Large-scale changes in the German residential care system during the 1980s

In West Germany during the 1980s extensive and encompassing reforms took place in residential care. These reforms involved completely new approaches such as non-institutional individual care. This paper examines the question of how non-institutional individual care was able to establish itself on a national basis in the West German youth services while, at the same time, other innovations failed to take hold. The reasons presented here involve: specific historical contextual conditions; certain qualities of agents' actions; and changing education and labour market policies, particularly the rapid increase in the professional workers in the youth service during the 1970s and 1980s. These and other factors led to an alteration of collectively shared interpretation schemes within residential care that called into question the closed forms of prison-like residential care of children and young people. These changes, however, led to problems in areas where youth services encountered other professional and societal systems, which continued to expect that youth services deal with youth delinquency in a custodial manner. New forms of treatment were needed which would be accepted by other services and wider society, while at the same time being compatible with changing ideas in the youth services. Non-institutional individual care was able to assert itself in this situation, in contrast to other innovations, because of the key abilities of the agents involved in its development, primarily as a result of their ability to create strategic alliances to support change.