a Statement of Informed Consent, before their inclusion on the research. The goal is to present a strategic perspective for professionals who work in the field of Social Care, so that they may perform an informed actuation, contextualized and warned about the central problematic that pervades the area. We also aim to provide the public managers and the care entities with relevant data for implementation of policies that might be more effective in the care of childhood and adolescence on the municipality.

This work is about making available some theoretical resources able to contribute to dribble both an excessive psychologizing of social care as well as an extreme sociologization based in a politicization of social life, in the practice of those professionals. We think that, in order to reach this goal, it is needed to build a theoretical perspective consistent and operative, starting from an approach that is, at least, dialectical with regard to addressing the issues.

To begin, it must be considered that in the field of Psychology, both in academic and scientific plans, it is possible to transit through theoretical universes that go from the more traditional and conservative ones to the more contesting, revolutionary and emancipating ones, some variation of specter may also be seen in the field of Social Care. In the same way, the professional practice of psychologists and Social Care professionals may be more or less lined-up with more bold instituting perspectives, or with visions and actions which reassure what is instituted. Being those differences also conditioned by social-historical, structural, conjunctural and institutional questions, it is appropriate to each one, and also to the inter-professional collectivity, to be placed, at least where the direct conscience allows, with respect to the immediate effects of this complexity in the specific institutional practices, where one is inserted. In other words, if we consider the institutions as logics that make establishments organized under the shape of a "set of knowledge and practices articulated by a speech of ideological nature", we must have as an inherent part of this set of knowledge the knowledge about the structure and the articulation of this particular set that is the institution where we sit as working agents.

We believe that to study the institutional assistance resources aimed to caring of children and adolescent considered to be in "personal and social risk state" represents a way to build relevant knowledge for the area of public policies focused on those social agents. We work with the hypothesis that the recognition, though cognitive in some moment, of the specificity and more current vicissitudes of care institutions dedicated to socio-educative activities with children and adolescents may work as an important analysis operator and even as a good starting point for the building of solutions for the eventual problems and suffering of the several institutional actors. The socio-historical and institutional determinations of the immediate reality also have a dialectic character and, by getting knowledge about their contradictions, it is possible to position oneself actively about those determinants and seek to promote their change from a more deliberated political and ethical stance, if it is wished (Costa-Rosa, 2000, 2006, 2011).

About the paradigm concept

We understand "paradigm" as a model dialectically structured, provided with an internal organization coherent and necessary, whose elements constitute a harmonic and understandable whole. It is a theoretical construct that allows us to dynamically understand the historical real ity, organizing its apparent chaos and to reach a comprehension about its shape, its meaning and its production processes. A paradigm constitutes a "legal-ideological and theoretical-technical unit of action over Demand" (Costa-Rosa, 2000, p. 143). We start from the minimal composition of four defining parameters of a production paradigm of institutional production in a given field of the praxis: a) conceptions of "object" and action "means" over it; b) conceptions of organization means of the institutional resource; c) means of relationship with clients and population (including the territory), and means of relationship between population and institution; d) conceptions about the social and educational effects (political, educational, pedagogic, therapeutic) and their ethical ramifications (Costa-Rosa, 2000, 2006, 2011).

We are working with the hypothesis that each care paradigm may produce and implement a type of Social Assistance aligned with some theoretical-care, legal-political and sociocultural specific assumptions. We may say that each paradigmatic arrangement implements a specific political and care orientation, guided by principles and assumptions that usually are not wholly explicit, but that, after all, is able to produce what is determined by its possibilities, not what they would like, the goodwill and political ingenuity of the institutional agents (Benelli, 2006, 2007; Costa-Rosa, 1987). It is always possible to produce new instruments to reach traditional goals, and vice-versa.

The practice brings bundled into it the care and political assumptions that might be studied through observation of the institutional resource in its daily working, from analysis of written documents and also of speeches that state the institutional finalities. There are key-words and other operators that refer straightly to specific conceptual and care universes. There are also tools, practices and procedures implemented daily that might be considered typical of this or that paradigm. When detected, it is possible to infer the subjacent paradigm to those institutional analyzers². We may learn, then, which resource³ is being implemented in the institutional practice. In reality, the paradigms do not appear "pure" and so sharp as in the conceptual field (Konder, 1981). But it is possible to detect the predominance and hegemonic orientation or the institutional dynamic through the paradigmatic analyzers (Costa-Rosa, 1987, 2011).

Although the ideal models don’t want to be a perfect reflex of the real, they may be useful to promote the comprehension of reality, that is always multiple and complex. Rational maps ease (and distort the complex reality), but allow to think about it and also to localize itself in the social field, from some known coordinates. This has great importance when we understand that the subjective implication of the agents is a determining criterion for the worker in institutions and social entities, because it is needed to stay alert to the ethical effects that its action helps to promote (Benelli, 2006, 2007; Lemos, 2007).

We are trying to understand how the offers of attention, care and social protection to children and adolescents configure a set of diverse paradigmatic figures that emerged along the history, while differentiated institutional strategies, implementing speeches and practices more or less distinct and, in consequence, producing specific ethical effects in the social life. Although the different paradigms did not appear at the same time, we may note its coexistence in the contemporary. We found the configuration of Christian charity paradigm, based in the perspective of Samaritan help to the neighbor; the one from the philanthropic and hygienist paradigm that configures disciplinary and correctional strategies to deal with the delinquent and potentially dangerous individual; the one from the Social Assistance paradigm that considers individuals in "personal and social risk situation" or in "social vulnerability situation"; and finally, a space starts to open for a speech that points for the individual as citizen subject⁴ of rights.

In order to better show the complexity of the institutional field where we are inserted in, we tried to establish the specificity of some of those paradigms and to describe their constituents in relation to the social and historical construction of Social Care as social institution. Those paradigms may be thought both from the point of view of their historical unfolding as well as synchronically as different aspects of the same social totality that is always one, however, at the same time, diverse, dialectically complex, contradictory and in constant transformation.

The didactic characterization of those paradigms may provide an orientation map for analysis and action in a highly complex social field. We will see that if it is true that the multiplicity of paradigms may be captured by the existing fight, in a given historical context, between two paradigms to impose a set of their "interests and values", it is also true that the historical and critical comprehension of those social and institutional phenomena allow us to detect the pregnancy of the logic of some paradigm and its temporal persistence, giving the impression that it is the only one in action. In reality, it appears that the pragmatic configurations that dominate in other historical series continue to be commonly present and effective in contemporaneity.

It is possible to distinguish the paradigmatic configurations in the daily practices of the institutional agents, so that there are paradigms that are predominant among different social actors, although not exclusive of them: the Charity paradigm, the Human Promotion and Philanthropy may be found in managers and technicians of care entities, the Clientelism-welfare paradigm is typical of workers and technicians of city administrations, while the speech of Social Care as State Policy is a paradigm found in politicians in regional and national levels, as well as in technicians and professionals who act on those higher spheres.

It is important to mention, finally, a configuration of knowledge, practices and speeches that we called "paradigm of the citizen subject", taking as a reference the ethics that defines Popular Education (Freire, 1967, 1987) and the ethics of the Movement of Health Reform, that culminated in the national project of the System Unified of Health (SUS in Portuguese) implementation and produced the ideas of popular participation in the planning, management and control of Health Sector actions, through the Health Councils and Management Councils of the "Health Unity" (Fleury & Ouverney, 2008).

We did not find evidence of social-care entities working concretely in the direction of the ethical paradigm of the citizen subject. Therefore this paradigmatic possibility is presented by us in the category of heuristic model, for analysis, and to demonstrate the possibility of other praxis. We think, on the other hand, that this might be one of the paradigms where it is possible to treat the neighbor as a subject, despite its possible limitations.

The theoretical design of those paradigms works as a mapping of the field that composes the complex institutional fabric of care of children and adolescents in the sector of Social Care. The social pulsing present on it uses to be expressed in paradigmatic possibilities that go from the ones that are simply diverse and contradictory among them, including similar and concurrent, until the dialectically contradictory. Its presentation might be made in a continuous of possibilities, oscillating between the extremes of tutelage and citizenship.

Social Care as a religious action: the charity

The charity paradigm as strategy of social protection predominated in the medieval world and survived even when the capitalist mode of production was already consolidated, being found even nowadays (Marcílio, 2006; Rizzini, 2008).

The analysis of this paradigm parameters shows that the "theory" is religious, based in the good works theme, that are a calling for all Christian to live the faith and the mandate of Jesus Christ of loving the neighbor, because, according to several Christian confessions, especially in the Catholic Church, all of us will be judged according to the works that we did. We will present a synthesis of the catholic discourse that was being used as the foundation for this perspective.

The good works, namely the alms, are particularly recommended to catholics during the annual period of Lent. According to the catholic doctrine (Catholic Church, 1999) the good works are made to please God by love and are the consequences of the true faith, put into practice. This faith in Jesus Christ and in his teachings translates in the desire and obligation that the Christian has to practice and express the virtue of charity, the spirit of mercy and, in short, God’s will.

According to the catholic doctrine (Catholic Church, 1999), among the good works, the more perfect and, because of that, more used to judge the catholic in the day of his private Judgment, are the mercy works. Those works, that are fourteen, have the goal to help the neighbor in its corporal or spiritual needs. They are therefore split, according to their nature, in two groups: the corporal works of mercy, that are seven: to feed the hungry; give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, lodge the pilgrims; watch the sick, visit the imprisoned, bury the dead. The spiritual works of mercy are also seven: give good advice; teach the ignorant; correct the one in error; comfort the afflicted; forgive affronts; suffer patiently the weaknesses of our neighbor; pray to God for the living and dead (especially those ones who are in purgatory) (Falcão, 2009).

