Debate: Social resistance and the absent utopia: comments on Hartley Dean's article Social rights and social resistance

This article focuses on conceptual and methodological problems in the transition from normative conceptions of social rights to more general strategies of social policy. In a discussion of Hartley Dean's article Social Rights and Social Resistance, the author argues that relevant "rights strategies" within social policy in general transcends the traditional dichotomy, assumed by Dean, between structural approaches and more agent-oriented approaches. In line with this, arguments are presented for the view that the denial of strategies concerning social rights, categorised as opportunistic or anarchistic by Dean, necessitates the formulation of realistic and substantial goal for strivings within social policy. Furthermore, the author claims that the conceptual elaboration of "social rights" does not in itself have any definite and direct consequences for the field of social policy, where material and symbolic power is more relevant. To transcend the criticised approaches of anarchism and opportunism, there still remains to be formulated a strategy of action.     

Christian democracy, social democracy and the paradoxes of earnings-related social security

This article compares the retirement policies of Belgium and Sweden in order to reveal the different incentive structures built into the pensions systems prevailing in countries that are taken to represent different approaches to welfare capitalism. It addresses the question of why in a Christian Democratic welfare state that is said to grant pensions rights on the basis of merit and past work performance one can find extremely low labour-force participation rates among elderly workers, while in a Social Democratic welfare state that is supposed to grant pension rights relatively independent of past labour-market performance, one can find quite high participation rates amongst that section of the labour force. This apparent paradox is explained in terms of the different purposes of the early-retirement schemes in the two countries: in Belgium they were primarily part of a strategy to combat (youth) unemployment, in Sweden they had more to do with reforms that sought to accomplish a 'humanisation of work' by softening the abrupt transition from work into retirement.     

Levels or worlds of welfare? Assessing social rights and social stratification in Northern and Southern countries

Since Esping‐Andersen's Three Worlds, it has become a truism of welfare state research that welfare states do not vary linearly along a single dimension but have to be conceptualized as multidimensional phenomena that cluster into types caused by the political economy of class coalitions. However, when moving beyond the 18 original countries of Esping‐Andersen's analysis, the situation is less clear. Although additional worlds have been identified in the Global North and the Global South, these are usually not conceptualized along the same dimensions as the original three worlds and are rarely empirically compared with them. This paper tackles these omissions by explicitly comparing Northern and Southern countries within Esping‐Andersen's framework. It poses the question whether the central insight of welfare state research, namely, that there are not just gradual differences between welfare states, but different types with qualitative differences, expands beyond classic welfare states. Based on newly generated data on social rights and social stratification, we employ cluster analysis with 45 Northern and Southern countries. This analysis produces mixed results. We do find different types of welfare states with qualitative differences, but these do not fully correspond to Esping‐Andersen's Three Worlds. Moreover, our findings also point to a conceptual issue in welfare regime research: regimes are not just defined and measured in terms of different logics of welfare provision but also take into account degrees of welfare stateism. We argue that this issue is poised to become ever more pressing with the geographical expansion of welfare state research.     

Who is supported? Social security for families with children between family law and social security regulations in Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom

Individual and collective welfare lies at the heart of deliberations about contemporary welfare states. It is not always recognized that social security provisions interact closely with systems for the support of families and for labour market participation. This paper focuses on the interaction of institutional arrangements providing social security for families with children. The analytic framework incorporates family and marital law and social security provisions. Three European welfare states, Belgium Germany and the United Kingdom — with divergent systems of family support — are compared in detail. Among the questions to be posed are: How do these societies organize their support and family-related activities? And what are the rights for individual women, men and children? Among the indicators to be considered are whether the basis for entitlement to social security is individualized or based on a collective unit such as the couple or the household; the extent to which access relates to marriage status or the legitimacy of the children; and the employment-related or universal nature of benefit. The different family models underlying institutions are analysed.     

