Content uploaded by Evelien Tonkens
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Evelien Tonkens on Feb 18, 2015
Content may be subject to copyright.
A preview of the PDF is not available
Participation, Responsibility and Choice: Summoning the Active Citizen in Western European Welfare States
Abstract
Responsibility, participation and choice are key policy framings of active citizenship, summoning the citizen to take on new roles in welfare state reform. This volume traces the emergence of new discourses and the ways in which they take up and rework struggles of social movements for greater independence, power and control. It explores the changing cultural and political inflections of active citizenship in Germany, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, France, Italy and the UK, with ethnographic research complementing policy analysis. The editors then look across the volume to assess some of the tensions and contradictions arising in the turn to active citizenship. Two final chapters address the reworking of citizen/professional relationships and the remaking of public, private and personal responsibilities, with a particular focus on the contribution of feminist research and theory.
... In particular, in contrast with the dominant focus in the governance literature on empowerment, participation and collaboration (cf. Sørensen & Torfing, 2003), responsibilisation or incorporation appear as warranted critical concepts (Cruickshank, 1990;Newman & Tonkens, 2011). ...
The interplay of practices of environmental governance and interactive/deliberative governance forms a rising phenomenon within Public Administration. This thesis researches this interplay by focusing on the case of the Rotterdam Climate Accord. Utilising a discourse analysis methodology I explored how both environmental governance and interactive/deliberative governance discourses reciprocally legitimate each other in governance arrangements addressing climate change. Incorporating a highly warranted elaboration of the dimension of power in PA and governance, by departing from the relationship between citizens and government this thesis explicates the dynamics of power beyond the state as it takes shape in the guise of environmental or climate governance. As such this research assumes a more critical approach to phenomena of governance, yet by relying upon theoretical criteria derived from deliberative democracy provides constructive findings for the future study of governance as a performative, deliberative democratic phenomenon.
... … this development towards a stronger emphasis on the individual are predicted to be dire for civil society organisations …. Likely to lead to 'the ultimate disowning or even devouring of social movements' (Newman & Tonkens, 2011, p. 10 in Feltenius & Wide, 2019. 235) Bennett's (2017) illuminating research argues that this is partly due to 'encumbering costs associated with operating in the [British] welfare-to-work quasi-market' (146); part of wider context shaping the limitations of civil society responses to social policy issues. ...
Here we make an original, empirical contribution to debates on welfare pluralism, the mixed economies of welfare and territorial rescaling by comparing civil society approaches to tackling youth unemployment in England, Scotland and Wales. Our core finding is that academic and policy literature's frequent characterisation of the UK as a single Liberal welfare regime is based on methodological nationalism privileging state‐wide analyses. In short, a scalar fallacy pervasive in international welfare studies. In the context of the global rise of meso‐government and so‐called ‘stateless nations’ pressing for greater autonomy, our case‐study challenges the dominant paradigm. Our analysis shows the liberal characteristics of work‐first policy orientation and marketised civil society are concentrated in England then tempered by devolved (social) policy. Based on contrasting, left‐of‐centre and civic nationalist governing traditions, grounded in multi‐level electoral politics, we show the devolved nations taking a different approach to Westminster, partially eschewing the market and incorporating collectivism and co‐production.
... Aux Pays-Bas, on place moins l'accent sur le rôle du marché libre et le retrait de l'État, et plutôt sur la fonction importante de la société civile. Bien qu'elle soit citée moins expressément, une évolution similaire s'observe au Canada (Ilcan, 2009), en Allemagne (Kuhlmann, 2011), en France (Neveu, 2011), en Norvège (Vabø, 2011), en Italie (De Leonardis, 2011), en Finlande (Anttonen & Häikiö, 2011), en Australie et aux États-Unis (Newman & Tonkens, 2011a). ...
This chapter introduces the concept of ailment, which is about generalised care needs, including the need for self-care. Ailment does not indicate an immediate dependency on others. Rather, it is a human condition and force that mobilises emotions, actions and relations. Responses to ailment extend from concrete encounters between human beings in the immediate environment to political and institutional responses in societies across the world. The political relatedness that ailment enacts in the world and the different kinds of social orders that emerge through different personal and collective responses to the needs of ailing subjects are discussed.
As participatory integration policies proliferate in Europe, it has become urgent to examine how the relational techniques of government they deploy condition migrants' membership in their host societies. This article forges an interactive and intersectional approach to the analysis of integration policies with the intent of laying bare the complex dynamics of belonging and exclusion played out in their context. Based on an ethnographic study in Helsinki, the article shows how the intendedly inclusive and egalitarian 'homey' mode of belonging promoted by welfare professionals engenders uneven conditions for immigrant women to partake in the local community and broader Finnish society. Premised on gendered, culturalized, and classed categories of citizenship and belonging the neighbourhood house provides positive recognition to 'respectable' (immigrant) mothers but also perpetuates the division between natives and immigrants and requires more belonging work from them than their native peers.