This perspective is present in the contemporaneous Catholicism, as we can see in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which teaches that

The mercy works are charitable actions through which we help the neighbor in its corporal and spiritual needs. To instruct, counsel, console, comfort are works of spiritual mercy, as well as to forgive and suffer patiently. The works of corporal mercy consist mainly in feeding the hungry; giving drink to the thirsty, lodging the pilgrims; clothing the naked; watching the sick, visiting the imprisoned, burying the dead. Among those mercy gests, the alms gave to the poor is one of the main testimonies of fraternal charity. It is also a practice of justice that pleases God. (Catholic Church, 1999, p. 632)

We may also find it in the Instruction of the Congregation for the Clergy, when it deals about the way that a catholic priest must act:

As a man of God, he exerts, integrally, his ministry, seeking the faithful, visiting the families, participating in their needs, in their joys; prudently corrects, takes care of the old, of the weak, of the abandoned, of the sick and helps with exuberant charity the dying; he pays particular attention to the poor and afflicted, strives by the conversion of sinners, of those who are in error and helps each one to fulfill its duty, encouraging the growth of the Christian life inside the families. To educate in the exercise of the spiritual and corporal mercy works remains one of the pastoral priorities and is signal of vitality for a Christian community (Congregation for the Clergy, 2003, p. 62)

Apparently, the catholic priest must perform pastoral activities based in the practice of spiritual charity and welfare, which would be aligned with a work to maintain the current social and political structures. But, besides that, the Catholic Church also formulated a "social doctrine" where it advances for other questions (Bas¬to de Ávila, 1993; Pontifical Council "Justice and Peace", 2005)⁵.

Not only catholic groups (Silva, 2006; Souza, 1994, 2001) operate according to this paradigm, but also other religious denominations, such as the spiritualists (Giumbelli, 1995, 1998; Souza, 1994, 2001) and traditional evangelical organizations, Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal. The care institution may be a "social work" of a given religious group, catholic or not, with the presence, influence and, overall, the leadership of individuals with strong convictions and religious motivations basing their conduct. The care institutions created according to this paradigm were predominantly closed, constituting total (Goffman, 1987) and disciplinary institutions (Foucault, 1999): they were the asylums for children "exposed in the wheel" (Marcílio, 2006), educational establishments for children without family, the orphanages for children of the poor who could not raise them.

Many feminine and masculine religious catholic congregations were also created along the history having as part of their objectives to help, support and educate the disadvantaged children. As an example we may mention the religious of Saint Vincent of Paula, the Salesians of Dom Bosco, the Orionine of Dom Orione, among several other (Silva, 2006; Souza, 1994, 2001). It must also be noted that, mainly in Latin America, segments of the Catholic Church, formulating the Liberation Theology, have advanced a lot in the comprehension of the relationships among faith, gospel, poorness and the structural determinations of the capital ism in the production of social injustice (Benelli, 2006, 2007; Libanio, 1984; Pereira, 2001), although it is not always possible to notice the influence of the ideas of popular work (Boff, 1984) in the catholic religious entities engaged with poor childhood and adolescence. Besides the boarding institutions, establishments for care of poor children also opened, despite the fact that such innovation was not necessarily due to the perception of the iatrogenic effects of institutionalization in closed regime (Goffman, 1987).

In actuality, our field observation allow us to consider that it may be much improvisation and creativity when founding a care entity, in a search to answer in a innovative way to an emerging social demand.

A care entity may be created and tend to work in order to "do good to the neighbor", lying, then, its reason to exist inconvictions and also in the religious sentiment. The management – legally demanded in order to constitute a care entity – uses to be made of "goodwill" people that want to collaborate for "building a more human and fraternal society" and its members are moved by the feeling of fraternity with the more poor and needed ones. It is common that the management who is in official documents, sometimes composed by illustrious people of the "good society" that lend their names and prestige for the entity, is not often present in the daily work of the society, and its influence in the directions of the work done may be minimal or absent. In true, the members of the directory don't need to effectively work, only their nominal participation is needed, in order to fulfill the bureaucratic and legal needs for the existence of the entity.

It may happen that the maintainer religious group has financial resources enough to invest in the entity, easily supporting it, in an autonomous way. But this is not the most usual, because the entities normally are in chronic financial situation of deficit and this certainly keeps it working on a basic level, even compromising the quality of its institutional offer, since they can't hire people with more specialized professional formation. This way, they need the volunteer work of "goodwill people" that want to help to "do good" for the more needed ones, to fill their positions. This apparent "shortage" is typical of this institutional model: there is a political position that resonates in the subjectivity – for the needy there is only the supply and the position of object, the supplier takes the position of subject.

The Chairman (or the executive manager of the entity, when one exists) uses to be the real responsible by the entity, personally watching over its interests and needs. The main work of the Chairman or executive manager consists in getting financial resources to keep the entity opened and working⁶. Two are the traditional ways to finding resources to found the entity expenses: the promotion of beneficent events with the aim of getting money, such as fairs, parties, bingos, raffles, lunches, etc, and the application for financial help from the political authorities such as the city secretary of Social Care, the mayor, councilors and other elected politicians. The public help usually is timely and specific, not resources that allow the operation of the entity along the time. They are only clientelism focused practices. Today, it is also possible to get financial support in the market, called "second sector" in the line of "social marketing", but this demands a higher professionalization of the entity work.

Continuing to analyze the parameters of this paradigm, it is perceived that the technique becomes action in a religious and moralizing education of personal behavior, using both persuasion as well as the fear of eternal condemnation; the action is based in the volunteer work, in the individual help and goodwill and demands no professionalization. The pedagogical practice is traditional, centered in the authority, knowledge and power of the adult, that takes authoritarian and seducing postures with the students, in a guardianship relation.

The ideology is conservative and looks to integrate means and ends of the institution, starting from an analysis allegedly uncritical of social reality, remaining in the plane of individual care to people whose problems are also taken as individual ones.

In the legal plan, the entity stays in the intra-ecclesiastical plan and/or in the specifically religious context of the group and, therefore, in informality, misrepresenting the social-historical and political dimension of social life. It is about the fulfillment of religious works by the individual faithful Christian or by the individual of a given religious group, moved by the religious doctrines in which he believes.

The institutional action is expressed in charity, in mercy works, in fraternal help, in personal goodness, in love for the neighbor, in solidarity, in individual solidarity practices, which are non professional, free, improvised and handmade. Normally there is no planning and systematic evaluations; when they exist, they use to be loose and superficial, the rule would be the spontaneity and improvisation to fulfill the demand.

Children and adolescents are designed as being poor, needy, understood as individuals that must be assisted, oriented, guided and as objects of protection and guardianship.

The care and ethical effects promoted are the subjection, sociopolitical alienation, naive consciousness before reality, hiding the exploitation of the working class by the capitalism, concealing the class struggle and fostering the social harmony by means of care strategies that are palliative, individualized and focused, whose capacity is not reveling to be able to do more than supply the immediate relief of the subject situation always repeated, that is, its subjective and social place of "object and decayed"

Social Assistance of the economical elite: philanthropy

The philanthropic perspective emerges in the eighteenth century, in the midst of the bourgeois capitalist society, overcoming the care of needed ones based in the idea of charity, whose action was based in Christian religious precepts, embodied in the mercy works (Marcílio, 2006; Rizzini, 2008). Philanthropy, inspired in the humanism, may be understood as meaning "love to humanity", constituting a modern logic that pretends to be scientific and rational. Its major goal would be to support the poorness, for what several institutions and philanthropic establishments are created.

Our hypothesis is that philanthropy might be understood as an institution, because it is embodied in knowledge, in speeches, in social practices and its logic creates provisions, incarnating into legal apparatuses, scientific ones and in diverse establishments, boarding ones or in open regime, of disciplinary and correctional shades (Rizzini, 2006, 2008).

The philanthropy paradigm (Adorno, 1991; Donzelot, 2001; Escorsim, 2008; Souza, 1994, 2001) coexisted with the charity paradigm. Its imposition happened as the state was separating itself from the Church, in the same movement where the catholic religion lost its hegemony in the organization of the bourgeois capitalist social life. Philanthropy is the social action typical of the modern bourgeois elite, articulated by means of service clubs, the masonry, among others.

Philanthropy is the continuous action of donating money or other goods to institutions or people who develop activities taken as being of large social merit. It is seen by many as a way to help and guide development and social change, without resorting to state intervention, many times contributing through this way to contradict or correct the "bad" public policies in social, cultural, or scientific development matters. Individuals who adopt this practice, usually individuals who have the economical means needed, are normally called philanthropists. Philanthropy uses to be one of the main sources of funding for humanitarian, cultural and religious causes. In some countries philanthropy assumes a relevant role in the support of scientific investigation and in financing universities and academic institutions.

Its "theoretical" support may be considered philosophic, humanist or humanitarian, dispensing religious motives to make the social promotion of human beings (Sposati, 1994). Historically, the educational character of social work was linked to socialization and disciplining objectives of the poor worker, in the context of expansion of the urban-industrial capitalism. The educational actions seek to "fix" what they understood by "moral problems" of families, that diverted their members from the path of "good". This strategy was constituted from an idea of blaming the poor bytheir poorness, as if this was only an individual question and, therefore, possible to be overcome in the same plane, by action of each one's conduct, especially women and youngsters. The social work frequently assumed the role of "police of families" (Donzelot, 2001), from a disciplinary educational practice aimed to the social framing of poor workers faced with the new needs created by the capitalist modernization in the first decades of the twentieth century. It was, evidently, a proposal to "promote the consciousness" – from outside to inside – in relation to daily life cares, with health, with nutritional habits, with family planning, in a perspective of adaptation of members of popular classes to the dominating rules.