Chinese seniors’ attitudes towards government responsibility for social welfare: Self‐interest,collectivism orientation and regional disparities

Government responsibility for social welfare remains a significant issue in the field of social welfare. Public welfare attitudes not only refer to the social needs of members of society, but also are viewed as the basis for government responsibility for social welfare. Data used in this study came from the Moderate Universalist Social Welfare Survey with a final sample of 1,166 seniors from four Chinese cities in 2012. This study examined seniors’ attitudes towards government responsibility for providing specific welfare and mixed welfare. It concluded that seniors’ welfare attitudes share the traits of self‐interest in general. Seniors’ perception of social rights and cities of residence were two important factors associated with welfare attitudes in both aspects of specific and mixed welfare. The stronger seniors’ social rights perception was the more favourable were the attitudes they held towards government responsibility for social welfare, indicating the collectivism orientation of their welfare attitudes.     

The client interview and the context

Based on analysis of 60 tape-recorded or observed interviews from a Danish social welfare office the article examines the Lipssky-like question: How and to what extent are macro structures such as social legislation and local municipal rules brought into real live existence in the meeting between case workers and clients? To what extent do the case workers show rule-conforming practice? Illustrated by several extracts, it is shown that the legislation is not a simple governing instance and that the case workers do not serve as simple tools for fulfilling decisions made as formal rules at a macro level. On the contrary, the case workers made use of those rules and official client or benefit categories that seemed helpful to them for their own professional purposes, and so did the clients in order to secure their interests. All in all, the case workers showed a considerable distance to social security office which was presented for the clients as distant and partly hostile towards the clients.     

Social security law: what does the politics of ‘conditional welfare’ mean for review and client representation?

This paper reflects on aspects of the meaning of new social security as ‘conditional welfare’ (such as welfare quarantining) and its implications for client rights, advocacy and public policy accountability. The paper considers the rising reliance on conditional welfare and related measures such as ‘linked‘, localised or place‐based welfare, and the increasing complexity of welfare discretions. The paper essentially makes the argument that it is past time to begin to debate the pros and cons for Australia of conditional welfare as it impacts on administrative law and new forms of welfare advocacy.     

Deservingness in the eye of the beholder: A vignette study on the moderating role of cultural profiles in supporting activation policies

People support welfare policy if its beneficiaries are perceived as deserving of support. This study found that individuals’ cultural worldviews play a role in assessing the deservingness of welfare recipients. We investigated whether four different cultural profiles find some beneficiaries to be more deserving than others and how this relates to support for social rights (welfare benefit, retraining, job coach) and obligations (mandatory volunteering). A Dutch vignette experiment showed that reasons for supporting social rights differ between people with different cultural profiles: equality advocates grant support if beneficiaries are needy, while the centre and trusting groups do so when beneficiaries reciprocate. We found that irrespective of deservingness, people with equality‐advocating and trusting profiles tend to be more supportive of social rights, whereas socially discontented citizens tend to emphasise the importance of obligations. In general, obliging beneficiaries to do volunteer work was deemed appropriate by almost all respondents in the study, whereas their cultural values determined the ways in which they considered social rights to have been earned.     

Developments in East Asian Welfare Studies

This essay in introduction is to the field of study, rather than to the present, itself distinguished, collection of papers. As such, it opens with a series of ‘flashbacks’: to the ways in which social policy, and the study of social policy, developed out of the interaction between Western welfare states (in this case Britain) and Asia Pacific. The main body of the article then charts the increasing presence of East Asian modes of welfare within comparative social policy, before going on to distinguish between the different types of approach to East Asian welfare study which have so far been adopted. Two sets of three‐part criteria have been adopted for the purposes of classification: focusing first on the dimensions (single case studies of specific countries; East Asia as a region; East Asia in comparison with other parts of the world) and second on the level of issues (matters of policy; of welfare system; of welfare regime) characteristic of each study in question. The article concludes with a restatement of its purpose: not to question the adequacy of hitherto Western (notably, Esping‐Andersen) approaches to the study of welfare regimes, but to demonstrate the need for a substantive extension to their scope.     

