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Is there a place for ‘community’? Transnational governance, post-socialist authoritarianism, and deinstitutionalization in a child protection NGO in Hungary
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While it is well-known that democratic backsliding imposes a variety of challenges on civil society organisations, it is often assumed that it represses civil society. However, a closer look at the impact of democratic backsliding on civil society organisations reveals that even in countries where democratic backsliding is fairly advanced, the relationship between civil society and the state is more complex. Close cooperation and partnership between civil society organisations and the state are scarce in backsliding countries; the relationship between civil society organisations and the state might, however, range from hostility to varying forms and degrees of co-optation. Based on interviews with representatives of civil society organisations and the examination of the sector-specific social and political environment, we aim to explore the forms and factors that shape the relationship between civil society organisations and the state in Hungary. More specifically, we analyse the impact of the changing political opportunity structures on three important sectors of civil society organisations: human rights organisations, environmental organisations, and women’s organisations. We argue that, to seize control over civil society the government applies sector-specific strategies, ranging from exclusion to co-optation. State strategies, in turn, spark different responses from civil society organisations.
Why do some countries become early policy adopters and fast policy implementers? We investigate this question through the analysis of cross-national policy shift toward childcare deinstitutionalization, i.e., the transition from institutional to community-based provision for children without parental care. The article presents the newly collected data on the adoption of childcare deinstitutionalization policy by 15 countries – previously republics of the Soviet Union. Qualitative comparative analysis is employed to explore the role of national-level attributes affecting the timing of policy adoption and the rate of implementation.
Expectations from political-economy and the institutional world-society perspectives on cross-national patterns of public policy adoption and implementation are incorporated in the hypotheses. Two respective groups of factors are considered: (1) the national economic system and the number of children in institutional care; policy implementation capacity (gross domestic product and government effectiveness); (2) world society ties to international organizations (IOs), conferences and European institutions; and local receptivity to world culture, operationalized as the contraceptive preference for pill. Results suggest that countries’ ties to policy-relevant international organizations are an important condition for earlier policy commitment, which is in line with institutional arguments. The findings point at the need for a more refined conceptualization of cross-national policy patterns for cases where world cultural drivers interplay with political-economic factors.
In the past decade, right-wing populist parties have brought back nationalism and religion into European politics. While a growing literature explores the political strategies, style and success of these parties and the challenge they pose to the European project, less attention has been paid to how right-wing populist governing is done at specific policy areas. This paper explores the education policy discourse of the Hungarian right-wing populist government. Drawing on the Discourse-Historical Approach to critical discourse analysis, the analysis concentrates on political speeches performed between 2010 and 2020 to examine the discoursive framings and strategies utilised in relation to three nodal points identified in the speeches: upbringing, teaching Christian values and the nation. While in the political rhetoric, a coherent religious nationalist, neoconservative narrative took form, over time this narrative shifted from a strategic project of crafting a new language to justify paradigmatic legislative and policy change to a language disconnected from policy work and predominantly displaying features of nationalist extremism. In the discussed period, as a combined result of the right-wing government’s Christian indentitarian project and the ambition of the Christian churches to increase their power and legitimacy, religion has increasingly permeated the secular spaces of Hungarian education.
This authoritative analysis of anti-liberal Hungary’s 21st century twist on “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” exposes its exploitation of women not only as unpaid carers in the home but also as a source of cheap paid labor. Fodor deftly links the Orbán regime’s notorious opposition to gender equality to its embrace of pronatalism, xenophobia, and expanded funding for church-based childcare and eldercare. A terrifying, essential read.
—Ruth Milkman, City University of New York Graduate Center and author of On Gender, Labor, and Inequality (lllinois, 2016) and Immigrant Labor and the New Precariat (Polity 2020)
Finally, a book that offers brilliant insight into the seemingly perplexing: the gender politics of the contemporary Hungarian state. With sharpness and wit, Fodor reveals how the public attack on gender--indeed, even on the concept of gender itself--goes hand-in-hand with the rise of authoritarian rule and right-wing populism. Giving this new gender regime a name, “the carefare state,” Fodor uncovers how it became so foundational to anti-liberal currents in Hungary. Part history of the present and part social policy analysis, The Gender Regime of Anti-Liberal Hungary makes an enormous contribution to understandings of anti-democratic politics, gender relations, and social inequality in Hungary and beyond.