In this paradigm, a care entity may be created by members of the elite who feel personally disturbed by the presence of individuals in situation of poorness, without schooling and unemployed. Then, those members of the elite organize themselves and create an entity with the goal to fix this specific social problem. To be a member of the entity management is an honorable distinction and to manage it as a president is considered to be a noble service, performed with magnanimity, selfishness and altruism. As those groups have available large economical resources to keep the entity, they may dispense the help and interference of the public power in their care class action. Dinners and other beneficent events – normally with pomp and circumstance – use to be realized in order to raise resources for the entity, occasions when the elite celebrates itself, sometimes spending more money to hold the event than raising funds for the entity.

There are also cases when influent people from the high society, in order to become members of the entity management, may plead for public resources from local and national political authorities, using their prestige and power to do it. If there is some public money available to fund the entity expenses, why not ask for it? After all, members of the "good society" are already doing their part and the public power won't be doing anything besides its obligation in contributing for the execution of this meritorious care action. Besides, the entity founders are obliged to build the establishment, because the public power does not acts, classically considered to be corrupt and inefficient, in face of the social problems of the people. This way, a "covenant logic"⁷ is established between the philanthropic care entity and the public power, based on favor and benevolence. The public resources made available may be merely symbolic, but it is not planned, "in any way", the possibility of fighting, claiming or demanding increase of transfers or extending the coverage for other entities, after all, one "does not bite the hand that feeds it", showing ingratitude and disrespect. Each philanthropic establishment works independently and far from its congeners, without communication, ones competing with the others to get the meager public resources.

The technique used by the philanthropic entity is based on a strategy of moralizing socialization and personal behavior, using persuasion by means of educational strategies and prioritizing the preparation of poor people to work, from a perspective of criminalization of poorness. By fighting the idleness of popular classes, it aims to transform the poor people into pseudo-professional individuals and into workers in the labor market and, therefore, also into salaried and consumers. The pedagogical perspective is frankly traditional and authoritarian, centered in the inculcation of hegemonic social values, creating relationships of guardianship, minority and subordination. Reproducing the flaws of school, cases of expulsion from the entity or, sometimes, of punishment of some children who may, for example, receive no meal or be forbidden to enter in the pool or to take part in institutional tours.

Its ideology, coming from a supposedly uncritical analysis of the social reality and acting in the plane of fulfilling the immediate individual needs, remains in the scope of private moral. It values the individual work and savings as ways of social ascension. It promotes social integration and keeps the "social gear" working inside the established order. Its main objective would be to prevent the increase of criminality, blocking the access of children, adolescents and youngsters who live idle in marginality, in drug addiction and finally, in criminality. "Idleness" is considered to be the "mother of all vices", thus it is needed to keep individuals considered to be in "risk situation", occupied and supervised all the time.

Historically, the interest in poor children is part of a political project that has had as its goal to fight, control and submit the idle contingent of the population, adapting it since childhood to the requirements of capitalism development. The speech talked on transforming the poor child into an individual "useful and productive to society", or in its more typical jargon, "into a good man"

In the legal plane, the philanthropic entities still remain in some informality. The social work is based on voluntary, altruistic and individual benefit of riches, treating the promotion of "good" to help the poor, independently from State action, considered to be corrupt and ineffective. Misrepresenting the social-historical and political dimension of the social life, they tend to strongly resist the official contemporaneous speech that proposes Social Care as a state policy, adopting it only formally and neutralizing its more critical perspectives.

It may be considered that the current official law already surpasses by large advantage the philanthropic ideas. This generated a full and complex legal-care apparatus, even under the State leadership, that materialized by the creation of innumerous laws and philanthropic entities aimed to the protection and assistance to childhood (Rizzini, 2006; 2008).

The institutional action is based on the volunteer and meritorious donation of the wealthy, in their individual will to help the "members of underprivileged classes", in the personal sensibility of their moral conscience, in their individual goodwill and does not demand professionalization. The action is primarily gift, favor, generosity, magnanimity, improvised, temporary and precarious. However, the management and planning of the entity may follow a bureaucratic entrepreneurial logic.

Today, we observe that values of protection and defense of children and adolescent rights have become the object of dispute for obtaining resources and power, besides having attracted the commercial interest of the business community. This way, philanthropy is updating itself under the denomination of "entrepreneurial social responsibility", of "social marketing", of "enterprise friend of the child", because the business community has discovered in the "third sector" a rich vein of added-value extraction (Carvalho, 2005, 2008; Centro de Estudos e Pesquisas em Educação, Cultura e Ação Comunitária, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c). Another version of philanthropy may be found in care entities focused in professional education, in capacitating or vocational training, adopting the perspectives of "entrepreneurship" and "marketing".

Children and adolescents are designed as "abandoned children" and as "delinquents", as poor, needy, assisted; at the same time they are objects of discipline, control and protection.

The ethical and care effects promoted are: the "pseudo-professionalization", subjection and sociopolitical alienation, hiding the exploitation of the working class by capitalism. By promoting the naive consciousness in face of reality, they conceal the perception of the structural conditions that generate social exclusion, at the same time that they foster social harmony with their palliative and integrative care strategies in the social system of excluded individuals. But those can never reach the criticism of their social and subjective positionof "objects" and "excluded", in social relations.

Social Assistance as human promotion

In daily practice, the old paradigm of charity is updated by several religious groups under the shape of the human promotion paradigm, a more contemporaneous expression, based on the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church. In the "theoretical" plane, we may say that it is a religious and Christian recovery of human and social rights of individuals, introducing the novelty of volunteering and a call for the feeling and practice of solidarity, but the "neighbor" that is helped is a "brother", which is not different from fraternity (Fagundes, 2006; Seron, 2008). In the context of religious speech, the work of human promotion is considered to be a responsibility and a compromise that everyone must have with oneself, with the other and with all things that are around him. The work of human promotion would try to offer for people in risk situation or socialeducational vulnerability an opportunity of humanization and discovery of the meaning of life through socio-educational activities, thus generating a more solidary community and a more fair society. The true external social union would result from the union of spirits and hearts, that is, of faith and charity.

The religious speech proposes that human promotion must bring man and woman to go from lesser human conditions to increasingly more human conditions, until reaching the "full knowledge of Jesus Christ" and must reach from the newborn until the elder. Promoting involves the word (awareness), the action (life into the service of the other), and collaboration (mutual help between the one serving and the one who needs to be served), compromising with the defense of individual and social rights of man, of people, of cultures, and marginalized sectors, as well as of the unprotected and prisoners. This way, it is about discovering the face of God in the suffering face of brothers. All Christian community or religious group is responsible for the care, evangelization, freedom and consequent human promotion that aims the total conversion of the person, in earthly and spiritual dimensions (trans¬cendental). The care would be aimed to poorness and spiritual/psychic pain, including also evangelization, with certain values being proposed that must be assumed. The human promotion aims to awake the human conscience in all dimensions (spiritual, personal, intellectual, social, economic, etc) and get it to fight for itself as a promotional agent, seeking for its own humane and Christian development, in a humanist and spiritual dimension. The larger goal of human promotion work would be to educate man for the acquaintanceship with the other, to move him to organize and have vindicatory strength (the formation of an association gives subsidies for the true social organization) and to move him to share the goods aiming at communion and participation.

In relation to the care entity, the same that we proposed on the charity paradigm is valid here. The technique employed is based on awareness, information and orientation about individual rights, on efforts and voluntary initiatives, creating or working as voluntary in social works or care entities developed by religious groups (catholic, catholic charismatic renewal, evangelic, spiritist, etc;) remaining inside a religious universe. Formation works in "pseudo-professional" activities or in areas that demand little qualification are developed, as well as in confessional or parochial care entities. The strategy is "to give the fish, aiming to teach how to fish". The aim is to insert the needy individuals in the work market, but what normally is achieved are subaltern posts in menial jobs. The pedagogical technique is renewed with a more psychologizing hue, centering in the individual who learns, no longer in the educator who teaches. It is also characterized by an accentuated voluntarism, starting from the principle that individuals are free and able to adopt beliefs and other attitudes according to their own will, disregarding the historical and social determinants that affect the production of social life.

The ideology of volunteering (Caldana & Figueiredo, 2008; Fagundes, 2006; Seron, 2008; Sousa & Araújo, 2007) tends to be naive, well-intentioned, religious, spiritualized, integrative, conservative, reformist and uncritical, aiming to promote social harmony and can be considered as typical of the urban middle class and, therefore, not used to develop a social criticism to the established order.

In the legal plane, it takes the place of public state policies that do not exist or that are not fully implemented. Actions turned to popular organization aimed at political fight, manifestations and public demands for rights, are normally not part of its horizon.

The action is characterized by individual goodwill, by volunteering and tends to be improvised and precarious. It acts in the common sense level, without planning and in a little professionalized way, developing an informal and "homemade" style. The evaluations, when they exist, usually are only formal and of praise. Children and adolescents are considered to be needy individuals, in "personal and social risk situation"; they are object of protection and tutelage.

In terms of care and ethical effects, it promotes welfare, tutelage and subordination.

Social Care as welfare care of the public power

We may find its "theory" in the patrimonialism and in the clientelism of the public power, especially in the national and regional executive governments that tend to be occupied by members of the elite (Chauí, 2000; Damatta, 1991; Fagnani, 2005; Graham, 1997; Holanda, 1999; Rizzini, 2008).

Patrimonialism is a characteristic of a State that has no distinctions between the limits of public and private. It was common in almost all absolutisms: the monarch spent the personal incomes and the incomes obtained by the government indistinctly, sometimes for matters that were only of its personal interest (buying clothes, for example) sometimes for state matters (as building a road). As the term suggests, the State ends up being an asset of its governor. Historically, such posture initiated in Europe by the Germans who invaded Rome. The Romans built the republic, a State in which personal interests were subjugated to the collective ones constituted by native Romans. The foreigners, that gradually gave shape to the decadent roman empire, had as characteristic the patrimonialism, according to which the kingdom and its riches were transmitted hereditarily, so that the successors enjoyed the benefits of the post, shameless to spend the kingdom treasure for their own benefit or for a minority, without the previous authorization of a senate.

