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The Welfare State: A Fundamental Dimension of Modern Government

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Abstract

What, in fact, is the Welfare State? This article traces the emergence of the welfare state as a specific mode of government, describing its distinctive rationality as well as its characteristic forms, functions and effects. It identifies five sectors of welfare governance, the relations between them, and the various forms these take in different times and places. It discusses the contradictory commitments that shape welfare state practices and the problems associated with these practices and contradictions. It situates welfare state government within a long-term account of the changing relations between the social and the economic spheres. And it argues that the welfare state ought to be understood as a “normal social fact”—an essential (though constantly contested) part of the social and economic organization of modern capitalist societies.

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... As concepções modernas de direitos sociais e cidadania social foram elaboradas por Marshall (1967) e o tornam, segundo Garland (2014), um dos importantes teóricos do Estado de Bem-Estar Social no Reino Unido. Marshall aborda, em seu ensaio, a incorporação dos direitos sociais ao status de cidadania no século XX como um movimento de expansão de direitos. ...
... Segundo Garland (2018Garland ( , 2014, essa concepção de interferência mínima do Estado sofreu uma profunda ruptura ainda no final da Era Vitoriana, na passagem do século XIX para o século XX, com a emergência uma nova governamentalidade, isto é, uma nova racionalidade de governo, o Estado de Bem-Estar Social. As principais mudanças que marcaram essa emergência foram as novas formas de entender a relação entre o social e o econômico, as novas concepções sobre os problemas a serem enfrentados e uma nova racionalidade de governo a elas relacionada. ...
... As principais mudanças que marcaram essa emergência foram as novas formas de entender a relação entre o social e o econômico, as novas concepções sobre os problemas a serem enfrentados e uma nova racionalidade de governo a elas relacionada. Dito de outro modo, o que distingue o Estado de Bem-Estar Social é a emergência de um novo estilo de pensar e agir sobre os problemas do emprego e da seguridade, que incorpora toda a economia e toda a população, e não apenas os pobres (Garland, 2014). Para compreender as consequências da emergência do Estado de Bem-Estar Social para o sistema penal, Garland (2018) ...
Article
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Resumo: Este artigo discute como as diferentes formas históricas de incorporação dos direitos sociais ao status de cidadania na Inglaterra e no Brasil constituíram-se como condições importantes de emergência da justiça juvenil nesses países. Nesse sentido, a questão central a ser discutida são as proximidades e diferenças das condições de emergência da justiça juvenil nesses dois países, tomadas aqui a partir da relação com os direitos sociais e as formas históricas assumidas por esses em cada um dos casos, e que são tratadas analiticamente no artigo a partir das noções de bem-estar, na Inglaterra, e de tutela, no Brasil.
... As the system under investigation, the welfare system entails various modes of provisioning, including public and private insurances against unemployment, disability and sickness, as well as pension funds and long-term care systems (Garland 2014;Rothgang 2010). These variations of welfare systems are based on mandatory and voluntary financial contributions, which in turn imply an individual's entitlement to benefits (Clegg 2018;Garland 2014;Obinger 2021). ...
... As the system under investigation, the welfare system entails various modes of provisioning, including public and private insurances against unemployment, disability and sickness, as well as pension funds and long-term care systems (Garland 2014;Rothgang 2010). These variations of welfare systems are based on mandatory and voluntary financial contributions, which in turn imply an individual's entitlement to benefits (Clegg 2018;Garland 2014;Obinger 2021). Although they are primarily financed through individuals' contributions, they are sometimes "subsidized" by the government (Morel & Palme 2018), which creates a link between the social insurance system and the system of public finance (see next section). ...
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Many socio-economic systems require positive economic growth rates to function properly. Given uncertainty about future growth rates and increasing evidence that economic growth is a driver of social and environmental crises, these growth dependencies pose serious societal challenges. In recent years, more and more researchers have thus tried to identify growth-dependent systems and develop policies to reduce their growth dependence. However, the concept of 'growth dependence' still lacks a consistent definition and operationalization, which impedes more systematic empirical and theoretical research. This article proposes a simple but powerful framework for defining and operationalizing the concept of 'growth dependence' across socio-economic systems. We provide a general definition consisting of four components that can be specified for different empirical cases: (1) the system under investigation, (2) the unit of measurement of growth, (3) the level of growth and (4) the relevant functions or properties of the system under investigation. According to our general definition, a socio-economic system is growth-dependent if it requires a long-term positive growth rate in terms of a unit of economic measurement to maintain all its functions or properties that are relevant within the chosen normative framework. To illustrate the usefulness of our scheme, we apply it to three areas at the heart of the existing literature on growth dependence: employment, social insurance systems and public finance. These case studies demonstrate that whether or not a system is growth-dependent hinges not only on the empirical properties of the system itself but also on the specification of the concept of growth dependence. Our framework enables coherent, robust and effective definitions and research questions, fostering comparability of findings across different cases and disciplines.
... Garland further argues that the precariousness of late modern societies-in which the welfare state has declined and neoliberal economics flourish -means that such insecurity is now widely experienced (Garland, 2014). Moreover, significant transformations in family life, the consumption of culture, and the growth of mass media accelerate the pace of social change in late modernity (Seal, 2017). ...
... They are the result of a complex interaction of many forces and tendencies, and correct the apparent decline of progress in some areas and cultures by advances in others. They include the astonishing progress of abolition in the area , 1974-2014(UN Economic & Social Council, 2015 of the 48 countries of the Council of Europe which have seen the area of abolition stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific coastlines on the world's largest land mass. They teach us to be patient with the slow pace of change in Asia, the Middle East, and the US. ...
Chapter
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This concluding chapter reviews how retentionist countries often seek to justify their use of capital punishment by relying on punishment theories that draw a distinction between the infliction of just punishment and arbitrary and unjust violence by the State. It also examines how the continuing use of capital punishment in Southeast Asian countries has been explained by some experts to reflect the distinctive Asian perception of human rights, being one that oversees the prevalence of community rights over individual rights, thus reinforcing the desideratum of the State to accentuate stringent punishment for offenders who are viewed as rebelling against the regiments of State control. There has been an undeniable worldwide decline in retention over the last forty years. This chapter, therefore, asks why, despite this inexorable global trend and the universal recognition of human rights, do most ASEAN States cling to retentionist principles and policies? Moving beyond traditional theories on criminal justice, particularly retribution and utilitarianism, this chapter attempts to conceptually unpack the factors used to justify the retention of the death penalty in the region. It concludes that the death penalty situation in the eight ASEAN countries remains rather static and the record somehow reveals a very mixed reality, reflecting the absence of any shared policy on the death penalty among AMS other than the proviso, ‘in accordance with law’. Some observations and recommendations are then made for Member States to consider possible steps towards the abolition of the death penalty.
... Obviously, the mere existence of some sort of social policy alone does not yet mean that we can speak of a welfare state (Titmuss 1974: 26) and the scope of the term has been discussed for decades now (among earlier contributions on how to conceptualise the welfare state is Briggs 1961). Regardless of the viewpoint, key elements of a welfare state include a strong emphasis governments place on the well-being of citizens (Esping-Andersen 1990) and the acknowledgement of social rights as a crucial part of democracies (Marshall 2000(Marshall [1950; Garland 2014). Furthermore, Titmuss (1976: 14-15) highlights two different points of interest when researching social policies: the institutional organisation of social services and the perspective of those who receive benefits. ...