—Lynne Haney, Professor of Sociology, New York University, USA
This open access book explains the new type of political order that emerged in Hungary in 2010: a form of authoritarian capitalism with an anti-liberal political and social agenda. Eva Fodor analyzes an important part of this agenda that directly targets gender relations through a set of policies, political practice and discourse—what she calls “carefare.” This book reveals how carefare is the anti-liberal response to the crisis-of-care problem and establishes how a state carefare regime includes selective pronatalist measures along with the familialization and sentimentalization of care, with the purpose of disciplining women into doing an increasing amount paid and unpaid work without fair remuneration. Fodor analyzes elements of the carefare regime in depth and contrasts it to other social policy ideal-types, demonstrating how carefare is not only a set of policies targeting women, but an integral element of anti-liberal rule that can be seen emerging globally.Eva Fodor is Professor of Gender Studies and Co-Director of the Democracy Institute at the Central European University located in Budapest, Hungary and Vienna, Austria. Her research focuses on gender inequalities in the labor market and social citizenship rights from a comparative perspective.
The study focuses on the relationship between professional working conditions and burnout among Hungarian social and pedagogical professionals. The novelty of our research is that in addition to the role of mainstream work and organisational factors studies, it points out the roles of conflicts of interaction and cooperation with clients, management of cultural distance and differences, and challenges of fieldwork in the occurrence of burnout measured by an individualised scale. Two hundred and sixty-one professionals participated in our cross-sectional questionnaire survey; the data were analysed by factor analysis and multinomial logistic regression. Adjusted for work field and age, the results showed that the challenges related to clients and fieldwork, as well as job and task fitting problems played a significant role in emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation of social and pedagogical workers. In addition to that, the deficiencies related to work-motivation are positively associated with the reduced personal accomplishment of professionals. The empirical results suggest that in order to prevent the burnout of professionals, it is essential not only to create organisational motivating conditions for work, but also to prepare them for the substantive parts of work, real life situations, the associated expectations for their role and conflicts management, and provide on-going professional support.
“Progressive neoliberalism” is the current hegemonic approach to understanding social justice in Western liberal democracies. “Progressive neoliberalism” also resurrects the “deserving” vs. “undeserving” narrative that can lead to punitive and pathologising approaches to poor and unemployed people—the demographic comprising the majority of child and family social work service users. Indeed, research suggests that social workers’ attitudes towards families in poverty are strikingly congruent with “progressive neoliberalism.” This article suggests that generational changes and the particular form of group-based identity, postmodern social justice ideology often taught in social work education have unwittingly conspired to create this concerning picture. This article suggests that the resurrection of radical social work, with attention to economic inequality, is one way to counteract this trend.
By the end of the twentieth century, caring for vulnerable adults in the community had become a pervasive policy trend in the Western world. In this article, this policy is described in two phases: deinstitutionalisation and the 'home turn' that are reflected from the perspective of social inclusion. Deinstitutionalisation has meant large institutions and asylums being replaced by group homes and communal-supported housing units in the community. In the second and current phase, the 'home turn' emphasises well-developed community care, home-based services, everyone's right to have their own home, and having a valued place in the community. In this semi-systematic narrative review, the widely shared incentives, premises, and criticisms of deinstitutionalisation and the 'home turn' are mapped from the research literature. The special focus is on the possibilities of and hindrances to social inclusion in both policy phases. The research results are mixed and conflicting concerning social inclusion, but there exists a wide consensus that small housing units and supported housing with devoted workers enhance social inclusion better than big institutions. However, the prevalent view is that deinstitu-tionalisation has not fulfilled its promise of social inclusion, and although the 'home turn' is a step in the right direction, there are still problems in strengthening service users' involvement and creating inclusive and accepting communities.
In many countries, foster care is an established system for looking after children who cannot live with their birth families. It is accepted as a preferable form of provision when compared to institutional arrangements. Deinstitutionalisation is founded upon theories of child development, most particularly attachment theory, which suggest that children are more likely to flourish in family settings as opposed to institutions. The implementation of a foster care system accords with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the associated recommendations. But is it feasible to apply these rights and recommendations across the world? How transferable is the system of foster care? By making use of the literature, this paper draws attention to some of the challenges and complexities that accompany attempts at implementing this child care strategy in some of the world’s regions.
