This book explores a phenomenon that is increasingly turning into a core feature of the provision of social services: individualisation. Put in very general terms, individualisation of social service provision means that services should be adjusted to individual circumstances in order to increase their effectiveness. It is an attempt to put ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches in the provision of social services in the past, and to promote tailor-made or personalised services – concepts that are usually treated as synonyms of individualised services. Of course, this ‘definition’ remains rather vague and imprecise. It says little about what individualised social interventions and services look like, about the process of deciding on the aims and nature of these interventions, about the autonomy of professionals and clients in this process, about power relationships between professionals and clients, and so on. That is what this book intends to do: to explore what the notion of ‘individualised social services’ stands for in various national contexts, not only at the level of policy formation, but also at the level of the actual implementation and delivery of services.

The individualisation of the provision of services takes place in a variety of social service areas. As several contributors to this book argue (see, for example, Chapters Two to Six), it is not simply a pragmatic, fashionable instrument to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of services, but part of reform strategies aimed at ‘modernising’ welfare states and modes of governing the social and the individual against the background of broader social, economic, cultural and political changes in society. Debates about individualised service provision mirror the controversies and struggles that characterise the transformation of welfare states that, as the reader will notice, resound throughout this book.

Our focus in the book will be on one particular kind of social services: activation services, that is, social services aimed at promoting the employability and labour market participation of unemployed people. A quick ‘tour d’horizon’ along some key policy documents reveals the increasing importance attached to individualised activation services, in European Union (EU) countries as well as in other industrialised countries. For example, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD’s) Employment outlook 2005, which contains a full chapter on the effects of activation programmes and strategies, states in its editorial that ‘[p]roviding the right individualised services for displaced workers is part of the general challenge of designing effective employment services.’