... Responding to risks and needs entails another noteworthy element, one might call a sub-function, which is the avoidance or at least reduction of uncertainty (Barr 2001: esp. chapter 2;Crouch & Keune 2013;Garland 2014). It is argued that this might even be one of the reasons social policies were implemented in the first place. ...
Book
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Open Access: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-658-39422-6
... Obviously, the mere existence of some sort of social policy alone does not yet mean that we can speak of a welfare state (Titmuss 1974: 26) and the scope of the term has been discussed for decades now (among earlier contributions on how to conceptualise the welfare state is Briggs 1961). Regardless of the viewpoint, key elements of a welfare state include a strong emphasis governments place on the well-being of citizens (Esping-Andersen 1990) and the acknowledgement of social rights as a crucial part of democracies (Marshall 2000(Marshall [1950; Garland 2014). Furthermore, Titmuss (1976: 14-15) highlights two different points of interest when researching social policies: the institutional organisation of social services and the perspective of those who receive benefits. ...
... Responding to risks and needs entails another noteworthy element, one might call a sub-function, which is the avoidance or at least reduction of uncertainty (Barr 2001: esp. chapter 2;Crouch & Keune 2013;Garland 2014). It is argued that this might even be one of the reasons social policies were implemented in the first place. ...
Chapter
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While the previous chapters explored ways to conceptualise the welfare state as an independent variable, the following part will deal with the practical applications of the proposed framework. For this purpose, poverty risk and attitudes towards the welfare state serve as exemplary dependent variables.
... Obviously, the mere existence of some sort of social policy alone does not yet mean that we can speak of a welfare state (Titmuss 1974: 26) and the scope of the term has been discussed for decades now (among earlier contributions on how to conceptualise the welfare state is Briggs 1961). Regardless of the viewpoint, key elements of a welfare state include a strong emphasis governments place on the well-being of citizens (Esping-Andersen 1990) and the acknowledgement of social rights as a crucial part of democracies (Marshall 2000(Marshall [1950; Garland 2014). Furthermore, Titmuss (1976: 14-15) highlights two different points of interest when researching social policies: the institutional organisation of social services and the perspective of those who receive benefits. ...
... Responding to risks and needs entails another noteworthy element, one might call a sub-function, which is the avoidance or at least reduction of uncertainty (Barr 2001: esp. chapter 2;Crouch & Keune 2013;Garland 2014). It is argued that this might even be one of the reasons social policies were implemented in the first place. ...
Chapter
Full-text available
After the preceding systematisation of the main assumptions about the influence of the welfare state on individual-level outcomes, this chapter turns to the derivation of specific measurements of welfare stateness that capture the mechanisms underlying the explanations and the corresponding hypotheses.
... Obviously, the mere existence of some sort of social policy alone does not yet mean that we can speak of a welfare state (Titmuss 1974: 26) and the scope of the term has been discussed for decades now (among earlier contributions on how to conceptualise the welfare state is Briggs 1961). Regardless of the viewpoint, key elements of a welfare state include a strong emphasis governments place on the well-being of citizens (Esping-Andersen 1990) and the acknowledgement of social rights as a crucial part of democracies (Marshall 2000(Marshall [1950; Garland 2014). Furthermore, Titmuss (1976: 14-15) highlights two different points of interest when researching social policies: the institutional organisation of social services and the perspective of those who receive benefits. ...
... Responding to risks and needs entails another noteworthy element, one might call a sub-function, which is the avoidance or at least reduction of uncertainty (Barr 2001: esp. chapter 2;Crouch & Keune 2013;Garland 2014). It is argued that this might even be one of the reasons social policies were implemented in the first place. ...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter examines the causal links between welfare state policies and individual-level outcomes. To this end, common theoretical premises, mechanisms and hypotheses are summarised and systematised. This is done by linking specific functions of the welfare state to specific groups of dependent variables, leading to a proposal for deriving theoretically sound indicators.
... Obviously, the mere existence of some sort of social policy alone does not yet mean that we can speak of a welfare state (Titmuss 1974: 26) and the scope of the term has been discussed for decades now (among earlier contributions on how to conceptualise the welfare state is Briggs 1961). Regardless of the viewpoint, key elements of a welfare state include a strong emphasis governments place on the well-being of citizens (Esping-Andersen 1990) and the acknowledgement of social rights as a crucial part of democracies (Marshall 2000(Marshall [1950; Garland 2014). Furthermore, Titmuss (1976: 14-15) highlights two different points of interest when researching social policies: the institutional organisation of social services and the perspective of those who receive benefits. ...
... Responding to risks and needs entails another noteworthy element, one might call a sub-function, which is the avoidance or at least reduction of uncertainty (Barr 2001: esp. chapter 2;Crouch & Keune 2013;Garland 2014). It is argued that this might even be one of the reasons social policies were implemented in the first place. ...
Chapter
Full-text available
How comparable are the results that emerge from different approaches to operationalising the welfare state as an independent variable and how can we derive a more standardised, transparent and comparable approach to operationalising the welfare state as an independent variable? This concluding chapter summarises the main findings and answers to these questions, but also addresses aspects that are still unanswered and should spark further critical debates and future research on the matter.
... Obviously, the mere existence of some sort of social policy alone does not yet mean that we can speak of a welfare state (Titmuss 1974: 26) and the scope of the term has been discussed for decades now (among earlier contributions on how to conceptualise the welfare state is Briggs 1961). Regardless of the viewpoint, key elements of a welfare state include a strong emphasis governments place on the well-being of citizens (Esping-Andersen 1990) and the acknowledgement of social rights as a crucial part of democracies (Marshall 2000(Marshall [1950; Garland 2014). Furthermore, Titmuss (1976: 14-15) highlights two different points of interest when researching social policies: the institutional organisation of social services and the perspective of those who receive benefits. ...
... Responding to risks and needs entails another noteworthy element, one might call a sub-function, which is the avoidance or at least reduction of uncertainty (Barr 2001: esp. chapter 2;Crouch & Keune 2013;Garland 2014). It is argued that this might even be one of the reasons social policies were implemented in the first place. ...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter examines the first main research question: how comparable are the results that emerge from different approaches to operationalising the welfare state as an independent variable? This raises several critical issues. In addition to discussing these issues in more detail, this chapter also explores the implications for research findings, their comparability and transparency. As the conceptual and empirical investigation shows, there is a need for more standardisation and conceptual work in order to more reliably include the welfare state as an independent variable in multilevel analyses.
... Obviously, the mere existence of some sort of social policy alone does not yet mean that we can speak of a welfare state (Titmuss 1974: 26) and the scope of the term has been discussed for decades now (among earlier contributions on how to conceptualise the welfare state is Briggs 1961). Regardless of the viewpoint, key elements of a welfare state include a strong emphasis governments place on the well-being of citizens (Esping-Andersen 1990) and the acknowledgement of social rights as a crucial part of democracies (Marshall 2000(Marshall [1950; Garland 2014). Furthermore, Titmuss (1976: 14-15) highlights two different points of interest when researching social policies: the institutional organisation of social services and the perspective of those who receive benefits. ...
... Responding to risks and needs entails another noteworthy element, one might call a sub-function, which is the avoidance or at least reduction of uncertainty (Barr 2001: esp. chapter 2;Crouch & Keune 2013;Garland 2014). It is argued that this might even be one of the reasons social policies were implemented in the first place. ...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter provides a brief overview of influential debates within welfare state research. It then discusses selected functions of the welfare state that contribute to an understanding of the various effects that social policies can have on individuals.