COVID-19 created an extraordinary social situation in which governments struggle to mitigate the harmful consequences of the pandemic. Challenging times show a society’s resilience and capacity for solidarity and cohesion, the government’s ability to deal with emergencies effectively, the stability and inclusiveness of political systems, and their aptitude to respect democratic values. It is particularly important to examine this period from the point of view of civil society and civil society organizations (CSOs), since civil society plays a pivotal role in the alleviation and dissipation of societal troubles associated with the epidemic, indeed a vital role in curbing the virus. The civil sector’s strength and resilience too is tested. As the studies in this Special Issue show, exploiting the potential of civil society was an option that only some countries have been able to seize - as a result of which they have effectively reduced the consequences of the calamity while increasing a sense of solidarity and belonging in their societies. Others, however, failed to recognize the importance of civil society and interpreted the situation as a “single-actor play on stage”. Neither solidarity nor cohesion play out as values in these latter cases; instead the single actor – government – grabs the opportunity to play the role of the heroic savior and the exclusive problem solver, grabbing for itself both symbolic gains and increasing concentration of power. Citizens are expected to trust no one or no organization except the charismatic leader (or party). Thereby is forged a vertical and hierarchical chain of control, rather than a horizontally linked network of trust and cooperation. The studies and commentaries in this issue cover nine countries located on an imaginary line beginning in the United Kingdom, and extending through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Turkey, Israel, India, China and South Korea, representing various socio-political and economic systems. Embedded in elaborated theoretical understandings, this introductory essay examines the research articles of this Special Issue in which authors unfold the dynamics of CSO-government relations in the context of the world pandemic. These accounts sharpen our understanding of the preexisting shape of government–CSO relations. The introduction places the countries on a scale which classifies them according to the characteristics of civil society–government relations unfolding during the pandemic. One of the endpoints is represented by those countries where the CSO’s creative and constructive responses to the social challenges were prevented or blocked by the government. In this setup, CSOs were ignored at best, and restrictions undercut their abilities to contribute to the process of mitigating the pandemic and its consequences. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of this scale, are countries where the government, both central and local, invited civil society partners in the response to COVID-19, orchestrated high-quality and multilevel cross-sectoral cooperation, and provided partners with the necessary (financial) resources. In those cases, CSOs were empowered effectively to participate in a process designed to address the epidemic and its consequences in accordance with principles of participatory democracy.
The core aspect of the child welfare and protection thought focusing on the family and channelling community resources is that in order to preserve the unity of the family, it is necessary to widely introduce from the local community the services into the family’s life, thus mobilizing the internal resources of the family, and acknowledging parenting, as a social value. Integrative child protection is a multidisciplinary and multidimensional process. The research examines how the Hungarian child protection professionals in child welfare services and centres, child protection institutions and foster care system reflect on the professional work, and on the dysfunctions identified in child protection field work. I also examine how social work training and practice can help to incorporate professional values into field work. I analyse how social assistance can be adequate in general, and how social work became asocial in the late modernity and in a rapidly changing, unpredictable service environment.
In this paper, we explore critically deinstitutionalisation reform, focusing specifically on the postsocialist region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). We argue that deinstitutionalisation in postsocialist CEE has generated re-institutionalising outcomes, including renovation of existing institutions and/or creation of new, smaller settings that have nevertheless reproduced key features of institutional life. To explain these trends, we first consider the historical background of the reform, highlighting the legacy of state socialism and the effects of postsocialist neoliberalisation. We then discuss the impact of ‘external’ drivers of deinstitutionalisation in CEE, particularly the European Union and its funding, as well as human rights discourses incorporated in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. The analysis is supported by looking at the current situation in Hungary and Bulgaria through recent reports by local civil society organisations. In conclusion, we propose some definitional tactics for redirecting existing resources towards genuine community-based services.
Our paper aims to demonstrate that social structure has significant impact on the formation of
interpersonal relations. We review and analyse the characteristics of ego-centric interpersonal
networks of Hungarians based on data from nationally representative adult population surveys
between the mid-1980’s up to 2015. We focus especially on core discussion networks, friendship
ties and weak ties and analyse how the transition to market economy influenced interpersonal
relationships. As expected, the large-scale social changes brought about by the transition
changed interpersonal networks as well. During the first decade of the transition (in the 1990’s)
one could not witness a significant change of personal networks, nonetheless the adaptation
process was easier for people supported by strong, traditional family ties. Non-kin ties, especially
friendships seem to gain significance at the expense of kin relationships. Overall, resources
available through weak ties seem to be decreasing.
The pluralisation of family forms significantly influences several aspects of family solidarity and the solidarity between generations. Its analysis is made difficult by its complexity: while values research into consensual and normative solidarity as well as the literature on the subject, deal with changes of emotional solidarity predominantly within theoretical frameworks, social and functional solidarity are examined through generational transfers. This paper attempts to provide an overview of the Hungarian conditions along the six interpretative dimensions elaborated by Vern L. Bengtson and Petrice S. Oyama with the help of earlier Hungarian empirical findings. The paper does not offer new empirical results; its primary achievement is being to first to approach the phenomenon of family solidarity with all its ramifications in Hungary in an interdisciplinary context. The paper also attempts to reflect upon the fact that while family solidarity is undoubtedly a positive phenomenon at the level of the individual as well as that of the family (due to its role in protecting the self, identity, and supporting existential security), from a social point of view family and generational solidarity is a significant and increasingly dominant factor in regenerating social inequalities. © 2017, Hungarian Sociological Association. All rights reserved.