In Brazil, patrimonialism was implemented by the colonial Portuguese State, with the process of awarding titles, lands and almost absolute powers to the landlords. Its legacy to posterity was a political-administrative practice where public and private were not distinct in front of the authorities. Thus, the confusion between public and private in our society has become "natural", dating back to the colonial period (1500- 1822), permeating the empire (1822-1889) and reaching even the Old Republic (1889-1930), moment when the "coronels" (big and middle sized farmers and merchants) exercised the command power over a large parcel of the population, intermediating the land use, warranting to them the "occupation", "protection" and giving them small personal favors in exchange of loyalty in elections and political disputes. In the hierarchical and vertical brazilian society, the relations of command-obedience and of favor are the typical traits of daily social life (Chauí, 2000, p. 84). The dominant legitimates its pretense natural right by means of a network of favors and clienteles.

Among the practices of patrimonialism, it was (and still is) common the building of, with public money, improvements in private properties (such as dams, summerhouses, pools, etc.; or the concession of jobs to more loyal coreligionists, without public tender). Even nowadays, those practices are still common in Brazil, seriously threatening the principle according to which "all are equal before the law", being common the use of the public machine to promote personal favors by mayors, governors, senators and almost all politicians, to their coreligionists, friends and followers. This exchange of favors is called "physiologism" and the favoring of relatives and friends with jobs, advantage and public offices characterizes "nepotism".

Understood as inherent of patrimonialism are the paternalism, the clientelism and the favoritism, characteristics, still today of the national policy. The corporatism designs the action of groups or associations (corporations) with the goal of defending their exclusive interests (keeping privileges, benefits and facilities obtained), without taking into account the basic social rules and the larger interests of the collectivity and of the country. The "corporatist philosophy" is based on the mob strategy: protection, data make-up, secrecy and terror. Under the pretext of protecting threatened rights and interests and the loss of credibility of politicians, workers, organizations and associations may become corporatists.

Brazil has a strong tradition of authoritarianism, despotism, centralization of power and state paternalism, characterizing a "masterly culture". The political institutions are extremely obsolete and addicted to their organizations and to its way of acting and the corporatist system that they created implies in its maintenance, being difficult that members of the political class might reformate and transform their structures and ways of acting. In fact, on a large measure, Brazil is still not wholly a "Rule of Law", as advocated in the Federal Constitution.

The culture of "petty politics" characterizes the corporatist action of a parcel of the National Congress, State Assemblies and Council Chambers, where those politicians legislate for their own sake. This parcel of the political class acts as a corrupter agent, because a large part of its members represents economical powers and other organizations, elected, many times, with the incumbency to exert influence peddling, establishing and institutionalizing in the country the politics of "take on, give here". Among other things, those politicians divert government funds to apply in their "electoral corrals"; being elected with financial support of companies, they start to favor them in the deals involving public entities. As they are the more funded institutions, they excel by unproductiveness and boycott the executive power initiatives.

Physiologism and nepotism flourish among the politicians, involving and buying the silence, the self-indulgence and the connivance of a good part of population with the "benefits" that they provide to it. In this scenario, prevails the perspective that "the rights are for a few" and are characterized as privileges; besides, one acts from the premise that "the laws were not made for all", where the culture of impunity flourish. "For enemies the law, for friends, everything". (Damatta, 1997, p. 24)

There is no shortage of political parties that have "owners" and "caciques", being normally dominated by groups who manipulate the distribution of jobs, selection of candidates, etc. There are still cities, municipalities, regions and states that tend to be split and dominated by powerful and influent families that alternate in power, using the public machine in their own benefit.

A very negative consequence of petty politics and physiologism is the inefficiency and waste of public services generally, resulting from the appointment of supporters and friends for management places, ignoring the criteria of qualification and competence. As an extension, there is the dismantling and discontinuity of services, plans and projects, subordinating public state policies to the contingences and conjunctures of governments. This discourages and "addicts" the career employees, promotes lower productivity and also dissatisfaction among users, who are the reason and funders of the public service, receiving from it, in exchange, only bad service in precarious installations, endless queues, excessive taxation, paltry pension benefits, with ridiculous adjustments, etc.

All this is widely seen in the city reality. Normally the politicians already discovered, for some time, that to invest in the care of children and adolescents considered to be "in personal and social risk situation", gives huge political and electoral dividends (Justo, 2003, Rizzini, 2008). In this paradigm, still prevails the "first-lady" and the so called "city fund for solidarity"), to which are forwarded funds that the mayor cannot send personally to the entities, in the traditional clientelism logic.

In this context, the public care entity is called "executing public unity" or "service of direct execution from the public power", usually working in a more open regime. It is created to fulfill demands from the people, received and intermediated by municipal councilors and secretaries, being maintained with public resources (city, state, federal) and normally quite limited. Their workers may be gazette officers from the public machine, they may also be workers hired in "commissioned places" or by "temporary contracts". There is a phenomena of intense precariousness of public workers service and service outsourcing is also common in this area. The formation level of the workers is very low, being characterized basically by undergraduate courses and there are many workers without university studies in the services. The public worker may be considered a privileged citizen, "owner" of its place, from which one tries to take all kinds of possible advantages and favors, not caring much about the treatment provided to the population: the treatment dispensed to the people is a favor.

The technique consists in giving help, assistance and favor to the poor, the "needy" by means of programs, projects and institutionalized services of Social Care both public and private, using the public machine with electioneering purposes. The pedagogical perspective is the classic one, traditional and tutelary, centered in the authority of the master, his knowledge and his power, considering the other as an object of his forming and modeling action, from whom it is always expected a different subservience.

The ideology is reactionary, utilitarian, pragmatic and politically opportunistic, paternalistic and clientelistic. It aims to help the poor and get their vote through favor, trying yet to relieve the social pressure, seeming to fulfill the needs of the poor population and inclusively anticipating their demands, incorporating some flags of social movements, but promoting only focused and quite delimited helps. It is compatible with the charitable philanthropy (Fagnani, 2005; Lemos, 2007).

In the legal plane, the Social Care would be still situated in an opportunistic informality, getting scarce public resources to foster programs, projects and public and private institutionalized services of Social Care. Ignoring the new legal/institutional system that has aimed to implement rights, it stays in the concrete logic of philanthropy with electoral goals, demonstrating much difficulty and resistance to transit in the direction of the official speech that considers nowadays Social Care as State policy.

The action is characterized by personal favor from the authority to one individual, gained by means of intersession of influent people with the public authorities, in a circle of "godfathers", expressing itself in a paternalist and kind protection, as a generous help offered by the public authority, tending to be improvised, random, unplanned, punctual and precarious. There is no whole planning of the caring action, to give space for political interests of the parties that may capitalize the population demands through strategies of electoral marketing. Under the title of a personal favor, the chief of executive may provide several public workers to work in private care entities, practice that usually "ties" the entities, keeping them under control and inside the "covenant logic" informal and clientelistic.

We may attribute the following general characteristics to the ones promoting care actions: they consider the social problem under a help view; they create addictiveness by means of the donation offered; they promote compensatory actions and not concrete solutions to the problems; they recreate misery under the disguise of tutelage; they promote a naturalistic conception of poorness, that is seen as normal, residual and not as a structural effect of the current social organization; they stigmatize the poorness and also the poor; they offer to the poor conditions of mitigating poorness that are also poor and secondary; they don't think on the intention of the ethical orientation with which the help is being given; they only recognize the notion of favor and do not assimilate the notion of rights; they are mainly paternalist.

Children and adolescents are considered as clients, "target public"; the poor "disadvantaged" and needy, beneficiaries of programs, projects and services of Social Care, public and private that, in their turn, "help" and try to "mitigate" the difficulties of the poor. They are object of tutelage, control and investments with advertising and electioneering purposes.

The care and ethical effects are tutelage, subordination and social control of the poor, "smaller" and infantilized citizens⁸.

Social Care as State Policy

Its "theory" consists in the official proposal of the National Policy of Social care in the country (Brazil, 1993, 2004, 2005, 2011). Social care is presented as a social fundamental right that protects the needy, warranting them the minimum to a dignified life, without a reciprocation from the beneficiaries. Let us see a synthesis of the official speech about Social Care.

Public and non contributive policy, Social Care is considered a State duty and right of each citizen that may need it. Among its main pillars are the Federal Constitution of 1988, that sets the guidelines for management of public policies, and the Organic Law of Social Care (LOAS in Portuguese), of 1993 (updated in 2011), that establishes the objectives, principles and guidelines of actions. The LOAS determines that Social Care be organized in a decentralized and participative system, composed by the public power and civil society. The Fourth National Conference of Social Care deliberated, then, the implementation of the Single Social Care System (SUAS in Portuguese). Fulfilling this deliberation, the Ministry of Social Development and Fight against Hunger (MDS in Portuguese) implemented the SUAS (Brazil, 2005), that started to articulate efforts, resources and means to execute the programs, services and social-care benefits, aiming to promote a wide reorganization of the Social Care field that is being made in all national territory.

The building of SUAS, by reorganizing Social Care offer in the whole country, wants to promote the welfare and social protection to families, children, adolescents and youngsters, to people with disabilities, elders, to everybody that will need it. The actions are based on the orientations of the National Policy of Social Care (PNAS in Portuguese), approved by the National Council of Social Care (CNAS in Portuguese) in 2004 (Brazil, 2004).

The management of socio-care actions follows the previewed in the Basic Operational Standard of SUAS (NOB/SUAS), published in the year of 2005, that disciplines the administrative decentralization of the System, the relationship between the three spheres of Government and the ways to apply public resources. Among other determinations, this NOB reinforces the role of Social Care funds as the main instances for the funding of PNAS. The management of brazilian Social Care is followed and evaluated both by the public power and by the civil society, equally represented in the national, state and city councils of Social Care. This social control aims to consolidate a management model that is transparent in relation to its strategies and policy implementation.