... A notion like governance is put to the test in a socioeconomic setting characterized by the effects of the health crisis (Garland, 2014). The effectiveness of the current governance will play a major role in whether or not this problem can be resolved. ...
Article
The COVID-19 pandemic presented an unprecedented challenge to European governance systems, testing their capacity to respond effectively to a multifaceted crisis. We conducted a systematic search between January and February 2023 of originally published articles from three electronic databases, such as Scopus, Google Scholar, and OECD iLibrary, including papers that were published in the last decade. This review provides a concise overview of the key aspects of European governance in the face of the pandemic. It discusses the initial hurdles in coordination and solidarity among member states, the strain on healthcare systems, economic repercussions, and the imperative for digital transformation. The review presents the current scope of research, highlights the limitation, and provides recommendations for future perspectives.
... There had been work before which had aimed to meet the needs of vulnerable members of society and the former culminated in the crea-tion of the welfare state during this period. Garland (2014) states that the concept of 'the welfare state' refers to a specific mode of governing that deploys a particular set of social and economic techniques and specific forms of administration. ...
Article
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This paper argues for the inclusion of indigenous social security systems in post-colonial African countries' social policy endeavours. It contends that in most cases, African political actors and policy-makers do not consider these indigenous forms of social protection when they are developing social policies for their respective countries, and thus either unwittingly or consciously cement the colonial agenda that had attempted to obliterate these systems in the first place. Arguably, most social policy initiatives in Africa still mirror those of the colonial era because they are still largely superimposed on African contexts by Western agencies or experts. Zusammenfassung: Einbeziehung lokaler Sozialversicherungssysteme in die postkoloniale Sozialpolitikformulierung in Afrika Dieses Papier plädiert für die Einbeziehung lokaler Systeme der sozialen Si-cherheit in die sozialpolitischen Bemühungen der postkolonialen afrikanischen Länder. Es wird behauptet, dass afrikanische politische Akteure und Entschei-dungsträger in den meisten Fällen diese einheimischen Formen des Sozial-schutzes nicht berücksichtigen, wenn sie Sozialpolitiken für ihre jeweiligen Länder entwickeln, und damit entweder unbewusst oder bewusst die koloniale Agenda zementieren, die diese Systeme von vornherein auszulöschen versucht hatte. Vermutlich spiegeln die meisten sozialpolitischen Initiativen in Afrika immer noch die der Kolonialzeit wider, weil sie immer noch weitgehend von westlichen Agenturen oder Experten auf afrikanische Kontexte übertragen wer-den.
... LITERATURE REVIEW Kertonegoro (2008) asserts that social security embodies a welfare concept designed to safeguard both social and economic risks for communities, aiding national economies in rectifying income distribution injustices by providing assistance to lowincome groups. It is evident that social security ensures benefits, thus protecting workers from income loss due to incapacity to work and ensuring basic needs for their families, thereby upholding human values against uncertainty and despair (Barrientos, 2016;Garland, 2014;Organization, 2000;Robson, 2022;Standing, 2017;Vrooman, 2009). From the aforementioned discussions, it can be concluded that social security represents a form of economic protection in the shape of monetary benefits and social protection through services, care, and medical treatment when certain risks occur during employment. ...
Article
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This research delves into the implementation of social security programs, particularly focusing on tobacco farm workers in Jember regency, Indonesia. Despite the mandatory nature of the BPJS Ketenagakerjaan, many tobacco farm laborers remain uncovered, posing risks to their social and economic well-being. Utilizing a quantitative research methodology, the study employs questionnaires and statistical analysis to understand the factors influencing participation in the BPJS Employment program. Findings reveal that variables such as Program Urgency, Farmers' Knowledge, Program Benefits, Farmers' Expectations, and the Role of Local Government collectively explain 67.5% of tobacco farmers' participation. Notably, Program Urgency and Program Benefits significantly impact participation, highlighting the vital role of social security in providing financial assurance against job-related risks. Moreover, active involvement of the Local Government is essential in fostering farmers' interest and engagement in the program. These findings underscore the significance of social security programs for tobacco farm workers, emphasizing the need for government support and facilitation to enhance program participation and ensure the welfare of vulnerable laborers.
... Broadly, social insurance would refer to: "programs [that] are generally comprehensive, compulsory schemes designed to protect workers and their families against the risks of lost earnings due to injury, sickness, old age, disability or unemployment". 81 We will focus on the unemployment variant, which exists in many Western as well as various Latin countries. This would be innovative in a Mexican context, 82 which lacks this nationwide (it exists in Mexico City) and only has a system of severance pay that covers only a fraction of the workforce. ...
Article
This paper discusses the relatively unexplored risk of societal disruption following from the replacement of human labor by the use of robots and artificial intelligence in Mexico. It sketches the broader context and background of the so called ‘fourth industrial revolution’ and reviews available data on the impact of automatization on work. While most such studies have centered on Europe and the United States, this paper argues that this issue should be of serious concern to researchers and policy makers in Mexico. The paper proposes a framework for discussing the possible policy responses to this threat, classifying these responses into preventive, mediating and compensating policies. After offering a brief discussion of ten such responses, the paper concludes by arguing that if this emerging societal challenge is to be taken serious, a combination of both preventive, mediating and compensating policies must be investigated, rather than searching for one particular ‘fix’.
... Social spending, on the other hand, defines a domain of resource allocation that explicitly shields citizens from pure market forces. Respective claims are based on social rights rather than direct renumeration for economic services, though they are often conditional on (previous) employment and/or meanstested [Esping-Andersen 1990;Garland 2014;Marshall 1961]. Taxation and public spending derive from political choices, and in the contexts discussed in this paper, democratic ones at that. ...
Article
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Since 2008, we have observed a more prominent role of the state in economic life, with the widespread use of financial tools. Advancing discussions on the financialization of distributional politics, the expansion of financial statecraft as a result of fiscal conflicts, and the fragmentation of state power, this article explores how proliferating financial policies reconfigure the state and its relationship with the economy as well as its democratic foundations. I introduce the concept of financial security states to theorize reactions to mature financialization and its inherent instabilities, which provoke socially structured demands for public stabilization. Leveraging the tradition of fiscal sociology, I work out differences between taxation and welfare systems and those based on financial security. In particular, I show that financial security states exploit value uncertainties to postpone loss-reckoning, are carried by hybrid state-banking institutions, and leverage the states’ endogenous power within market-based finance. This article argues that the by-and-large regressive distributional outcomes and fiscal costs of financial policies remain opaque, due to strategic obfuscation, the failure of traditional modes of political mediation, and deficient budgeting procedures.
... The deep substantial differences between wellbeing and welfare are obvious when applied to humans, who have complex perceptions of self, time and space and live in highly organized societies. Human welfare refers to a system of governance, the welfare state, about which there are different models and viewpoints [24][25][26][27][28]. The purpose of human welfare is to govern (manage) to move society towards providing equal opportunities for all its members to reach a state of doing well. ...
Article
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The overarching goal of a preventative medicine program is to minimize the chances of health problems developing and to maximize the chances of detecting health problems early, in a manner that best benefits the animals and the organization. The traditional paradigms of animal welfare, stemming from the five freedoms and being progressively fleshed out to five domains, the 24/7 approach and so forth do not apply perfectly to zoological collections and less so to animals undergoing veterinary treatments. The physiology and behaviour of animals undergoing veterinary treatments, including therapeutic, quarantine and preventative medicine, are derailed from their normal states and their choices and comfort are de facto limited. A paradigm separating animal wellbeing from animal welfare is necessary to instil clarity of thought and to guide actions in regard to the welfare of animals under human care. Using such a model, preventative medicine programs emerge as a cornerstone of zoo and aquarium animal welfare, all the more if it incorporates modern veterinary and husbandry techniques, including operant conditioning.