The paper claims that through its genealogy, Social Movement Studies (SMS) as a discipline incorporated a time-space bias on postwar Western affluent societies which defined the way it conceived of movements and their socio-institutional contexts. Two interrelated effects of that bias were the assumption that material claims belong to the past, and a focus on short-term contextual factors in movement dynamics. As a new wave of movements after 2008 raise material claims in Western contexts again, earlier frameworks of SMS are being transformed so as to capture the relationship of movements to long-term structural processes. However, a newly forming consensus that links new movements to the “crisis of democratic capitalism” seems to maintain the bias on Western experience. East Central European (ECE) countries, where austerity and democratization came hand in hand after 1990, hardly fit that picture. The paper asks whether new transformations within SMS, and an increased attention toward ECE movements due to their new proliferation provides a possibility for comparative perspectives beyond the time-space bias. It identifies a tendency in SMS of post-socialism to translate the time-space bias of SMS frameworks into a normative framework of development toward Western models (or lack thereof), which worked to obscure the long-term history of movements in ECE, as well as forms of popular politics and state-society relations different from Western models. The paper proposes a world-systems approach to the task of comparative understanding of movements in different contexts, and illustrates its possible gains through the conceptualization of new middle class movements in ECE.
The paper addresses this issue’s subject of the question of East/West hierarchies in academe, and the conditions of the epistemic position and public authority of East and Central European scholarship, through a case study of a major institute of Hungarian reform economics, the Financial Research Institute (FRI), and a moment of political critique by its experts in 1986, asserted in the political pamphlet ‘Change and Reform’. The paper points out connections between world economic and geopolitical shifts, consequent reorganizations of Hungary’s world economic integration. It addresses changes to the institutional power and political position of reform economics at FRI, from the perspective of conditions set by the relationship between import substitution industrialization, the pressure for hard currency created by technological imports, and the changing global economic conditions affecting the availability of technology and capital. Through placing the expert and political critique developed at FRI into that context, the paper contributes to a perspective on ECE social science that goes beyond measuring local scientific paradigms to Western ones, and which understands the epistemic position and public authority of local social science as shaped by formative interactions embedded in a common global history.
Research has shown that the last two decades has seen the rise of voluntarism and more particular a reframing and re-enactment of the ideal-type citizen as a moral subject of responsible communities. In this chapter I ask how citizens are enacted by policy practitioners through different policy practices. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a deprived urban neighborhood, I analyse the policy practices of neighborhood gatherings in an Amsterdam neighborhood that are part of a community participation programme called Neighborhood Circle. Through these gatherings policy practitioners try to stimulate and encourage residents to perform voluntary tasks in the neighborhood. I will argue that in these meetings policy practitioners arouse ‘profound coziness’: a sphere animated by fellow feeling and imagine residents to be activated by the capacity to feel and act upon these feelings, rather than the capacity to think and deliberate rationally. Through these practices different ‘citizens’ emerge. On the one hand the ‘respected citizen’ embodied by (post)migrant women who feel proud to finally be able to participate and recognized by policy practitioners. On the other hand the ‘resentful citizen’ embodied by autochthonous volunteers who feel unrecognized by practitioners and feel publicly displaced by (post)migrant women. I show that the ideal-type citizen that is enacted by policy practitioners singles out other expressions of citizenship, leaving some volunteers in the neighborhood to feel displaced unable to act and a sense of fellow feeling and community far away.
The deinstitutionalization policy sought to prevent unnecessary admission and retention in institutions for six populations: elderly people, children, people with mental illness or developmental disabilities, criminal offenders, and, more recently, the homeless. It also sought to develop community alternatives for housing, treating, and habilitating or rehabilitating these groups. U.S. institutional populations, however, have increased since the policy’s inception by 212%. As implemented, deinstitutionalization initiated a process that involved a societal shift in the type of institutions and institutional alternatives used to house these groups, often referred to as transinstitutionalization. This entry considers how this shift has affected the care and control of such individuals from political, economic, legal, and social perspectives, as well as suggestions for a truer implementation of deinstitutionalization.
Keywords: community care, deinstitutionalization, transinstitutionalization
Debates on the post-socialist welfare state evolved in two main directions. While some scholars have maintained that they would eventually converge with Western European patterns, some others have pointed at the need of a more ‘particularist’ approach, seeking to demonstrate that post-socialist states might follow a different and non-traditional path, individually or as a region in terms of welfare provision. Our current work is an attempt to contribute to the debate on the direction of post-socialist welfare state adaptation by engaging with corruption and welfare state/public sector failure in post-socialist spaces. In particular, emphasis is put on the tactics and strategies used by public workers and citizens to cope with incomplete and inadequate public social welfare provision. Rooted in different disciplinary schools, and making use of diverse methodological and theoretical approaches, the papers of this special issue provide further evidence to rechart the relationship between the public welfare sector, citizens and the current economic transition, a commonality that allows us to point at alternatives to the capitalist model that for some time has been seen as the only option. In line with our previous works, in this special issue we explore the possibility that informality and formality are complementary or that informality may ‘replace’ formal processes and structures. In other words, where the welfare state does not penetrate, welfare might be spread also through informal channels and it might redefine the very dynamics underpinning of a society.