The official speech presents SUAS as an opportunity to implement transparency and universal access to programs, services and social-care benefits, promoting a management model that wants to be decentralized and participative, wishing to consolidate, definitely, the responsibility of the Brazilian State in fighting poorness and inequality, with complimentary participation of the organized civil society, by social movements and entities of Social Care. One should never neglect the advances of the institutional ideas: they are, at least, the glimpse of possibilities by which it is possible to fight.

In the technical plane, generally, Social Care as public policy must be implemented by professional, qualified and remunerated work of social assistants, psychologists, teachers, social educators and other technicians, effective in programs, projects and services institutionalized, public and private. According to our field observations, such professionals may many times be characterized by a qualification level between tolerable and basic (graduation) and use to be little organized in the city scenario. They suffer from lack of recognition and social appreciation and receive low wages. Social Care is also configured as an acting field for trainees and for volunteer work; this, when performed without political awareness, also collaborates to produce the "de-professionalization" of Social Care, but even so it still contributes to close the gap left by the State regarding citizens' rights.

In this paradigm the technique may be called "social-educational", providing pedagogical and educational resources in order to produce psychological, moral and therapeutic effects, aiming the social adequacy of individuals, by means of technical and depoliticized actions. The socio-educational services, performed in the Reference Centers of Social Care (CRAS in Portuguese), are part of the Basic Social Care of SUAS: territorialized services, accessible for the population, aimed to strength affective links between the family and the adolescent/youngster (Brazil, 2006b, 2006c). The socio-educational services and actions are inserted as a field of rights to be warranted by the public policy of Social Care.

The conception of Social Care as policy of social protection establishes warranties that the policy must provide to fight insecurities that the citizen faces along his life. There is also the level of Special Protection of Middle Complexity, developed in the Reference Center Specialized in Social Care (CREAS in Portuguese) (Brazil, 2006d). The High Complexity services are performed in establishments of institutional hosting institutes. The pedagogical perspective predominant in available literature shows to be renewed, centered in the individual, voluntary, psychologizing and little critical.

Its ideology is, at the same time, conservative and developmental, "modernizing" and "progressive". Assuming the philosophy of development, it proposes the concepts of "participation", "organization", "self effort" and "local development", aiming to promote the "community development". It reveals a clear demobilizing intention, when it seeks an "integral development", "balanced" and "harmonic". The organized participation of the popular classes would be the condition for their integration in the community, obtained through their "social promotion" in the development process.

The official speech says that it plans to promote care of individual social rights as a duty of State and society, aiming to eradicate poorness, but we see that it continues to be permeated by a naturalizing vision of the social problems and of the poorness phenomena. No essay to deepen the critical analysis of historic and social production of misery and poorness by the Capitalist Production Model is seen.

Today, in the opposite direction of the speech about social rights defense and State responsibility, the neoliberal agenda promotes precisely the take away of responsibility of the State for the "social problem" and proposes "partnerships" with the market ("second sector") and with the civil society ("third sector") (Fagnani, 2005; Montaño, 2001, 2007). There are transfers of responsibilities and outsourcing of the implementation of public policies of Social Care (and also of Health, Education, among others) for Non-Governmental Organizations, without the transfer of enough budgetary resources.

In this scenario, companies discover how to profit from the Social Care offered to the members of the expropriated social class, creating foundations that develop the social business marketing and the ideology of "social business responsibility", learning to collect financial resources from society to invest in care actions and in this way to aggregate "social value" to its brand (Fagnani, 2005; Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada & Diretoria de Estudos Sociais, 2006; Muller, 2006).

In this paradigm, the "organizational culture" that permeates the official speech wishes to adopt a management model based on flexibility, on deconcentration and on decentralization, to fight the stiffness of bureaucracy, aiming to reduce costs, betting on quality and productivity, emphasizing the results. However, the autonomy of the manager predominates, with delegation of authority, responsible to set goals and objectives. He may use competition and awarding strategies to manage the public workers, based on the business model. The worker of public services does not conceive himself as a "citizen of rights", or understand that his institutional action could contribute for the construction and the exercise of constitutional rights for all organization subjects. Old vices still persist in public administration: patrimonialism, where the State apparatus works like an extension of the sovereign power and there is a lack of distinction between public property (res publica) and private (res principis). Authoritarianism, paternalism, clientelism and favoritism, nepotism and corruption tend to follow the patrimonialism model. All this may be disguised in a bureaucratic, centralizer and hierarchical management model.

In the legal plane, Social Care is formally warranted by the Federal Constitution (Brazil, 1988), by LOAS (Brazil, 1993, 2011), by PNAS (Brazil, 2004), by SUAS (Brazil, 2005). It tends to remain in a rhetorical plane, and seems to be a bold speech with more symbolic than practical objectives, because it does not provide enough and effective public budget for its attainment. The clearest evidence leads to the conclusion that it aims to legitimate the hegemony of the existing social order, more than promoting its change.

Its action is segmented, focused and decentralized, including outsourced, advocating the implementation of public policies of Social Care (SUAS) in federal, state and city levels by the Ministry of Social Development, the National, State and City Councils of Social Care, the State Secretary of Care and Social Development, the Municipal Secretary of Social Care and the public and private social-care network. For that it uses entities that work in closed regime and also others that serve children and adolescents in open regime; the institutional functioning itself is normally pyramidal, as we say. However, the current policy for childhood and adolescence follows a logic which is contrary to the strategy of indefinitely institutional internment (Brazil, 1990).

The policy councils (Brazil, 2006a, 2007a, 2007b), with the participation of civil society and public power, were created to perform the social control of Social Care policies, being characterized as ultra democratic instances that find almost insurmountable challenges, in the political and social national context that is still centralizer, authoritarian, patrimonial and corporatist (Behring & Boschetti, 2006). The management system by councils is a novelty of the Constitution of 1988 and is being implemented in Brazil, facing many challenges with the civil society (that is not homogeneous) and the established powers (that oscillate between conservative and reactionary). The council model brings another conception on how to exercise power, overcoming verticality and proposing the common citizen representativeness and the democratic sharing of power (Gohn, 2001, 2004, 2005; Raichelis, 1998). It is a new logic, resulting from tactical concession to popular demands of the civil society in the decade of 1980, through their politically organized groups, and because of that it wants to break, and at the same time overcome, the traditional clientelistic and authoritarian relationship of the government with civil society.

The "social-care network" is constituted by the set of care entities of the municipality (including the ones who take care of children and adolescents considered to be in "personal and social risk situation") but the care is still not performed in network, it continues to be fragmented and focused. The private care entities continue to work with a clientelistic and covenant logic, staying on the traditional and reactionary paradigms, working isolatedly and resisting to adopt the perspective of Social Care as public policy.

From our research, we may problematize the situation of professionals who work in the Social Care establishments, even if there is no clear definition of the worker/social educator figure, with many of them coming from the same social stratum to which the clients of the care entities belong (Silva, 2008).

Normally they are teachers from several areas: physical education, pedagogy, philosophy, social sciences, psychologists, social assistants and trainees of those courses, among others, that could study in a university. The proletarian process to which those classes have been submitted is huge. Even regarding social area workers, it is seen that among those that are occupied in the field of social problems still dominates the poorness, precariousness and improvisation in professional and social fields. As, inclusive, apology is made to individual solidarity, social responsibility and volunteer work, it is considered without justification that those professionals be well paid, since the social-care work (Costa, 2006) would forgo a demanding and expensive professional preparation, but would depend, overall, on generosity and individual altruism, aspects that are considered to be individual gifts that, as such, it would be licit and even a duty to share them for free.

Social educators seem to be living, then, from the social problem. Their meager salary comes from the "care" management of the depleted classes in their multiple facets, from where they use to come, and from which they detached a little through schooling and university stay, but without this producing an effective social ascension. They still orbit the periphery of the included society, living in its adjacencies, located in a care entity that constitutes the intersection included/excluded.

There is altruism and social compromise among the professionals engaged in care works. But there are also many professionals that, despite having their origins in popular classes, are quite imbued of speeches, prejudices, values, dreams, ultimately, of all the bourgeois liberal ideology of the dominant elite. They do not tend to identify themselves with the explored/excluded/users of the establishments where they work. They earn their bread with the institutional equating of the several refractions of the social problem, while they seem to search with greediness their all individual social ascension.

Certainly this is not about denouncing or individually blaming the professionals that have those attitudes. We are aware that to deal with the ills of the social question is by itself highly unhealthy from the psycho-social point of view, and this is allied with precarious conditions of salary and work, with professional devaluation and frequent frustration before the insolubility of the social problems faced, generating stress that may fuel desperation. The idealism may be left along the way and some opportunist cynicism may start to gain space in the care work, because the professionals start to see their work only as a tool that allows their personal and familiar survival, in the middle of the weight that comes from the routine and sameness. The pleasure of creating and living together, of educating and socializing, of raising awareness and fighting for better living conditions may make room for "pretending to work" with the users, hoping to maintain the appearance of being busy, to justify their salaries. But this "work" may be loose, improvised, without planning, lacking theoretical foundation, without clear goals to be reached, finishing in superficial and innocuous evaluations regarding its enhancement and ethical purposes.

Apparently, anyone may be a social worker/educator. The ones who question this aspect the most are social workers, professional category historically in charge of the social problems in general. The volunteers, trainees and other professionals from the humanities find occupation and employability space in the field of Social Care in the care entities. This phenomenon also produces effects in the professionalization processes, because it tends to empty the fights for the valuation of professional work in this field. This is how the easing of working relationships, market demands, the shrinkage of the neoliberal State and the cost cut in social area, as well as structural unemployment and precarious employability possibilities, motes of the globalized world and internationalized economy, beat the daily work of care entities.