... The welfare state is not a sign of de-differentiation (Luhmann 1981) if it maintains rule of law principles. Instead, it is semantics and an institution to ensure the functional differentiation of society and the Ausdifferenzierung of the political system, trying to adapt to structural changes in the environment to coordinate and redefine its coupling with the economic system (Garland 2014;Lessenich 2012, 30;Vobruba 2015, 122 ff.). Furthermore, citing Luhmann, Wansleben points to organizational solutions as an essential structure for welfare state formation (Wansleben 2016, 293 ff.). ...
Article
Violence as a means of threatening the life and health of others is the foundation of power structures. According to a system theoretical understanding, however, physical violence becomes the basis for the power medium only when it is potentialized as a possibility for the political system. This potential threat contributes to the exodus of the political system through the formation of political organizations. This paper examines this hypothesis about violence and the political system from a historical, sociological perspective. I analyzed semantically the significance of Polizei , whose scope is said to have been limited from various governance practices, including welfare to the maintenance of security since the 19th century, in the development of labor protection policy, which was a precondition for the formation of the modern German welfare state. On the one hand, the work of the police in social policy was clearly distinguished from welfare on the level of political semantics; on the other hand, the appearance of other professionals made it possible for the police to continue to be involved in a wide range of social policy. These empirical findings show that the semantic differentiation of the political system with the potentialization of violence does not mean irrelevance and indifference to the environment; rather, it expands the scope of interest and makes it possible to relate to a more diverse range of subjects.
... This concerns a facet of the 'increasingly complex state-corporate network' (Hillyard and Tombs, 2004b: 32), which should not be construed as a zero-sum game or conflict between two opposing sides. Precisely under this market-state connivance characteristic of austerity, imaginaries of inchoate threats and fear for the increased insecurity in meeting social contingencies (Garland, 2014) have contributed to reshape security and establish the securitisation of 'risk' as a synonym for the solution to the uncertainties of life. At the same time, criminal policies -albeit unable to provide substantial solutions -have played a decisive synergic role in depoliticising and reallocating to crime control part of this perception of insecurity. ...
Article
Predictive policing lies at the intersection of a diachronic paradox between the innovativeness of algorithmic prediction and its selective application to archetypes of conventional criminology. Centring on the Italian context, I outline a critique of predictive policing, proceeding from its embeddedness in the neoliberal restructuring of security provision and the increasingly blurred boundaries between private and public agencies. Rejecting the narrative of technical neutrality and operational smartness, I retrace the interdependence of a selective understanding of security that has paved the way for predictive policing and the impact of automated predictions on the governance of crime control. I argue that the production of social harm under predictive policing follows three main patterns: firstly, the continuation of a tolerable rate of street crime; secondly, a dramatic acceleration in the marginalising and stigmatising potential of criminal targeting; and thirdly, the impairment of democratic accountability through tautological schemes of self-legitimation.
... The class dimension can be grasped through the focus on how welfare polices produce and reinforce social inequalities through economy. The welfare state is here understood as a distinctive form of governmentality that structures the relationships between the state and society through specific "rationality", technologies, and practices (Garland, 2014). A crucial transformation of the western welfare states lies in the "neoliberal turn" that started in the 1980s and led to the abandonment of the Fordist model of production with stable employments and full welfare protection. ...
Article
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This paper discusses the regulation of the Ausbildungsduldung implemented in Germany in 2016 to integrate rejected asylum-seekers through vocational training into the labour market. I here intertwine the literature of neoliberal welfare state with the theories of border studies to understand the intersectionality of race and class in the lives of refugees put to work. Drawn on ethnographic fieldwork from 2016 to 2020 with refugees and practitioners , I shed light on a moral economy of deservingness underpinning the Ausbildungs-duldung and affecting its implementation as well as the process of construction of the self negotiated by refugees during the vocational training. The analysis of the discursive, formal , and subjective dimensions of the Ausbildungsduldung shows how the control feature prevails over the integration aim. This pushes refugees into a legal, social-economic, and ex-istential precarity that is institutionally produced. To be integrated, refugees have to prove their worthiness by embodying the ideal migrant: a good worker with a "Beruf " (profes-sion) in the low-paid sectors of the German economy. Ultimately, this paper addresses the concept of "Neoliberal Asylum" to discuss how the Western states use the category of "de-servingness" as moral criteria to guide the juridical measures to govern refugees through their economies.
... Dalam hal ini, pemerintah harus menerapkan kebijakan yang sesuai dengan konsep negara kesejahteraan dan good governance, seperti memenuhi kebutuhan dasar warganya, menyediakan pelayan kesejahteraan sosial, dan melindungi rakyatnya(Kartika dkk, 2018). Menurut analisisGarland (2014), masyarakat yang hanya diatur oleh sistem kapitalisme sangat beresiko terjadi konflik, sebab sistem itu cenderung menciptakan konsentrasi kekayaan dan ketidaksetaraan. Oleh karena itu, pemerintah perlu menerapkan sistem negara kesejahteraan sebagai tandingan: untuk melindungi masyarakat dari pengaruh buruk sistem kapitalisme. ...
Article
Dalam urusan kepentingan ekonomi, hubungan antara masyarakat dengan korporasi sering saling bertentangan. Salah satu contohnya konflik antara masyarakat Pangkalan Susu dengan korporasi pengelola Pembangkit Listrik Tenaga Uap (PLTU) batubara di daerah mereka. Masyarakat menganggap pengoperasian PLTU telah menyebabkan kerusakan lingkungan, yang akibatnya berdampak buruk ke penghasilan dan kesehatan mereka. Penelitian dilakukan untuk menggali pengalaman masyarakat Pangkalan Susu dalam menghadapi dampak buruk pengoperasian PLTU tersebut. Sampling purposif digunakan untuk merekrut informan. Menggunakan pendekatan analisis fenomenologis interpretatif, dilakukan wawancara mendalam kepada tiga informan. Ditemukan bahwa ketidakhadiran negara dalam konflik ini membuat masyarakat makin terpuruk. Padahal Indonesia, sebagai negara kesejahteraan, perlu melindungi rakyatnya dari pengaruh buruk kapitalisme. Apalagi mayoritas masyarakat Pangkalan Susu bergantung pada alam: jika alam mereka rusak, maka penghasilan mereka juga hilang. Artikel ini ingin menjelaskan pentingnya kehadiran negara dalam konflik antara masyarakat vs. korporasi—terutama untuk melindungi masyarakat sebagai kelompok yang lebih lemah.
... De aard van de welvaartsstaat (of van het welvaartsregime, in termen van Esping-Andersen, 1990) is op verschillende vlakken bepalend voor de doorwerking van deze factoren (Garland, 2014). We wezen al op de rol van collectieve voorzieningen, maar de welvaartsstaat biedt vooral sociale bescherming, in de vorm van socialezekerheidssystemen en de daaronder liggende bijstandsnetten; ze heeft ook impact op de arbeidsmarkt via gesubsidieerde tewerkstelling. ...