Este artículo aborda los retos de la reforma de los sistemas de bienestar y protección de la infancia en Hungría y Rumanía –dos países en transición del socialismo al capitalismo– y la repercusión en los niños, jóvenes, familias y profesionales. El contexto del debate lo constituye una breve revisión de las características sociales, políticas y económicas de ambos países y de la evolución de sus sistemas de bienestar infantil. El énfasis se pone en los esfuerzos realizados para desinstitucionalizar a los niños de las grandes instituciones y desarrollar servicios locales de prevención y alternativas a la asistencia institucional. Los dos países tenían puntos de partida diferentes a la hora de transformar el sistema de protección de la infancia. Rumanía solo comenzó después de 1989, bajo presiones políticas y económicas, con escasa iniciativa interna, mientras que Hungría comenzó a mediados de los años 80, estando más avanzada en el desarrollo de servicios alternativos que otros países en transición. A pesar de que los datos estadísticos muestran un descenso en la población objeto de asistencia y un cambio de la institucionalización al acogimiento familiar, lo que demuestra avance, la lenta aplicación de las reformas da lugar a grandes desfases entre la legislación inspirada en la UNCR y los planes nacionales y la calidad de vida y bienestar de los niños. Entre los factores que explican esta discrepancia se encuentra la deficiente inversión, la falta de profesionalización y fiabilidad y el escaso uso de la investigación y evaluación para esclarecer el vínculo entre servicios y necesidades.
This article focuses on state foster care as a case study in the (re)configuration and negotiation of boundaries between work and non-work. Foster care can be seen as occupying a liminal position between the domains of ‘work’ and ‘family’, requiring management of the tensions presumed to exist between competing value systems. Through a review of research and policy developments, the relevant boundary issues are contextualized and explored, drawing examples from areas such as remuneration, taxation and benefits, employment status, work-life balance and the labour process. It is argued that while foster care shares the hybridity and ensuing tensions of care work more generally, the spatial and temporal integration of work and family and the high level of state regulation give them a particular intensity. In turn, this offers great potential for the study of work/non-work boundaries. Possible research avenues are set out.
Using Latour's concepts of "actor-network" and "translation," the authors show that neoliberalism's success in Eastern Europe is best analyzed not as an institutional form diffused along the nodes of a network, but as itself an actor-network based on a particular translation strategy that construes socialism as a laboratory of economic knowledge. They argue that socialism was made into a laboratory of economic knowledge during the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s and 1930s. An extensive debate during the Cold War is also documented and shows that a transnational network continued to be organized around attempts to connect the results obtained in the socialist laboratory with debates and struggles in Western economics. Finally, the drafting of transition blueprints in postcommunist Eastern Europe after 1989, with the participation of American economists, is shown to be a continuation of this transnational network.
This paper examines whether it is possible to recognise specific patterns of institutionally regulated downward (towards children) and upward (towards the old) intergenerational obligations with regard to care and financial support, and to identify specific country profiles and clusters of countries in Europe. Based on the three-fold conceptualisation of familialism by default, supported familialism and de-familialisation, and using a complex set of indicators, we describe how countries, by means of policies, allocate intergenerational responsibilities between families and the state, also paying attention to their gender impact. The study includes all 27 EU countries and for the first time offers a comparative overview of a diversified set of policies with regard to both children and the old. It concludes that although specific policy profiles emerge with regard to the two sets of obligations, these do not always coincide. Furthermore, contrary to widespread opinion, supported familialism and de-familialisation are not always contrasting policy approaches. In some countries, they actually represent part of an integrated approach to public support of intergenerational obligations. Moreover, the gender impact of supported familialism may be different and even contrary, depending on the specific instrument. Finally, once the road of oversimplification is excluded, only one statistically sound cluster of countries emerges. It is, however, possible to detect groups of countries that are similar. These only partly overlap with prevalent welfare regime types.
Anthropological Quarterly 79.3 (2006) 463-482
"Orientalism" as a critical category was instituted by Edward Said in 1978. For him orientalism is, first of all, a set of discursive practices through which the West structured the imagined East politically, socially, military, ideologically, scientifically and artistically. Orientalism is also "a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and…'the Occident'" (Said 1978: 2) The Orient as such exists and real people live in the region concerned, but the European representation of these people is a typical cultural creation that enables those powerful to legitimize their domination over those subjugated and conquered. The oriental Other constitutes the alter ego of the West and a perpetuation of this dichotomy proves that a powerful cultural hegemony is still at work. Discursive hardening permits politically stronger groups to define weaker groups.