We may see how the employability logic is replacing the full employment logic, which is one of the promoters of social rights of social ascension and social inclusion. The access to work is reduced to its individualistic dimension: each one is personally responsible to qualify in order to live up to the market exigencies. In this complex social process, we see that there is a maximum of collective homogenization and, at the same time, an exacerbation of individualist narcissism.

In this paradigm, the "social network" (Schlithler, 2004; Serviço Nacional de Aprendizagem Comercial, 2005, 2008; Silva, 2000) seems to work more as a tool of capture, management, and control of the poor and social deviants, or only as a pragmatic and operational strategy to intensify in a capillary way, the siege to "individuals in personal and social risk situation", making them circulate by the several agencies of social Care, Health and Education - Reference Centers of Social Care (CRAS), Reference Center Specialized in Social Care (CREAS), socio-educational entities, Basic Health Unities (BHU in Portuguese), Guardianship Council (CT in Portuguese), school, etc. As it can be seen, working in this paradigm, the "network" logic would be limited to a technical, bureaucratic, pragmatic and operational question, sterilized of any trace of political transforming strength. It proposes a technical and bureaucratic instrumentalization of institutions, entities, programs and services in a closed local circle that would be the "local community", the "city", the "municipal territory", also aiming at the "rational saving" of public expenses. It wants to use and be based in traditional psychological and pedagogical theories about childhood, adolescence and youth.

When we read the official proposals that organize the field of Social Care today (Brazil, 1993, 2004, 2005, 2007a, 2007b), the Technical Orientations for CRAS (Brazil, 2006a, 2009), the orientations for the follow-up of families benefiting from the PBF in the scope of their SUAS (Brazil, 2006b), especially the Technical Orientations for the CREAS (Brazil, 2006c) that bring a series of "group dynamics" to be used with the families, we may see how their perspective of social relationships is psychologizing⁹, concealing their political dimension.

In this paradigm, children and adolescents are the "clients" and are the needy, the poor, the "cared" and the "beneficiaries", individuals considered in "personal and social risk situation" (Diniz & Lobo, 1998; El-Khatib, 2001; Hunning & Guareschi, 2002; Ro-mam, 2000) or in "situation of social vulnerability". They became the "target audience" (jargon of management and marketing, areas that are colonizing Social Care and that reduces it to a management technique) of the Social Care actions. In institutional practice they are also objects of protection, tutelage and control, practices that pertain to the philanthropic paradigm, although official speech call them as being "subjects of rights".

Their care and ethical effects point to the maintenance of the order by tutelage integration and consented inclusion, deflating the capacity of organization, fight and vindication from the popular social movements, by assuming and expropriating some of its themes as part of government programs, but without promoting anything else than focused activities of symbolic and advertising impact, with electoral goals.

On the one hand, there is no doubt that the social reality where the Single Social Care System (SUAS) is implemented, as State policy, is very different from the social reality where the Unified Health System (SUS) is implemented with much more defined appearances of Public Policy than of State Policy. On the other hand, there are no questions that both have an important social function in advancement conjunctures of popular "claim" and the "answers" to them by the groups established in power.

Those advancements and retreats may be better understood based on the Gramscian concept of Process of Strategic Hegemony¹⁰ (Gruppi, 1978) that tries to explain how it is performed the management, by democracy, of differences between interests and contradictory social values in a given context and historical moment. In this case it is opportune to use the concept of paradigm with which we have been working in this essay, in order to indicate that it is located in areas, as Social Care and Health, of paradigmatic fight between different ways of knowing, making and wishing (different sets of knowledge and practices, articulated by different speeches).

The SUAS is the "curious" representative of the public and political "outcry" reached by the amplitude of the state of abject poverty, chronically built, of a huge contingent of workers excluded from the production and consumption processes; in conjunction with the possibility of choice, by direct election of a faction of power holders, that used, in good time, a candidate with popular roots and ideological speech accustomed only to cosmetic social changes. Even as State policy, the SUAS used the gap opened by SUS, a public policy, using part of its ideas for the construction of the Official Speech of Social Care, and popular councils as instruments of "planning, management and control" of the institutional apparatuses and the guidelines for its concrete action.

Those circumstances and their burning motives (being and structural effect of the increase of predatory social inequalities in the globalized neo-liberalism) authorize us the hypothesis that the Social Care praxis may be an opportunity, that is, an open breach in the practices of the Process of Strategic Hegemony, able to allow the organization and implementation of strategies to foster precious micro-political advancements of socially subordinated interests that in them are being updated at this moment. This evidently could never happen spontaneously, much less by programmatic imposition or ideological indoctrination of its participants, workers and subjects of Care. For our part we don't want more than is within our reach, that is, a modest contribution specifically for the worker subjects if they want to take it in consideration, if they aspire to support an ethical identification with social interests of Social Care subjects.

It is in this ethical perspective that we will propose below, as heuristic model, the analysis and discussion of the Citizen Subject Paradigm, that we found in action pouring from the Popular Education (Freire, 1967, 1987) and in practices of the Unified Health System, arising from the Health Reform (Fleury & Ouverney, 2008). Another fundamental argument comes from the dialectic method of analysis that we are undertaking. It forces us to the work hypothesis that considers to be no instituted dimension without necessarily another corresponding one that is instituting, even if that one is apparently invisible under the mist of practices, knowledge and instituted speeches. If, from dialectic, any institution is defined as the effect of the set of instituting pulsations of Social Demand¹¹, organized in resources, through the ideological and imaginary mediation, it seems enough authorized the hypothesis that intends a "visibility" beyond that which tends to persevere as ideological speech, and that, in this case, will only appear in practices as an exception to the ordinary (Costa-Rosa, 1987).

The citizen subject paradigm: a possible dialectical alternative to the previous paradigms

Aiming to enunciate possibilities of a dialectic overcoming of the previous paradigms limits, we had formulated a paradigmatic configuration as a glimpse of another ethics proposition for Social Care. Our references are, as already pointed out, the Popular Education of Paulo Freire and the paradigmatic fight, in management and control of projects and institutions, opposing to the hetero-management that still dominates the sector.

We perceived in the official speech of Social Care as State Policy the lack of a critical political perspective, dialectical and transforming. The political ideology of the 1980s included the theme of political participation, of popular organization, of social movements, collective fights by human rights, better conditions of work, of health, of education, of habitation, of future possibilities and of life (Boff, 1984; Bordenave, 1987; Carneiro, 1985; Dallari, 1984; Demo, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004; Pereira, 1988, 2001; Sampaio, 1982; Souza, 1989). However with the democratic opening, the governments began to encompass some claiming flags of the social movements and this promoted their draining. The new institutional scenario promoted the inclusion and canalization of a good part of the popular aspirations for the city councils, official institutional channels, easily manipulable by the rulers, in face of the lack of tradition and experience of institutionalized political participation of civil society members. In other words, this means that the interests and social values that keep the hegemonic control of society regain the absolute hegemony, leaving a more limited space yet to the social movements.

In a context of always increasing advancement of neoliberal politics, removal of the State from the position of social mediator and provider of essential services to the population, the 1990s are characterized by changes in the actions of social movements and by the raise of Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs), seeking partnerships and funding with political authorities (Gohn, 2005). The marches, public manifestations, collective claiming actions, social fight, popular and communitarian organization apparently disappeared by becoming "obsolete" and "outdated", since the public power was proposing to govern "for the people and with the people", implementing several public policies, services and programs of interest for the population. As expected, this way of the democratic and democratizing process proves to be quite formal and comes with a strong depoliticization of social life and a "sanitization" of the impasses of this part of the population. Those are translated and reduced to planning and technical management problems, and solved with policies based on supply. In this context the Project of Social Care, as State policy, is marked by a strong pedagogical and psychologizing content and by social control strategies over the popular classes that are its target of action; although, as we have seen, the circumstances of its creation and its inspiration in the Health Movement fight strategy had opened a gap for dialectically alternative ideas.

Where can we find other possibilities to think the construction of a praxis with power for popular democratic fight, based on proposals of integral citizenship for all? As hypothesis, the Paradigm of Popular Education seems to us a critical and dialectical alternative to the previous paradigms, because it is based directly on the interests of the popular groups with which it operates.

As far as learning is concerned, the perspective of Popular Education is based on the dialectical Marxist methodology, and in the radical participation of the student subject as central protagonist of the teaching- learning process production. It is not a cold and imposed education, because it is based on the community knowledge and encourages dialogue as a way of learning. It is not "informal education", because it aims the formation of subjects and citizen awareness, and the organization of the political work to assertion of the subject. It is a strategy of popular participation construction redirected into social life. The main characteristic of Popular Education is to use the community knowledge as a raw material for learning. Learn from the subject's knowledge and teach from words and generating themes coming from its one's daily life. In this paradigm, Education is seen as an act of subject's transformation, through knowledge, and of social change, having an explicit political nature. The result of this way of educating is observed when the subject can position himself in a critical way in the social context that he inhabits" (Brandão, 1986a, 1986b; Freire, 1967, 1987; Graciani, 2005; Hurtado, 1992).

Neto (2002) says that to be considered Popular Education one must define the word "popular". The more common conception observed, even in dictionaries, is "popular" as synonym of oppressed, the one who lives without the elementary conditions to exercise its citizenship and who is outside the possession and use of socially produced material goods. Thus, we may define Popular Education as a praxis, practical and theoretical of knowledge referenced in reality, with methodologies incentivizing the participation and empowerment of people, permeated by a political base that stimulates social changes and oriented by human desires of freedom, justice, equality and felicity.