... What is noteworthy here is that welfare cooperation among actors is nothing new; (Esping-Andersen, 2002; Bode, 2006) there has always been a mixed welfare systems and the state has never been the sole providing actor (Spicker, 2008;Garland, 2014). However, the type and method of application change over time. ...
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The focus of this paper is the interaction between social innovation and restructuring welfare state. Modern welfare states have been reconfiguring their welfare mixes through social innovation. This includes a productive integration of formal and informal actors with support and leading role of the state. This collaboration becomes significantly important since it means the integration of not only the actors, but also their capabilities and resources in today's world where new social risks and new social challenges have emerged and no actor can overcome these by its own. Therefore, social innovation is a useful tool in the new role sharing within the welfare mix in order to reach higher levels of satisfaction and success in welfare provision. The main point here is that this is not a zero-sum competition ; gaining more power of the actors other than the state-the market, civil society organisations and the family-does not necessarily mean that the state lost its leading role and power. This is rather a new type of cooperation among actors and their capabilities as well as their resources in welfare provision. In this sense, social innovation may contribute well to the debates over the financial crisis of the welfare state since it may lead to the more wisely use of existing resources of welfare actors. Thanks to social innovative programs, not only the NGOs, but also market forces as well as citizens are more active to access welfare provisions and social protection in the broadest sense. Thus, social innovative strategies are definitely a solid step taken towards "enabling" or "active" welfare state.
... De aard van de welvaartsstaat (of van het welvaartsregime, in termen van Esping-Andersen, 1990) is op verschillende vlakken bepalend voor de doorwerking van deze factoren (Garland, 2014). We wezen al op de rol van collectieve voorzieningen, maar de welvaartsstaat biedt vooral sociale bescherming, in de vorm van socialezekerheidssystemen en de daaronder liggende bijstandsnetten; ze heeft ook impact op de arbeidsmarkt via gesubsidieerde tewerkstelling. ...
... The definition used in this paper departs from this narrow classical understanding of the welfare state as social services, or as the state as merely a provider of those services (Briggs 1961, Titmuss 1975, Weir 2001. Rather, the welfare state is understood as a mode of capitalist government (Esping- Andersen 1989, Garland 2014) that mitigates the social effects of crises stemming from capital accumulation (Offe 1984, Valocchi 1992, O'Connor 2001. It does this through both the provision of welfare programmes, as well as the regulation (or shaping) of markets (Moran 2000, Mazzucato 2018). ...
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Welfare state bureaucracies the world over have adopted far-reaching digitalisation reforms in recent years. From the deployment of AI in service management, to the ‘opening up’ of administrative datasets, digitalisation initiatives have uprooted established modes of public sector organisation and administration. And, as this paper suggests, they have also fundamentally transformed the political economy of the welfare state. Through a case study of Danish reforms between 2002 and 2019, the analysis finds that public sector digitalisation has entailed the transfer of responsibility for key infrastructure to private actors. Reforms in Denmark have not only been pursued in the name of public sector improvement and efficiency. A principal objective of public sector digitalisation has rather been the growth of Denmark’s nascent digital technology industries as part of the state’s wider export-led growth strategy, adopted in response to functional pressures on the welfare state model. The attempt to deliver fiscal stability in this way has, paradoxically, produced retrenchment of critical assets and capabilities. The paper’s findings hold important implications for states embarking on public sector digitalisation reforms, as well as possibilities for future research on how states can harness technological progress in the interests of citizens – without hollowing out in the process.
... Si encontramos un mayor apoyo por parte del Estado, habrá mayor distribución de recursos monetarios y provisión de servicios a los hogares y, por tanto, existirán menos posibilidades de sufrir pobreza laboral. Al contrario, si los trabajadores deben recurrir principalmente al mercado o al apoyo de las familias para la provisión de bienestar, los hogares serán más dependientes de sus ingresos o de las posibilidades familiares de asumir la provisión de bienestar (De Haan, 2007;Garland, 2015;Heinz y Lund, 2012;Lohmann, 2009). El contexto institucional dice relación con la regulación, prácticas, políticas y convenciones que influyen en las condiciones de contratación laboral, salarios, jornada, negociación colectiva y sindicalización (Betcherman, 2012). ...
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Esta contribución realiza un análisis comparado de la pobreza laboral en Chile y España, dando cuenta de cómo un grupo de trabajadores pertenecientes principalmente al segmento secundario forman parte de hogares en situación de pobreza. Luego de una breve introducción, revisamos la literatura respecto de la temática para conocer las principales dimensiones que inciden en la pobreza laboral. En el tercer apartado contextualizaremos los casos de estudio, para luego conocer las características y la vivencia de la pobreza laboral en ambos casos. Finalmente, identificamos las principales semejanzas y diferencias: mientras para ambos casos encontramos similares características de la situación ocupacional asociadas a la pobreza laboral, en el área de la experiencia encontramos diferencias. El estudio comparado de la pobreza laboral nos permite comprender de mejor manera los orígenes de la misma y sus diversas consecuencias, con miras a superar las discusiones sobre casos particulares y contribuir a la creación de un marco analítico general.
... The first was a period of growth, which accelerated after World War II in what is commonly known as the Golden Age of the 1950s and 1960s. Garland (2014) speaks of a 'new government rationality', where problems such as poverty and unemployment were no longer seen as simply individual problems but ones which merited action by the State for the benefit of all. The Golden Age was marked by sustained economic growth and rising social expenditure, and by consensus on social welfare across the political spectrum and between labour and capital. ...
... Welfare programs have always first served the worthy poor, a population seen by state and society as worthy of assistance, compared to other populations deemed lazy or otherwise unsympathetic, generally according to racialized and gendered norms (Garland, 2014;Piven and Cloward, 1993). Central to this categorizing, Piven and Cloward explain, is welfare's role in encouraging people into the workforce as the market demands through denials or granting of benefits, plus the role of employer-provided health insurance (Thomasson, 2002). ...
Article
Two important changes are happening in health care in the US. As hospitals close in high numbers, the geographies of health care services are changing. Also, the ageing of the population brings about new and complex care needs. These are not discrete trends, as ageing impacts the who, what, and where of care needs, and hospital closures remakes the geographies of where people overall access care. Developed out of research on the impacts of hospital restructuring on workers, patients, and communities, this paper aims to understand how health care financing, care needs for the ageing, and new geographies of health services are intertwined. To do so, I look back to 1980s policy changes to Medicare, the federal health insurance program for the elderly and disabled. In 1982, Congress made two important changes to Medicare. The program began covering hospice services, constituting an expansion of care, and the government drastically changed the way it reimburses providers, effectively a contraction of the program. I trace the impacts of these changes over the next decades through analysis of media coverage and secondary research on hospital budgets. Drawing on the concept of palliative space-time, I identify a contradictory logic of death at the center of this expansion and contraction of the health care system. This death logic works to destabilize an already uneven geography of health service. Yet, this crisis has the potential for more just geographies of health and care.
... Surely, the historically evolved involvement of different actors in welfare provision through formal and informal arrangements is nothing new (Esping-Andersen, 2002, Bode, 2006. Welfare systems have always been mixed and despite the wide use of the notion of the 'welfare state', welfare provision has never been a purely public affair (Spicker, 2008;Garland, 2014). What is new is that the roles and responsibilities of these various actors in welfare provision have changed profoundly. ...
