[Rehabilitation of the handicapped caught between content programming and economic justification]

Notwithstanding the wide socio-cultural scope of theoretical social policy, those, at any rate, who are involved in practical social policy making time and again face the task of providing an economic justification for their respective programmes; the field of rehabilitation of the disabled is no exception to this rule. An economic justification of rehabilitation service provision would however imply their flexibility within economic development: content programming continuity and economic justification will clash as the economic situation changes. Maintaining, or honouring, present rehabilitation service programming will jeopardize economic justification, whereas orientation of rehabilitation practice toward economic justifiability would imply the need to abandon redemption of present content programming. This entails a normative dilemma between rehabilitation content programming, or goal-setting, on the one hand, and its economic-functional, theoretical justification as reflecting given economic circumstances on the other. This normative dilemma gives rise to critically re-consider current practice in, and the rank accorded to, economic justification in rehabilitation service provision.