At a time of growing risks of social exclusion (e.g. rising unemployment and poverty) and strained social policy, budgets Social TSOs are currently facing contradictions.

The concentration on users´ activation (Stelzer-Orthofer 2008), marketisation (Diebäcker et al. 2009) and decentralisation (Dahme & Wohlfahrt 2010) goes hand in hand with more responsibility for them to solve growing societal problems. At the same time, restrictive public authority’s demands limit their ability to create and deliver quality services for their users (Anastasiadis 2017).

Against this background, it is important to investigate if, and how, professionals as lifeworld-oriented stakeholders continue to be able to participate in strategical-policy processes on regional level, where decisions on the service provisions are made.  To arrive at this goal the first section of the paper proposes an analytical framework, which was developed to analyse phenomena of participation in Social TSOs (Anastasiadis 2019).

This model is based on elements of the structuration theory (Giddens 1997) as well as on the axial coding scheme of the grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin 1996).