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To address unmet social needs and tackle complex societal challenges, social innovation initiatives often mobilise new actors, resources and/or approaches within specific fields of social action. Changing welfare mixes and the governance of various actors, instruments and resources are therefore key concerns for social innovation research. In this chapter, we analyse the changing welfare mixes in social innovation initiatives and their governance on the micro-level by looking at the networks of organisations and institutions behind these initiatives. We provide a descriptive analysis of the different welfare mixes of social innovation initiatives and their strategies and mode of governance and identify patterns and typologies in the governance of local social innovations. Particular attention is attributed to the role of public actors, resources and instruments. We use our empirical findings to assess the main tendencies on changing welfare mixes as identified in the scholarly literature.
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It is now 40 years since the publication of Claus Offe's classical paper, Some Contradictions of the Modern Welfare State. Much change has occurred to the form and content of welfare states over the intervening years, yet in addition to change, continuities are very much evident, and it is this constellation of developments – alongside anniversarial convenience – which has motivated a re-examination of Offe's seminal work on the contradictions of welfare states. This anniversary article re-introduces and provides a critique of the original paper before moving on to a historical comparison of the major political economic and societal differences which sets the scene for a concluding review of the major contradictions within welfare states in contemporary times. The paper argues that the core historical contradiction identified by Offe – that between the accumulation requirements of capital and the legitimation requirements of political elites to satiate the welfare needs of populations – remains at the core of contemporary contradictions.
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Michel Foucault's essay 'The Subject and Power' has seen four decades. It is the most quoted of Foucault's shorter texts and exerts a persistent influence across the social sciences and humanities. The essay merges two main trajectories of Foucault's research in the 1970s: his gene-alogies of legal-disciplinary power and his studies of pastoral power and governance. This article connects these two trajectories to Althusser's thesis on the ideological state apparatuses, demonstrating affinities between Althusser's thesis and Foucault's diagnosis of the welfare state as a 'ma-trix' of individualising and totalising power. The article suggests that Foucault's essay straddles between two different concepts of subjectivation. First, one encounters the citizen 'internally sub-jugated' by disciplinary and pastoral power, whereas, at the end, we find a 'flat' subject of govern-ance; a form of power which intervenes only in the environment in which individuals make their rational, self-fashioning choices. The implication of Foucault's newfound concept of governance is a weakening of the link between subjectivation and the formation of the state, which also meant that the state's role in reproducing capitalism receded into the background of Foucauldian scholarship. Finally, the article suggests extending Foucault's analytical 'matrix' to current techniques of subjectivation associated with the advent of big data and artificial intelligence, which buttress the expansive technique of predictive profiling.
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Chapter
Since the 1980s, intersectionality has received significant recognition as a feminist framework with its theoretical, methodological, and political elements, offering a vigorous understanding of social inequalities that are multifaceted and overlapping in nature. By drawing upon the vast body of feminist literature and adopting a critical and process-focused approach to intersectionality, this edited book explores how the conceptual frame of intersectionality contributes to the analysis of the complex and interconnected inequalities within the welfare state, examining them on macro, meso and micro-levels, including institutions and everyday social practices. By emphasizing the recognition of selective factors of inequalities across diverse institutional domains, organizational settings, and society at large, the volume seeks to expose how multiple forms of inequalities persistently endure within the multilayered institutional boundaries, policies, and practices of modern welfare states.
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Pode considerar-se a gestão pública como um dos mais complexos desafios no que à administração diz respeito. Este artigo, através do estudo de alguns dos mais conceituados modelos de gestão pública, tenta melhor entender o complexo motor que é a Administração Pública. Os dados obtidos baseiam-se na análise dos diversos modelos que surgiram ao longo da evolução da administração. Com este artigo poderá melhor entender-se como os diversos modelos influenciam o presente da gestão pública, bem como melhor entender toda a evolução resultante dos modelos estudados. Conclui-se que a Administração Pública que hoje se conhece é resultado de um conjunto de alterações que se verificam ao longo dos tempos, seja através de novos mecanismos de coordenação, mas também da recuperação de aspetos positivos da burocracia.
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This article examines the influence of Emile Durkheim's sociology on Richard Titmuss, founder of the academic field of social policy. While operating in different environments and historical eras, they shared concerns about modernity's impact on contemporary societies, heightened by their experiences of living in periods of considerable political and socio-economic upheaval. Their social thought embraced crucial complementarities, and understanding these adds a previously under-explored dimension to Titmuss's influential analyses of Britain's post-war ‘welfare state’.
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Tarihsel olarak birçok afetler ve felaketler yaşayan insanlık tarihi, 2019 yılında Wuhan’dan dünyaya yayılan Covid-19 olarak tanımlanan bir pandemi ile birlikte yaşamın rutininde yeniden ciddi problemler yaşamaya başlamıştır. Bu problemin temelini teşkil eden pandemi küresel bir sağlık krizine neden olurken, bu kriz küresel düzenin egemen düşüncesi ve hâkim paradigması olan neoliberal politikaların ve onun taşıyıcı araçlarının pandemiye karşı cevap üretmekten oldukça uzak olduğunu bir kez daha ortaya çıkarmıştır. Covid-19 pandemisi, başta sağlık hizmetleri olmak üzere en temel kamusal hizmetlerin piyasalaştırılmasının devletleri ve toplumları ciddi anlamda etkileyen sonuçlar üretmesi, refah devleti anlayışına duyulan ihtiyacı yeniden gündeme taşımıştır. Bu çalışma; 1980’lerle birlikte neoliberal düşüncenin ve politikaların dominant hale geldiği, minimal devlet yaklaşımı üzerinden piyasayı egemen kıldığı bir küresel sistem içinde ortaya çıkan Covid-19 pandemisinin, toplumsal yaşam alanlarında yarattığı tahribat üzerinden refah devleti anlayışının yeniden bir ihtiyaç haline gelmesi gerektiği savı üzerine bir analiz denemesi yapmayı amaçlamaktadır. Bu bağlamda; neoliberal yaklaşımın kamusal hizmet ve kamu yararı gibi değerler üzerinden biçimlenen kamucu politikalar yerine serbest piyasa ve bireysel çıkarı önceleyen düşünce ve politikaları etkin kılarak “eşitsizlikler” yaratmasının toplumlar üzerinde ciddi olumsuz etkiler oluşturduğu üzerine bir yaklaşım benimsenmektedir.
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Public management can be considered one of the most complex challenges in administration. This article, through the study of some of the most prestigious models of public management, attempts to better understand the complex engine that is Public Administration. The data obtained is based on the analysis of the various models that have emerged throughout the evolution of administration. With this article, it will be possible to better understand how the various models influence the present of public administration, as well as to better understand all the evolution resulting from the models studied. The conclusion is that the Public Administration that we know today is the result of a set of changes that have occurred over time, either through new coordination mechanisms, but also through the recovery of positive aspects of bureaucracy.