Street‐level discretion,emotional labour and welfare frontline staff at the Australian employment service providers

Despite the current controversial debates about discretion in public bureaucracies in general, and in welfare agencies in particular, the current literature on street‐level bureaucracy mainly assumes that discretion is a distinctive feature of the daily work of public servants. Nonetheless, a pertinent question has not specifically been asked in this literature, that is, given the context of privatisation and increased welfare conditionality in the welfare sector that are seriously challenging welfare frontline staff's commitment to social justice and human rights‐based practices, what are forms of street‐level discretion likely to contribute to improving the quality of welfare services? In this study, we attempt to address this question by exploring discretion displayed by welfare frontline staff in four Australian employment service providers. We argue that emotional labour, especially when being informed by critical empathy, is an important and effective form of street‐level discretion that welfare frontline workers can perform to better support welfare recipients and minimise the punitive aspects of welfare policy.     

The Greens and Social Policy: Movements,Politics and Practice?

The central aim of this paper is to show how different types of green movement respond to questions of social policy. An important factor in this is a difference in attitudes to the state between more anarchistic greens and those greens that are prepared to accept a permanent and/or strategic role for the state. The paper is divided into two parts. In part one, after defning the green movement, it outlines how different green social movements from local groups, direct action protestors, established environmental groups and green political parties, have developed analyses, responses and alternatives to social policy issues. Part two of the paper looks at some of the ideological/theoretical debates within green politics with regard to social policy, with particular regard to the role of the state. It goes on to look at some of the ways in which European green parties have viewed social policy, and at proposals they have advanced for moving the aim of social policy from "welfare" to "well-being". It concludes with suggesting that the "post-materialist" characterization of green politics is very wide of the mark in terms of the range of analyses and policy alternatives greens have put forward, from health, education and drugs to transport. The central and long-standing green concern with lessening socioeconomic inequalities (but without relying on indiscriminate and unsustainable "economic growth") means that in terms of social policy, green politics can be seen as an "environmentalism of the poor", concerned with "materialist" issues.     

“作为武器的弱者身份”：农民维权抗争的底层政治

社会弱者并不必然在任何时候都处于弱势地位,有时甚至拥有优势。在评述和借鉴农民维权抗争,特别是体现为“弱者的武器”的日常抵抗的相关研究的基础上,本文将农民底层政治的自主性作为分析农民的维权抗争的基点,同时将关注焦点放在农民维权抗争的日常事件上,从而发现了农民的另一种底层抗争的政治机制——“作为武器的弱者身份”。本研究论述了弱者所具有的隐性力量及以弱者身份作为武器进行抗争的作为,即回答了“作为武器的弱者身份”何以可能与何以可为的问题,从而对学界以往对弱者的传统认识提出了修正。本文最后指出,“作为武器的弱者身份”的抗争机制的研究对于社会管理与发展具有更深远的意义。     

The Social Security Act: Just Another Act or a Blueprint for Social Justice?

This paper takes the opportunity of the Social Security Review to reflect on the meaning of social security reform. It argues that traditional conceptions of the welfare state are unduly narrow and atomistic, concentrating on vesting individuals with social security rights similar to private law notions of contract or properly, and the securing of those rights from depredations by the state. In contrast it contends that social security properly rests on a notion of social rights to participation in society. This is a positive, reciprocal relationship between citizen and state in which both sides have rights and obligations in furthering participation in core social, economic and community activities. The article assays a preliminary statement of ‘social rights’ and considers how new legislation might better harmonize with it.     