To think in Popular Education it is also needed, therefore, to rethink Education as a complex social praxis. Education, considered in the social panorama, is the permanent condition of recreating culture, being, because of that, at the same time the possibility of domination of culture, among other factors. In the individual panorama, education is the fundamental condition for individual creation, since knowledge is a needed factor of exchange relations among people. Still according to Brandão (1986a), to learn is to become a person from the organism, making the passage from nature to culture. To him, there was firstly a knowledge collectively built that later was crystallized, formalized and became wise and erudite, matter for Knowledge specialists. Erudite knowledge tends to oppose popular knowledge, erecting itself as the form exclusively of specialists in education. Thus, popular knowledge came to be considered as a diffuse knowledge, typical of the subaltern classes:

A community knowledge becomes the knowledge of subaltern fractions of the unequal society (classes, groups, people, tribes). In a first distant sense, the ways – immersed or not in other social practices, through which the knowledge of popular classes or of classless communities is transferred among groups or people, are their popular education. (Brandão, 1986a, p. 26)

The large division between erudite and popular knowledge is the component of the large social division of work, between doing and thinking, which leads to marginalization of the oppressed, of the subaltern classes of the unequal society. It is to build elements and conditions which intend to metabolize in a dialectically alternative way this fundamental contradiction that Popular Education arises. The teaching-learning process is seen as an act of knowledge and social change, delineated in the political perspective. It is different from Traditional Education because it is not an imposed education, since it is based on community knowledge and incentivizes dialogue; it is different from an informal Education because it has a horizontal relationship between educator and learner based on the principle of self-management of the collectives. It is interesting to consider that it arises in Brazil as praxis inside the same effervescent socioeconomic and political institutional context that originates the proposals and practices of the Health Reformation in the field of Health; both aspire the construction of a strategy of hegemony of subjects whose values and social interests were historically subordinated, from a social sector where they are situated, naturally in connection with the wider social-historical reality according to good dialectic.

Popular education is a process of formation and qualification that happens inside a political perspective of class and takes part or is linked to the organized action of people, of masses, in order to reach the goal to build a new society, according to their interests (Hurtado, 1992, p. 44)

The previous observations allowed us to conjecture that, from an institutional perspective, and based on self-analysis and self-management, by means of an intense self-formation work, the care entity would be horizontally and collectively built by professionals, users and their families, all acting as formulating members and participating in their activities. The fraction of interests and values that characterize the Paradigm of Citizen Subject would prevail as dominant, the operation of the entity would be totally aligned with the interest of the socially subordinated pole, necessarily guided by the participation and collective management of the establishment. The workers would be in the trail to become professionalized and politicized, clearly situated on the users' side, in the fight and promotion of their rights, from the recognition that the fight of the institution subjects, called users, is their own fight. Certainly this last acquisition demands not a few subjective and ethical-political reassignments, however this is the instituting principle that may be attributed in this context to the word "solidarity".

Management would be exerted by people engaged in Social Care work, representing the public power, of workers and subjects in the Care process provided by the entity. Social Care should be planned in a critical way, as social-political praxis and also as public policy of State duty and as well as a citizen's right (Brazil, 2004, 2005).

Adopting the democratic model based on participative democratic practice, the institutional action would aim the construction of the subject-user citizen social rights; there would be ethical implications concerning the action effects. The manager would be invested of delegated authority, at any moment reassessed and subject of transfer to a substitute. The planning of public policies should be made, according to the indications and determinations of the Federal Constitution (Brazil, 1988) by means of civil society participation in social control instances (councils, public audiences, conferences, etc). Its characterization would necessarily undergo decentralization, participation and popular organization of the included social movements, taking into account the awareness and political participation of society, taking advantage of the working way of social networks.

In the technical plane of this paradigm, the entity would privilege the group practices¹², the grouping processes and collective assumption of the institutional task, the problematization and analysis of structural and conjunctural producing causes of "social problems"; their management, pedagogical (social-educational), social-care and political practices will tend to be more democratic, dialogic, participative, decentralized, multi-professional, transdiciplinary and ethically situated.

Our hypothesis is that the social-educational could be based on a dialectic perspective and also of Institutional Analysis (Lourau, 1975). The expression "social-educational", according to our investigations, would be reduced, in the previous paradigm context, to an instrumentalization of pedagogical and educational resources in order to produce psychological, moral and therapeutic effects, aiming at social adequacy. However, this expression taken as a concept, could not include the political dimension of social life, constantly changing? From the dialectical conception of praxis, it seems perfectly legitimate to propose an interpretation of "social-educational" as a concept able to express a more consistent meaning with the interests of the social actors from the subordinated pole, including the political and politicizing perspective of social life.

The themes and contents typical of social-educational care entities actions must be collected by the subjects in their daily life, which could give them a specifically popular political classist focus. We underline again that only ethics guides action, changing its sense. Popular Education acts with adult collectives, in which children are certainly included, and there is no objection to translate this important theoretical-technical and ethical perspective for the specific work with children and adolescents, members of the popular classes, excluded or near exclusion from the common Social Bond, for reasons diverse, but not random. For that, the proposals of dialectic education might be inspiring, as proposed by Cotrim (1993, pp. 37-78), Saviani (2009, pp. 59-68) and Libâneo (1994, pp. 53-74), being needed to formulate pedagogical perspectives for the social-education of children and adolescents in the care entity, starting fundamentally from their becoming subjects of rights.

In this direction, Hurtado (1992, pp. 89-120) proposes to approach in a creative, critical and conscientizing way any traditional thematic. He presents possibilities for one to make use of as well as a critical recovery of elements of the hegemonic system (traditional school calendar, for example, but also of cultural "moments", such as mother's day, Easter, etc), developing awareness and critical education, by means of Popular Education tools. For such, the educator must be situated in the place of the solidarity identification that we have referred to above, with the interests of the children and adolescents who lie in the margins of the Social Bond, and develop abilities able to produce the collective effect of changing possibilities, from the daily praxis of those subjects.

His ideas should open to a radical and revolutionary dimension, able to express a glimpse of the becoming of a social and political practice able to promote, growingly, the differences and the different, aiming at the emancipation of those popular groups (Santos, 2000, 2002).

In the legal dimension, considering the Social Subject paradigm, the Social Care would adopt as starting point the current legislation concerning human rights, on social public policies in all fields, denouncing their limits and traps, as well as the political maneuvers that prevent their implementation; claiming their effective compliance (Rizzini, Barker, & Cassaniga, 1999). We must note here something absolutely important: it would be enough to adopt the discursive statements, of revolutionary content, that are already the effect of popular fights or "tactical concessions" to their claims, that are already present in the current social proposal, as we saw before.

Its action would follow the dialectical methodology, in a process of "action-reflection-action", "practice-theory-practice", as performed by groups and popular movements, conducting to the conscientious appropriation of its praxis, permanently transforming it for the conquer of another insertion in society. Its pedagogical perspective would be dialectical and critical, and the pedagogical relationship would happen between subjects who teach and learn collectively, overcoming the relationship subject-object of the ordinary banking pedagogy. In this way, the relationship of the social educator with children and adolescents would be a "social-educational" relationship that would comprise the political dimensions of the relationship subordination-emancipation, the educational and pedagogical critical aspects and psychological and therapeutic plans which are producers of singularized subjectivity¹³. The planning would be theoretically based, executed with ethical professionalism, the evaluations would be systematic and should aim at the change and improvement of the Social-educational Attention.

The care actions in this paradigm – never losing sight that the neoliberal capitalist production mode is not a society of rights, in spite of the ideological emphasis in the speech of human and social rights – may be guided by the following characteristics: based on the human rights logic, on political rights, on social rights and on rights of specific social segments, overcoming the notion of favor; they aim at the reinforcement of participative citizenship; they go beyond the material and immediate help; they include activities of orientation and counseling; they promote the meaning of reflecting, the sharpening of critical spirit and/or decision-making in population; they may also perform the emergency actions needed, but do it together with a pertinent analysis of the distortions promoted by the working of the social structure, generator of popular classes impoverishment; they aim to develop the articulation in network among all social policies; they radically seek the cause of the social problems, situating them in a wider social context, encompassing the political, economical, cultural, legal and social dimensions; they seek to help people to exercise their citizenship integrally (Costa, 2008; Lara, 2003).

In such context, the "social network", considered as reference for practices of Social Care, has to suppose a radical, instituting, disruptive, creative and inventive democratic practice, based on self-management and self-analysis of the entity as a collective. This network is opposed to the fragmentation and focalization on the management of the "social problem", contemporaneous version of the "field of illegalities" described by Foucault (1999, pp. 226-234).

Widening the analysis horizons, it must be seen that there is a notion in which the "network" connects everything and everybody in a web in permanent magnification and extension, in open flows and multidirectional vectors to all sides, in all senses, in multiple planes, in incommensurable and unpredictable opening. It is never limited to any intra-community, intra-municipality or intra-territorial plane, but connects all to everybody, in a dialectic process raised to the maximum productive power. The "network" seams the impossible and the unspeakable, the improbable and invisible, in its innovative and creative institutive opening; a plane that certainly will be updated in the daily praxis of all social-educational entities.

Children and adolescents would be considered and treated as citizens and effectively as subjects of constitutional rights (Brazil, 1988, 1990; Lemos, 2007; Saliba, 2006), seeking emancipation and social empowering, by means of a critical development of conscience, of active and vindicator political participation. To give social plausibility to the ideological speech, in circumscribed junctures, may be a good tactics of implementing strategies dear to the socially subordinated interests, by the agent subjects in those conjunctures.

The care and ethical effects promoted in the paradigm should point to social change, to the implementation of life quality and to subjective singularization. To conquer citizenship implies a political process of subjectivity production that necessarily must overcome the mere normalizing inclusion of the individual in the so called space-citizen. It must correspond to the ethical dimension, as this may be extended, from the Citizen Subject paradigm: the opening to the becoming of other societal and subjective possibilities, from the subject inclusion in the construction of the "work" that belongs to him. Certainly his own position as protagonist is being built, in this process of instituting. The problematization of the ethical effects of the socioeducational praxis, in restricted or widened spaces of Social Care praxis, must be the major guiding reference of the production process considering its complex aspects.