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Refah devletleri 1970’lerden beri varlığına ve sürdürülebilirliğine yönelik önemli meydan okumalar, krizler ve eleştirilerle karşı karşıyadır. Refah devletlerinin başarılı bir performans gösterip göstermediği öncelikle refah devletinin temel amaç ve işlevleri üzerinden değerlendirilmelidir. Bireyler yaşam boyunca pek çok risk ile karşılaşmaktadır. Bu riskler karşısında yaşamlarını düzgün ve insani koşullar altında devam ettirebilmeleri refah devletinin kapsayıcılığı ve bu alanda sağladığı desteklerle ilgilidir. Ortaya çıkan yeni toplumsal riskler işgücü piyasası, demografik yapı gibi sanayi sonrası döneme ait koşullarda yaşanan değişim üzerinden birey-devlet ve piyasa bağlamında dönüştürücü olmaktadır. Refah devletinin kendisi de ortaya çıkan bu yeni toplumsal riskler karşısında yeni politikalar ve araçlar uygulamak zorundadır. Yeni toplumsal riskler genellikle refah devletine yönelik meydan okumanın ulusal/içsel bir kaynağı olarak ele alınırken küreselleşme süreci, çok uluslu şirketler ve uluslararası örgütlerin de dışsal bir faktör olarak ortaya çıkardığı etkiler unutulmamalıdır. Çalışma bu yeni toplumsal riskleri tanımlama amacıyla refah devleti-birey ilişkisinin ekonomik, sosyal ve politik alandaki değişimini incelemektedir.
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The social, as a plane of thought and action, has been central to political thought and political programmes since the mid-nineteenth century. This paper argues that, while themes of society and concerns with social cohesion and social justice are still significant in political argument, the social is no longer a key zone, traget and objective of strategies of government. The rise of the language of globalization indicates that economic relations are no longer easily understood as organized across a single bounded national economy. Community has become a new spatialization of government: heterogeneous, plural, linking individuals, families and others into contesting cultrual assemblies of identities and allegiances. Divisions among the subjects of government are coded in new ways; neither included nor excluded are governed as social citizens. Non-political strategies are deployed for the management of expert authority. Anti-political motifs such as associationism and communitarianism which do not seek to govern through society, are on the rise in political thought. The paper suggests some ways of diagnosing and analysing these novel territorializations of political thought and action.
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'I propose here the view that, when the market fails to achieve an optimal state, society will, to some extent at least, recognize the gap, and nonmarket social institutions will arise attempting to bridge it....' (Kenneth Arrow 1963, p. 947). 'Economic theorists traditionally banish discussions of information to footnotes. Serious consideration of costs of communication, imperfect knowledge ... would, it is believed, complicate without informing.... [T]his comforting myth is false. Some of the most important conclusions of economic theory are not robust to considerations of imperfect information' (Michael Rothschild and Joseph Stiglitz 1976, p. 629). 'That any sane nation, having observed that you could provide for the supply of bread by giving bakers a pecuniary interest in baking for you, should go on to give a surgeon a pecuniary interest in cutting off your leg, is enough to make one despair of political humanity' (George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor's Dilemma, 1911).
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This book offers a careful examination of the politics of social policy in an era of austerity and conservative governance. Focusing on the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Pierson provides a compelling explanation for the welfare state's durability and for the few occasions where each government was able to achieve significant cutbacks. The programmes of the modern welfare state - the 'policy legacies' of previous governments - generally proved resistant to reform. Hemmed in by the political supports that have developed around mature social programmes, conservative opponents of the welfare state were successful only when they were able to divide the supporters of social programmes, compensate those negatively affected, or hide what they were doing from potential critics. The book will appeal to those interested in the politics of neo-conservatism as well as those concerned about the development of the modern welfare state. It will attract readers in the fields of comparative politics, public policy, and political economy.
Book
The Golden Age of post‐war capitalism has been eclipsed, and with it seemingly also the possibility of harmonizing equality and welfare with efficiency and jobs. Most analyses believe that the emerging post‐industrial society is overdetermined by massive, convergent forces, such as tertiarization, new technologies, or globalization, all conspiring to make welfare states unsustainable in the future. This book takes a second, more sociological and institutional look at the driving forces of economic transformation. What stands out as a result is that there is post‐industrial diversity rather than convergence. Macroscopic, global trends are undoubtedly powerful, yet their influence is easily rivalled by domestic institutional traditions, by the kind of welfare regime that, some generations ago, was put in place. It is, however, especially the family economy that holds the key as to what kind of post‐industrial model will emerge, and to how evolving trade‐offs will be managed. Twentieth‐century economic analysis depended on a set of sociological assumptions that now are invalid. Hence, to grasp better what drives today's economy, it is necessary to begin with its social foundations. After an Introduction, the book is arranged in three parts: I, Varieties of Welfare Capitalism (four chapters); II, The New Political Economy (two chapters); and III, Welfare Capitalism Recast? (two chapters).
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The roots of today's Great Recession are usually located in the financial excesses of the 1990s. Wolfgang Streeck traces a much longer arc, from 1945 onwards, of tensions between the logic of markets and the wishes of voters-culminating, he argues, in the international tempest of debt that now threatens to submerge democratic accountability altogether beneath the storm-waves of capital.
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The seminal work by Esping-Andersen (1990) has transformed and inspired social policy research over the past two decades. Various contributions have confirmed his typology, while others have challenged, and expanded, it from substantive and methodological perspectives. This article contributes to this debate in two ways. First, it provides a comprehensive analysis of the different typologies proposed in the literature, employing the concept of 'ideal types'. Second, it elaborates new directions for research along three dimensions: (1) improving measurement validity by linking macro and micro data to overcome assumptions, largely based on the average (production) worker; (2) assessing the reliability of typologies over time; (3) systematically integrating both the work–welfare as well as the care–welfare dimensions.
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1. When jailed inmates are added, the incarceration rate is nearly 700 per 100,000. 2. The resident population consists of both citizens and legal resident aliens. 3. Bruce Western (2006) provides the most thorough analysis of the scope of the carceral influence. 4. Hispanic males in the same age band are imprisoned at a rate of 2,890 per 100,000, or nearly 3 percent. In contrast only about 1 percent of white males in the same age band are imprisoned. 5. The alienating effects are multiplied in jurisdictions that strip former prisoners of the right to vote absent success in a cumbersome pardon process. 6. My analysis of the relationship between bringing order to prisons and to governance is drawn from Bright (1995). 7. The question of penal technique is raised in the writings of major revolutionary leaders like Robespierre and Jefferson, and was the consuming interest of less central figures like Benjamin Rush. 8. Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments (1764) was for many readers the model Enlightenment tract. 9. Here we are concerned specifically with formal political governance since states and their creatures (and the federal government and its creatures) have a practical monopoly on the practice of imprisonment. This remains true even if the prison facility is leased to or from a private firm. Yet the influence of the prison as model of governance is not limited to the penal sector of the state or the state at all. 10. Philadelphia’s great rival, the New York State Prison, in Auburn, New York, became the leading example of an alternative model of the penitentiary, based on common labor but under silence and known as the “congregate system.” In contrast to Philadelphia, Auburn allowed inmates to work in common workshops during the day (albeit silently). Auburn represented an alternative vision of the penitentiary, one in which highly disciplined labor replaced the spiritual/ psychological crisis of isolation as the engine of reform. In contrast to the solitary confinement penitentiary built in Philadelphia, Auburn represented a hybrid, solitary confinement at night with collective labor under conditions of silence and close supervision (Rothman, 1971; Foucault, 1977; Dumm, 1987). 11. Historian Michael Meranze’s study of Philadelphia’s solitary confinement system in the context of the late colonial, revolutionary and early nineteenth century sets up precisely the problem of how the penal enterprise related to the effort of Pennsylvania elites to establish a republican order (Meranze, 1996). 12. Foucault (1977) offered Jeremy Bentham’s unrealized plan for a prison known as the “panopticon” as a pure schema of the disciplinary power that many actual prisons of the era relied upon. Eastern lacked the transparency of Bentham’s panopticon, although is spoke-shaped ceUblocks and central guard tower invoked that ideal. Meranze points out that the keepers in the central tower could not observe conduct in the individual cells (Meranze, 1996: xx). 13. Bright suggests that there may well have been a dark side to the big house’s role in the political order as a repository for criminal violence that could be usefully directed against political opponents (Bright, 1995: 111). 14. This sense of isolation is powerfully portrayed in Kalven’s book, Working With Available Light: A Family’s World After Violence (1999). The book presents a searing account of Kalven’s family in the decade following a nearly fatal assault on his wife, the photographer Patricia Evans, who was attacked by a stranger while running in a lakefront park several miles from their Chicago home. 15. This divide is powerfully articulated in the neoconservative jeremiad and memoir of David Gerlentner, a well-known computer scientist when he was severely wounded and mutilated by a letter bomb sent by “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski. 16. Two recent books from and about California examine the politics and new technologies of power that have taken shape there since the late 1970s and which correspond to the beginnings of two decades of growth in the California and national prison population (with Texas and California the largest components of the latter). Journalist Peter Schrag’s Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future (1998) provides an insightful and detailed analysis of one state’s...