Orientalism has been received both approvingly and critically. The most important critiques refer to the fact that "Said's work frequently relapses into the essentializing modes it attacks and is ambivalently enmeshed in the totalizing habits of western humanism" (Clifford 1988: 271). Critique notwithstanding, the book inspired a sequel of works, some of them directly addressing Eastern Europe (Wolff 1994) and the Balkans (Todorova 1997; Bakić-Hayden 1995; Bakić-Hayden and Hayden 1992; Hayden 2000). Wolff wrote about the invention of Eastern Europe in the period of Enlightenment by Western intellectuals, travelers and writers in a style similar to Said's. Todorova is more specific. She focuses on the Balkans and asserts that in Western eyes this region appears, so to speak, as "neither fish, nor fowl," semi-oriental, not fully European, semi-developed, and semi-civilized. "Unlike orientalism, which is a discourse about imputed opposition, balkanism is a discourse about an imputed ambiguity" (Todorova 1997: 17). An ambiguity that raises anxiety. The Balkans emerge as the product of attempted Europeanization (westernization, democratization), a region that permanently has to shed "the last residue of imperial [i.e. Ottoman] legacy" (p. 13) by implementing rationalism, secularism, commercial activities and industry. The work in imagology, the term she borrows from Milan Kundera, despite being narrowed and redefined, also focuses on the way the West has created its "quasi-colony" which has to be dominated and subordinated both politically and intellectually.
While discussing orientalism, Said, Wolff and Todorova touch upon several issues vital for today's anthropology that I will partly, although at times only indirectly, address later. All of these revolve around the issue of alterity and the epistemological validity of the concept of the Other. Thus, one can recognize that they are concerned with (1) the modes by which the Other is created. In anthropology, as well as in the works cited, the Other often assumes the status of (2) a universal cognitive category in the factory of social and individual identity that divides the universe into "us" and "them." However, it also figures as (3) an analytical concept that enables authors to construct narration and at the same time, somehow paradoxically, and in the most subtle approaches, to (4) deconstruct the category itself.
In social life, the process of making the Other assumes various forms. Shifts in collective identities and the meaning of "the Other" have become a part of the transformations in Europe after 1989. There are several factors influencing these alterations, but one among them seems especially salient: a restructuring of the perception of social inequalities by the hegemonic liberal ideology. The degree to which various countries, authorities, social groups and individuals have embraced the free market and democracy—always evaluated by those powerful who set rules of the game—has become a yardstick for classifying different regions, countries and groups as fitting more or less into the category of "us," i.e. "(post)modern-Western-liberals," to paraphrase Rorty (1991: 198-199). In the Cold War period, from a Western perspective, the Iron Curtain set a clear-cut division into "us" and "them" which was...
This paper connects research on deinstitutionalization as a dominant paradigm in service provision for children and adults with disabilities to the research on transformations from state socialism to neoliberal capitalism in a long durée perspective. It focuses on the transformations of care practices and infrastructures in terms of biopolitical shifts. By building on ethnographic fieldwork surrounding a now closed neuropsychiatric hospital for children in Romania, interviews and informal conversations with formerly institutionalized children from the institution, carers, professionals and volunteers, it traces both the transformations of the institution and its follow-up services from the 1950s to 2015, as well as the practices prevalent in these institutions and the ways in which these reflected dominant moral and political orders and how they were enacted in everyday life. It concludes that although biopolitical infrastructures and practices have changed greatly during the period under study, continuities can be observed in the ways in which productivist logics still work to exclude as well as include people with disabilities – thus perpetuating practices of hierarchization in relation to social inclusion based on economic criteria. Moreover, biopolitical shifts were not linear, but involved contradictory movements and logics, and entanglements of multiple transformation processes.
Care of the State blends archival, oral history, interview and ethnographic data to study the changing relationships and kinship ties of children who lived in state residential care in socialist Hungary. It advances anthropological understanding of kinship and the workings of the state by exploring how various state actors and practices shaped kin ties. Jennifer Rasell shows that norms and processes in the Hungarian welfare system placed symbolic weight on nuclear families whilst restricting and devaluing other possible ties for children in care, in particular to siblings, friends, welfare workers and wider communities. In focussing on care practices both within and outside kin relations, Rasell shows that children valued relationships that were produced through personal attention, engagement and emotional connections. Highlighting the diversity of experiences in state care in socialist Hungary, this book’s nuanced insights represent an important contribution to research on children’s well-being and family policies in Central-Eastern Europe and beyond.