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Received 23/03/2011

Accepted 18/02/2012

Silvio José Benelli, psychologist, Phd. In Social Psychology by the Psychology Institute of USP, São Paulo, Brazil. Assistant teacher of the Dept. of Clinical Psychology, in the Undergraduate Course in Psychology and in the Graduate Program in Psychology and Society with the FCL-UNESP-Assis. Mailing Address: Avenida Dom Antonio, 2100. Parque Universitário. CEP 19806-900. Assis, SP, Brasil. E-mail: [e-mail]

Abílio da Costa-Rosa, psychoanalist and institutional analyst, Master and Phd. by the Psychology Institute of USP, Tenured Professor in the Dept. of Clinical Psychology in the Undergraduate Course in Psychology and in the Graduate Program in Psychology and Society with the FCL-UNESP-Assis. E-mail: [e-mail]

1

. This paper is part of the post-doc research developed by Phd. Silvio José Benelli, under the supervision of Prof. Phd. Abílio da Costa-Rosa, in the Postdoctoral Program of UNESP, with the Graduate Program in Psychology and with the Department of Clinical Psychology of the Psychology Course in FCL/UNESP, Assis, SP, Brazil. Founding FAPESP.

2

. Institutional analyzer: natural or constructed device that propitiates the explicitness of institutional conflicts and their resolution. It is an assemblage that manifests the strengths that constitute the organization. A natural "analyzer" is spontaneously produced by historical-social, libidinal and natural life as a result of its determinations and degree of freedom" (Baremblitt, 1998, p. 152).

3

. A resource is a "decidedly heterogeneous set that encompasses speeches, institutions, architectonic organizations, regulatory decisions, laws, managerial measures, scientific enunciates, philosophical, moral, philanthropic propositions, in short, what is said and unsaid are the elements of the resource. The resource is the network that may be established between those elements" (Foucault, 1999, p. 244).

4

. Subject is the man while social actor and agent individual, autonomous person and citizen – in the political order. It is yet the cognoscente ego – the "me" centered in the rational and reflexive consciousness, in traditional epistemological plane. To us, fundamentally includes the Lacanian notions of "subject of the unconscious", of "divided subject" and of "subject of desire" (Cabas, 2009; Fink, 1998), according to which, the "ego or the me does not cover all of the subject" (Vallejo & Magalhães, 1979, p. 158).

5

. The social doctrine of the Catholic church consists in a set of propositions, principles, criteria and general guidelines about the social and political organization of people and nations. It has been developed since the XIXth century by occasion of the rising of modern industrial society, with its new structure for production of consumer goods, its new conception of society, State and authority, its new ways of working and property. In face of those changes and the emergence of the Marxist perspective, the Catholic Church was obliged to rule. The Catholic Church considers that the fundamental law of the State must be the promotion of justice and that the finality of a fair social order is to warrant for each one, respecting the principle of subsidiarity, their share of common goods.

6

. By hypothesis, we consider that corruption may happen both in private and public entities, of confessional orientation or not. This totally compromises the fins that those entities ensure to defend and promote. From a long insertion in the field, it is not hard to see that seems to be entities managed by groups composed of a few people that practically take possession and may transform them in their way of living. The entity may be converted then in the warranty of salary for those workers that manage it and its effective action becomes conditioned to the minimum, in order to give some status and prestige for this management team, besides allowing the usufruct of privileges such as the indiscriminate use of the telephone, fuel, vehicle, food, etc, because all that may represent personal advantages for the managers may be appropriated by them. It was also possible to see that the financial management of the entities is confidential, seeming very easy to produce corruption practices. Those corporatist managers may close the entity to strangers in order to keep their privileges, undue benefits and conquered facilities, without witnesses who might denounce them. Among workers like that, it would not be uncommon a mentality that "public money has no owner, it belongs to nobody"; then it seems justifiable and inclusively obligatory to spend it all, no matter how: super-invoicing acquisitions, getting "cold invoices", deviating resources, usually with the connivance of a "friendly" bookkeeper. After all, if he does not do it, some other more smart will certainly do it, one also should think. In these cases of corruption, we think that such entities did not have proper management and pedagogical teams, but "gangs" used to "grafts" of all kinds. We could find there the "crookery" more than the "philanthropy". Evidently, nothing of this is easy to be proved and is also not said like that, will all letters, but we cannot avoid to note that there are strong indications of such practices in some entities. About those hard questions, the City Councils say nothing, even because those managers use to have places on them.

7

. The covenant logic may be defined as the traditional habit that managers of private care entities have to get from the public power financial resources, payments of public bills (water, energy, telephone, etc) or the assignment of workers (technicians, teachers and other workers) that are allocated to work in the entities. These kinds of help obtained from the public power constitute an informal "covenant" between the public power and the entity, characterizing relationships of collusion of care and electioneering garb. The public power, as a way of governing, "helps" the entity because it is magnanimous and supportive, not as a public policy but as favor and benefit.

8

. An experience diametrically opposed demonstrating how the municipal public power is not inexorably doomed to a so nefarious destiny may be found in Lancetti (1996), book in which are reported the inventions, tensions and potential instituting, bold and innovative creativity, within a predominantly citizen Social Care, despite its eventual limitations, that was implemented directly by the municipal public power in the city of Santos, São Paulo, between the years of 1989 and 1993.

9

. Those dynamic s were aimed to help the group, as sets of individuals, to interact and relax, to express solidarity, to wake-up empathy; to increase the knowledge of oneself and inter-personal; to build dreams, friendship and respect to individuality; disinhibition, sensitization and self-esteem; to improve communication, express creativity; improve verbal, gestural and spatial expression; to wake-up the individual for self-motivation; to relate in an effective, confident and social way.

10

. "The Process of Strategic Hegemony (PSH) is a concept of Gramsci that allows us to analyze, in molar terms, some composition lines of social formations: pulsations that organize them and that in them are updated (Gruppi, 1978). In the case of Mental Health Institutions, the PSH allows us to analyze and understand the game of strengths that happens in them, contrasting aspects of the Psychiatric Hospital-Medicalization Paradigm (PHMP) to the ones of the Psychosocial Paradigm (PSP), regarding knowledge, practices, legal, cultural and ethical aspects (Amarante, 1995; Costa-Rosa, 2000). The PSH comprehends a set of practices related to strategy and tactics, with the aim of keeping the Social Formation, in the institution or in society as a whole, in dynamic balance; given that they are segmented and contradictory realities about the interests and visions of world that are necessarily updated there. This segmentarity tends to polarization. Hence we can talk about PSH as an effort to keep in dynamic balance dominant and subordinate interests. From the dominant side we see a set of practices and repressive and ideological effects, besides a set of repeated tactical concessions of its recovery (Guattari, 1981). From the subordinated side there is also a set of practices that, due to the material and ideological dominance of the socially dominating pole, are according to the interests of this pole, and reproduce them. But there is also a set of claims, sometimes active, other times passive and apparently inadvertent (like "falling into crisis", for example); in addition to a set of alternative practices that sometimes come to aspire the elaboration of an alternate hegemony to the dominant one; in other words, the aspiration of making hegemonic the interests socially subordinated in that context may consolidate. The case of Mental Health institutions, in this historical moment, is highly illustrative of this process, because there can be seen the effects of true fight for the hegemony of theoretical, technical, cultural and ethical visions. In another context we sustain the hypothesis that those changes are expressed, already, in a praxis through which we can see a paradigmatic transition, from the PHMP to the PSP. This process, in daily practice, has generated the ideas of experiences and practices of the Psychiatric Reformation, around the Centers and Nuclei of Psychosocial Care (CAPS and NAPS in Portuguese), as organizers and achievers of integral practices in a given Territory." (Costa-Rosa, 2011, p. 46).

11

. "We use here the concepts of Social Demand and social order according to their application in the field of Institutional Analysis (Lourau, 1995). The Demand is a hiatus in a broader sense; set of pulsation produced by the antagonism of strengths playing in the social-economical and cultural space. The order is a type of counterface of Demand, that is, the way as this one appears empirically in the orders. The Demand may only be translated in orders through its imaginary and ideological mediation. That means, the translation of Social Demand pulsing into orders depends on the representation ways of what is "missing" and what is needed and wished for; on the representation of offers available in the field, able to "respond"; as well as it depends on the recognition of those offers available in the social-cultural space of the Territory, on the part of the one who requests them. It is known, from a long time, that the field of offers to Psychic suffering care is split between the mystic and popular knowledge, and the scientific knowledge. Thus influencing the set of requests for help and intersection addressed to Health institutions." (Costa-Rosa, 2011, p. 47).

12

. Here the group practice should take into consideration the possibilities of the group as "collective labor" (Bion, 1975; Lapassade, 1977). We may talk in terms of subject group and subjected group (Guattari, 1981; Costa-Rosa, 1987) as useful concepts to explain some kinds of group performances, particularly when the project is an institutional one in which they are involved. It is not about absolute categories, but about two reference poles between which we can observe any groups oscillating. Subjected group is dependent, submitted, hierarchical, overseen, has no conscience of its own task and is alienated under authority orders. The subject group has control of its behavior, elaborates the means for elucidation of its object or task; is listened and listener, the word circulates freely and there is subjective implication, is detached from structures, which allows their transformation and amplification.

13

. It is important to observe that the theme of "subjectivity" is treated by different authors, under several points of view. We may point out works of Foucault (1982, 1984, 1985), of Deleuze and Guattari (2009) and Lacan (1979, 1998), that have specific and singular aspects, diverging and irreducible between them, but also with some possible contact points, avoiding light eclecticisms. Of particular interest to us is the "subjectivation process" and "subject constitution", as well as the operators proposed by Freud and Lacan Psychoanalysis to understand the process of subjective construction which is always historical, social, unconscious and structural.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  17 Jan 2013
• Date of issue
  Dec 2012

History

• Received
  23 Mar 2011
• Accepted
  18 Feb 2012