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Part I. The American Welfare Regime: 1. The politics of public and private social benefits Part II. The Politics of Public and Private Pensions: 2. Connected at birth: public and private pensions before 1945 3. Sibling rivalry: public and private pensions after 1945 Part III. The Politics of Public and Private Health Insurance: 4. Seeds of exceptionalism: public and private health insurance before 1945 5. The elusive cure: public and private health insurance after 1945 Part IV. The Formation and Future of the American Welfare Regime: 6. The formation of the American welfare regime 7. The future of the American welfare regime.
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This article begins with a survey of some influential classifications of welfare states based on different dimensions of social policy. Advantages and shortcomings are pointed out in relation to each classification reviewed. It is argued that none of these single-dimension classifications is in fact adequate to understand past and current developments in European social policy. An alternative classification, which combines elements of the ones reviewed above into a two-dimension approach, is proposed. This two-dimension classification is then related to past developments and current debates in European welfare states. The strength of this approach is its ability to reflect social policy developments in terms of both the expansion/contraction of state welfare and the convergence/divergence of European social policies.
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The phrase “welfare state” is of recent origin. It was first used to describe Labour Britain after 1945. From Britain the phrase made its way round the world. It was freely employed, usually but not exclusively by politicians and journalists, in relation to diverse societies at diverse stages of development. Historians also took over the phrase. Attempts were made to re-write nineteenth and twentieth century history, particularly British history, in terms of the “origins” and “development” of a “welfare state”.
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The paper argues that contemporary capitalism must be studied as a society rather than an economy, and contemporary society as capitalist society. Capitalism is defined as a specific institutionalization of economic action in the form of a specifically dynamic system of social action, with a tendency to expand into, impose itself on and consume its non-economic and non-capitalist social and institutional context, unless contained by political resistance and regulation. The paper illustrates its perspective by four brief sketches, depicting contemporary capitalism as a historically dynamic social order, a culture, a polity, and a way of life. All four examples, it is claimed, demonstrate the superiority of a longitudinal-historical approach over static cross-sectional comparisons, and of focusing on the commonalities of national versions of capitalisms rather than their “varieties”.
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The aim of the book is two-fold. First of all it is to provide a fair, complete and analytical account of the Neo-liberal conception of the role and function of the state in modern society. The second aim is to provide a critical assessment of some of the central elements of this conception. The book will look at the emphasis of Neo-liberals on procedural and rule governed approaches to the role of the state rather than outcome or end state views of the role of government and to consider how this conception of politics relates to issues such as the rule of law, freedom, justice, rights, the relationship to the market economy, to civil society and to look at the role of government in relation to the provision of welfare and public sector services more generally. It builds up the Neo-liberal case in respect of these aspects of modern society by drawing upon the works of central Neo-liberal thinkers such as Hayek, Mises, Menger, as well as thinkers such as Oakeshott, Nozick and Rotbard who are not directly Neo-liberals but whose works have been important for the development of central Neo-liberal themes. The second part of the book provides what might be regarded as an immanent critique of the Neo-liberal case built up in the first part of the study. It takes Neo-liberal ideas very seriously and shows how incoherences arise within and between those ideas such that a plausible form of Neo-liberalism as opposed to Libertarianism on the one hand and Social Democracy on the other is very difficult to state. The theme of this book is very germane given the considerable debate which is now taking place in the context of the world financial crisis about the appropriate role for the state. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/politicalscience/9780199281756/toc.html
Book
Amongst intellectuals and activists, neoliberalism has become a potent signifier for the kind of free-market thinking that has dominated politics for the past three decades. Forever associated with the conviction politics of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the free-market project has since become synonymous with the 'Washington consensus' on international development policy and the phenomenon of corporate globalization, where it has come to mean privatization, deregulation, and the opening up of new markets. But beyond its utility as a protest slogan or buzzword as shorthand for the political-economic Zeitgeist, what do we know about where neoliberalism came from and how it spread? Who are the neoliberals, and why do they studiously avoid the label? Constructions of Neoliberal Reason presents a radical critique of the free-market project, from its origins in the first half of the 20th Century through to the recent global economic crisis, from the utopian dreams of Friedrich von Hayek through the dogmatic theories of the Chicago School to the hope and hubris of Obamanomics. The book traces how neoliberalism went from crank science to common sense in the period between the Great Depression and the age of Obama. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason dramatizes the rise of neoliberalism and its uneven spread as an intellectual, political, and cultural project, combining genealogical analysis with situated case studies of formative moments throughout the world, like New York City's bankruptcy, Hurricane Katrina, and the Wall Street crisis of 2008. The book names and tracks some of neoliberalism's key protagonists, as well as some of the less visible bit-part players. It explores how this adaptive regime of market rule was produced and reproduced, its logics and limits, its faults and its fate. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780199580576/toc.html
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This book applies economic theory to the welfare state. Its core message is that the welfare state exists not only to relieve poverty and redistribute income and wealth (the ‘Robin Hood’ function) but also as a series of institutions that provide insurance and consumption smoothing (the ‘piggy‐bank’ function). The book develops three central arguments about the role of the state in industrial countries and also in post‐communist and middle‐income developing countries. First, the welfare state has an insufficiently understood piggy‐bank function that is additional to and separate from poverty relief. Even if all poverty and social exclusion could be eliminated, so that the entire population were middle class, there would still be a need for institutions to offer insurance (for example, unemployment insurance, long‐term care insurance, medical insurance) and consumption smoothing over the life cycle (for example, pensions and education finance in the form of student loans). Private institutions – though often effective in other areas – face pervasive problems of imperfect information, risk, and uncertainty, and attempts to address those problems inescapably involve state intervention. Second, and consequentially, the welfare state is here to stay, since twenty‐first‐century developments do nothing to undermine those reasons – if anything, they do the reverse. To argue that the welfare state is robust does not, however, mean that it is static. A third set of arguments concerns the ways it can and will adapt to economic and social change.
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Tackling one of the most volatile issues in contemporary politics, Martin Gilens's work punctures myths and misconceptions about welfare policy, public opinion, and the role of the media in both. Why Americans Hate Welfare shows that the public's views on welfare are a complex mixture of cynicism and compassion; misinformed and racially charged, they nevertheless reflect both a distrust of welfare recipients and a desire to do more to help the "deserving" poor.
The Welfare State: An Obituary
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Anything But Benevolent
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It’s Already Happened
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