This article compares how the global policy of deinstitutionalisation (DI) of child welfare travelled, was translated and institutionalised in two post-Soviet countries – Russia and Kazakhstan. These countries share a Soviet legacy of child-welfare systems dominated by residential care and have recently introduced similar DI reforms based on the global child rights framework. However, despite similar institutional legacies and post-Soviet conditions, the DI reforms have produced different outcomes in terms of the scope and pace of the institutionalisation of DI policy. In Russia, the DI of child welfare has been a fast-moving and sweeping reform, while in Kazakhstan, the implementation of DI has been an incremental and gradual process. We argue that the institutionalisation of the DI policy in two post-Soviet contexts was an outcome of the interplay between structural factors and the agency of policy actors who translated global DI ideology into domestic policy discourses. Yet, they were ‘sold’ with quite different discursive frames – one nationalist, another one trans-nationalist – in these two countries. We claim that the geopolitical position of a country is also a significant factor for framing and thus, in the end, in how child-welfare systems have been reformed.
Early childhood prevention programs, fueled by the idea of social investment, have been the focus of policy making for a few decades in Europe and the USA. Amongst these, the Sure Start program in Hungary has evolved into a nationwide service incorporated into the child welfare system. The program aims to combat social exclusion and compensate unequal opportunities related to socio-spatial inequalities through providing assistance, developmental intervention, and social activities to families. The article examines the socio-spatial consequences of the program by bringing together an analysis of the current regulatory and financial framework and the everyday working of several Sure Start houses in different parts of the country. The analysis relies on the findings of two post-doctoral research projects (NRDIO PD 112659 and Premium PD 3300405), combining sociological and anthropological fieldwork in three settlements. The study reveals that the current institutional structure is based on structural deficiencies and institutional asymmetries characterized by the disproportionate allocation of resources and obligations for Sure Start houses. This results in large differences regarding the implementation of the program in different localities, which are largely influenced by the positionality of the settlements, as well as the resources that the maintainers of the service can draw on. The article argues that in its current form the program appears to strengthen rather than alleviate socio-spatial inequalities, as it is exactly the most disadvantaged remote rural places that lack the resources that would be needed to compensate for their multiple disadvantages.
This article will argue that Nancy Fraser’s (2017, 2019) notion of ‘progressive neoliberalism’ provides a conceptual lens that can be effective in the development of a critical analysis of mental health policy in England and Wales during the period of deinstitutionalisation and community care. Mental health policies that came steeped in an originally progressive discourse of choice, empowerment and wider service user rights were introduced by governments largely committed to the free market. In the UK and US, this produced a contradictory position where moves towards a community-oriented vision of mental health service provision were overseen by administrations that were committed to a small state and fiscal conservatism. There were similar developments in other areas. Fraser (2017, 2019) terms this mixture of socially progressive rhetoric and market economics ‘progressive neoliberalism’. Fraser’s model of progressive neoliberalism argues that neoliberalism has colonised progressive discourses. The article outlines this theoretical model and then applies it to the development of community care. It argues that policy responses to the perceived failings of community care focused on increased powers of surveillance, including the introduction of legislation that allows for compulsory treatment in the community. This focus on legislation was at the expense of social investment. The article concludes that the introduction of austerity in the UK has strengthened these trends. For example, The Coalition government (2010–15) introduced new mental health policies such as ‘No decision about me without me’, which emphasised inclusive approaches to service organisation and delivery. At the same time, it followed social and economic policies that increased inequality, reduced welfare payments and entitlements, and cut services. These are all factors that contribute to higher levels of mental distress across society.
Modern-day conceptions of American childhood and family situate children, and the labor required to rear them, outside of the wage labor market. This ethnographic study of a foster care adoption program shows how board payments elicit commodification anxiety at this local site, and in American culture more broadly. In using board payments as a litmus test to weed out parents with profiteering motives, workers inadvertently play into a model that devalues care work—which is disproportionately done by women and minorities. This study places everyday casework into the context of welfare state history and the history of foster care, and describes troubling similarities between the profiteering parent of foster care and the stereotype of the welfare queen used to garner public support for the 1996 welfare reforms. I argue that a socially just approach to caregiving must abandon the fiction that sentiments and markets operate in separate spheres.
In this paper I suggest that we might understand some features of contemporary populism by reworking the concept of ‘authoritarian populism’ first proposed by Stuart Hall in his analysis of ‘Thatcherism’. Following a brief review of my earlier analytics of ‘governing through freedom’, I suggest that while the political movements identified by the names of Trump, Wilders, Le Pen, the Austrian Freedom Party, the True Finns etc. may be ephemeral, it is worth considering whether they are beginning to articulate a new set of rationalities and technologies for governing ‘after neoliberalism’. I analyse some key elements of these movements, the new epistemologies that they employ and the ethopolitics that they espouse, and suggest that the key operative concepts may be ‘the people’, security and control. We may still be ‘birds on the wire’ as Leonard Cohen once put it, but perhaps what we are enjoined to seek in these strategies for ‘governing liberty’ is not so much freedom but security.
