Introduction

National commotion ensued in February 2008 about the ‘handshaking incident’, which occurred in the Amsterdam city district of Slotervaart. While on a working visit, an assistant of an Amsterdam alderman is warned that a Muslim ‘street coach’ would not be willing to shake her hand. This warning is heard by a journalist from a large national newspaper and appears in an article about the working visit the next day (Plaggenborg 2008). There is widespread indignation: how can it be that a ‘street coach’ employed by the local authority does not share a commonly held norm like handshaking as a form of greeting, and that the city authorities accept that employees stick to their ‘own’ norms and values? The mayor, Job Cohen, responds negatively to all the commotion. During a meeting with the city council he states that: ‘It's not necessarily a drawback if an employee visiting people in their homes refuses to shake hands with a woman. As long as they do their job. We all know it's about Moroccan youths. Not shaking hands may serve a purpose’. His reaction only leads to more indignation: apparently the mayor does not find it problematic that public service employees have deviant cultural norms and values and express these in public.

This incident contains an important aspect which in our view is crucial to understanding current local social policy and its delivery in a complex and diverse society like Amsterdam. This aspect is closely linked to the question of to what extent the government can go along in accepting the ‘deviant’ values and norms of the target group when it comes to reaching and supporting that group. Clearly, Mayor Cohen has a pragmatic approach; when the target group is reached better and served better by a public employee who is close to their worldview, the local government should go along with that. The mayor's goal is effective implementation of policy, and practitioners do not have to be model citizens but are allowed to decide themselves which strategy pays off. In fact, practitioners are selected to do particular work with difficult target groups on the basis of their similarities with the target group. The mayor's opponents take a more principled stand.