Currently, Nordic welfare societies are at a crossroads. Ongoing demographic changes – such as ageing, accompanied by challenges in financing adequate services for all – have highlighted the need to consider the roles of citizens and the state in a novel way. Balancing rights and responsibilities has always been at the core of universalism, even though, traditionally, trust in the welfare state's ability to fulfil its basic function of providing necessary services for all has been strong. However, of late, subtle signs of change have become more visible, and in practice, older people's housing and care provisions have been marked by the state's withdrawal. By employing narrative analysis, this study explores, through the experiences of residents in age-related intermediate housing, how older people make use of, negotiate and embed the arguments being made in societal debates on the rights and responsibilities of ageing citizens. The accounts showcase the ways in which these narrators are able to accommodate the sometimes contradictory elements in their narration, accept the demand for increased responsibility for their later-life arrangements and construct plausible portraits of themselves as morally responsible citizens. These subtle negotiations and the acceptance of personal responsibility indicate a change in their perceptions of and expectations from the citizens and the state. Whilst the findings comprise stories of good outcomes, they also question the legitimacy of the current welfare system's universalism and its ability to guide the way to achieve equally good outcomes for all in the future.
In the wake of mass-migrations of refugees seeking safety and stability in Europe, this contribution studies emerging grassroots organizations that support refugee status holders in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The municipality expects these organizations to adhere to the European trend to incorporate immigrant integration priorities in interventions that apply to all residents. The article discusses the paradox of how bureaucratic classifications regarding preferred target groups cast certain grassroots responses as fringe-activities that are less legible bureaucratically. Based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork, this article shows how this lessened legibility translates into profound insecurities for grassroots organizers. The article discusses how these insecurities, in combination with the uncertainty grassroots organizers feel regarding their employability, motivate them to play guessing games and to give in to municipal preferences to boost their eligibility for funding. It argues that this process of giving in to municipal preferences should be understood as an attempt to render their endeavors legible, reduce precariousness, secure a livelihood, and turn affective labor into a life-sustaining practice. In so doing, this contribution evokes the story of a particular grassroots organizer-a woman of color with a forced migration background.
La démocratie est un régime politique intéressant si et seulement si elle reste capable de remettre en question régulièrement ses propres procédures mais aussi les frontières qui qualifient les êtres participant à ces procédures (Walzer, 1997). Comment faire pour qu'elle reste ouverte aux membres qui ne possèdent aucun des critères traditionnels de représentation : le sang, le savoir ou l'argent, et contrer ses tendances naturelles à l'oligarchie (Rancière, 2005) ? (...).
In this book Bo Rothstein seeks to defend the universal welfare state against a number of important criticisms which it has faced in recent years. He combines genuine philosophical analysis of normative issues concerning what the state ought to do with empirical political scientific research in public policy examining what the state can do. Issues discussed include the relationship between welfare state and civil society, the privatization of social services, and changing values within society. His analysis centres around the importance of political institutions as both normative and empirical entities, and Rothstein argues that the choice of such institutions at certain formative moments in a country's history is what determines the political support for different types of social policy. He thus explains the great variation among contemporary welfare states in terms of differing moral and political logics which have been set in motion by the deliberate choices of political institutions. The book is an important contribution to both philosophical and political debates about the future of the welfare state.
This new edition of Eva Feder Kittay's feminist classic, Love's La,bor, explores how theories of justice and morality must be reconfigured when intersecting with care and dependency, and the failure of policy towards women who engage in care work. The work is hailed as a major contribution to the development of an ethics of care.
Where society is viewed as an association of equal and autonomous persons, the work of caring for dependents figures neither in political theory nor in social policy. While some women have made many gains, equality continues to elude many others, as in large measure, social institutions fail to take into account the dependency of childhood, illness, disability and frail old age and fail to adequately support those who care for dependents. Using a narrative of her experiences caring for her disabled daughter, Eva Feder Kittay discusses the relevance of her analysis of dependency to significant cognitive disability. She explores the significance of dependency work by analyzing John Rawls' influential liberal theory and two examples of public policy-welfare reform and family leave-to show how theory and policy fail women when they fail to understand the centrality of dependency to issues of justice. This second edition has updated material on care workers, her adult disabled daughter and key changes in welfare reform.
Using a mix of personal reflection and political argument, this new edition of a classic text will continue to be an innovative and influential contribution to the debate on searching for greater equality and justice for women.
This is a collectively written, inter-disciplinary, thematic cross-national study which combines conceptual, theoretical, empirical and policy material in an ambitious and innovative way to explore a key concept in contemporary European political, policy and academic debates. The first part of the book clarifies the various ways that the concept of citizenship has developed historically and is understood today in a range of Western European welfare states. It elaborates on the contemporary framing of debates and struggles around citizenship. This provides a framework for three policy studies, looking at: migration and multiculturalism; the care of young children; and home-based childcare and transnational dynamics. The book is unusual in weaving together the topics of migration and childcare and in studying these issues together within a gendered citizenship framework. It also demonstrates the value of a multi-level conceptualisation of citizenship, stretching from the domestic sphere through the national and European levels to the global. The book is aimed at students of social policy, sociology, European studies, women’s studies and politics and at researchers/scholars/policy analysts in the areas of citizenship, gender, welfare states and migration. © Ruth Lister, Fiona Williams, Anneli Anttonen, Jet Bussemaker, Ute Gerhard, Jacqueline Heinen, Stina Johansson, Arnlaug Leira, Birte Siim and Constanza Tobío, with Anna Gavanas 2007.