In the mid-1980s, Daniels coined the term ‘invisible work’ to characterize those types of women’s unpaid labour – housework and volunteer work – which had been culturally and economically devalued. Scholars have since applied this term to many types of labour, yet there is little clarity or consensus as to what ‘invisibility’ means and what mechanisms produce it. Through an in-depth analysis of this far-reaching literature, the present article seeks to reconstruct ‘invisible work’ as a more robust analytical concept. It argues that work is made invisible through three intersecting sociological mechanisms – here identified as cultural, legal and spatial mechanisms of invisibility. Though they differ in function and degree, each of these mechanisms obscures the fact that work is performed and therefore contributes to its economic devaluation. Ultimately, this revised concept of invisible work offers scholars a new analytic tool to untangle the systems that produce and reproduce disadvantage for workers.
Closure of the remaining institutions where some people with intellectual disabilities live is increasingly urgent following the Australian Government commitment to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the National Disability Strategy, and the full National Disability Insurance Scheme. How can the
transformative opportunities that this new policy context opens for people leaving institutional care be realised? This article analyses the rights of people leaving institutions by drawing on the data from an evaluation of the closure of three New South Wales institutions and the related development of four new facilities. The closures aimed to achieve a better quality of life but results were mixed. While participation, growing and learning, health and wellbeing, social relationships, and autonomy improved for some people, results were not consistent between sites and in some cases people were actually worse off than before. Community inclusion was not the focus of the closures and social isolation negatively affected the quality of life of people who were relocated. The implications are that remaining closures must apply a rights-based framework rather than building new facilities to meet legislative rights obligations. This includes: taking a person-centred approach to housing support; using closure as a transformative opportunity for community living; identifying people’s
choices through informed supported decision-making; applying sophisticated change management with families, staff and unions; and using the resources, expertise and successful closure experiences from the disability community to inform the process and opportunities for housing support. Applying the framework could draw on Australian and international evidence and experience.
Crisis Assessment and Treatment Teams (CAT Teams) were established in Victoria, Australia, in 1988 to provide crisis intervention and home treatment as an alternative to hospitalisation for the seriously mentally ill. These teams were set up to prepare for the closure of the large-scale, state-run psychiatric institutions over the following decade. Increasingly, concerns are being expressed in the media over the failure of the new community-based services to provide adequate care and protection to the mentally ill. This paper offers a preliminary attempt to make sociological sense of one such aspect of deinstitutionalisation, the major changes that have occurred in the practice and delivery of CAT Team services since inception. I suggest that a shift has taken place from a therapeutic consciousness, centred on providing home treatment, to a risk consciousness, centred on protocols to evaluate and document a client’s ‘risk factors’. Drawing on my personal experiences as a clinician in a Melbourne-based CAT Team since 1991, I probe these changes through the lens of sociology. In so doing, I utilise several insights from Nikolas Rose’s (1998) analysis of risk as a foundation for social intervention.
In this article, the author examines Romanian child protection reforms during European Union (EU) accession as a case of externally facilitated modernization aimed at solving acute social problems. The data for this case study came primarily from fifty-three unstructured interviews with civil servants, civil society representatives, and EU officials. The author finds that in a similar manner to other externally driven modernization projects, the belief according to which Western institutions constituted a universal blueprint, applicable regardless of particular contexts and historical legacies, led to unintended consequences. What is more, because the reformers did not envisage that Western institutions might carry their own pathologies, they ended up replicating some of these pathologies. The study suggests that the goal of externally facilitated public policy should not be to create replicas of Western institutions but to spur local innovation that takes advantage of successful Western institutional logics.
This paper argues for a relational perspective in the social sciences that sees the former Second World as connected to both the former First and Third Worlds. Rather than the mono-directionality, especially between the First and Second Worlds, assumed by many modernisation and globalisation approaches, this article suggests that these “worlds” have been mutually constitutive. Making globalisation, postcolonial and postsocialist studies speak to each other, the article places postsocialism in a new global context. Relationality has consequences not only for how we see the ontology but also the political possibilities of the postsocialist global. As such, this article develops a constructive critique of Nancy Fraser's concept of the postsocialist condition by demonstrating how class and identity politics have been strategically fused in the region during and after state socialism, relying primarily on research in Hungary. Empirically the article argues that the interaction of state socialist and postsocialist histories with new Western projects of the politics of recognition—such as cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, global civil society, and postnationalism—had the effect of impoverishing national public discourses, which led to undemocratic results in Eastern Europe, and created a favourable atmosphere for the extreme right wing.