Risk, Contingency and the Third Way: Evidence from the BHPS and Qualitative Studies

New Labour's "Third Way" in welfare derives its intellectual underpinning from "risk society" theory as developed in the UK by Anthony Giddens. The theory suggests that the crucial changes affecting citizens of modern societies are globalization, the post-traditional social order and social reflexivity. These changes lead people to question authority and to wish to take greater responsibility for meeting their needs. Applied to welfare, the analysis suggests a diminution in the role of government, greater proactivity by citizens and subsidiarity favouring community groups and also the private sector. It buttresses Third Way calls for "no rights without responsibility" and "equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome". This paper reports qualitative and quantitative research which indicates that the risks of modern social life are experienced differently by different social groups. Risk society theories assume value consensus. They understand social change to have a common impact across society, leading to a common response, and direct attention away from the particular needs and aspirations of more vulnerable groups. The risk society thesis is class ideology masquerading as social theory: it serves the interests of those already privileged in a more flexible society by obscuring the needs and aspirations of the more vulnerable, who already bear most of the burdens of social change.     

Can welfare reform make disability disappear?

I argue here that, while welfare reform policy and the disability rights movement appear to share a common agenda based on the belief that disability is a social creation which can be remedied by way of increased access to employment and social resources, their world views and objectives could not be more at odds. By demonstrating how welfare reform policy makers have opportunistically appropriated the language which frames the disability rights movement and, in the style of Orwell's Newspeak, used it to conceal an agenda which actually aims for the reverse of what it promises, I seek to show that what is being promoted as a means for increased access to a better life for disabled people could be more aptly described as a gateway to poverty.     

How to start to talk about money: developing clienthood in interaction in a social welfare office

The process of defining clienthood, in terms of real-time talk and the inherently local linguistic and interactive practices, which highlights the need for an explication of the interaction order, is analyzed in this article. The tracking of the objectives and patterns of actions of local interaction in a Finnish social welfare office between social workers and longterm clients reveals the ongoing negotiating about meaning, rights and social positions and the central role of institutional speech in the constitution of a social welfare office. Basic interactional solutions for managing the institutional task of dealing with the applicant's interested claims was found. The social workers could, using different practices, initiate the treatment of the question of benefits so that the participants, with mutual alignment, avoided representing the clients interested claims. Also the clients could initiate the treatment, but the social workers did not align with the initiations that could be classified as interested.     

Government for the people: the substantive elements of democracy

The most widely used understandings of the concept of democracy – normative, procedural and institutional – focus on its methods and approaches. This article argues that democracy needs also to be understood in terms of its substantive implications. Democratic rights include not only the civil and political rights associated with liberal democracy, but also the economic and social rights promoted in industrially developed countries. Liberal principles promote democracy and economic development. Social rights have developed, not just through state action, but through the independent establishment of solidarities facilitated by the exercise of democratic rights. Every established democracy has a system of social welfare provision. This is not coincidental. Democracy, economic development and social protection are intimately linked.     

Familiar subjects? Domestic violence and child welfare

Historically, domestic violence and child welfare have been seen as largely separate concerns. Over the last decade domestic violence has finally gained a place on social work agendas, partly as a result of linking domestic violence with child protection issues. Whilst welcoming the extent to which domestic violence is being taken seriously, we raise concerns about the dominant feminist perspectives guiding this project. We argue that current feminist theory is based on fixed and essentialist gender and generational categories which are unhelpful in understanding the complexities of family situations and family processes. Instead we argue for the relevance of relational understandings of gender, power and violence developed from feminist post-structuralist and psychoanalytic theorists. In doing so, we challenge accepted feminist understandings of domestic violence, and question the basis upon which dominant feminist approaches claim an unviolable alliance between the interests of women and children.     

The Social Policy Indicators (SPIN) database

The Social Policy Indicators (SPIN) database provides the foundations for new comparative and longitudinal research on the causes behind, and the consequences of, welfare states and social citizenship rights. The SPIN database is oriented towards analyses of institutions as manifested in social policy legislation. To date, SPIN covers 40 countries, of which several have data on core social policy programmes from 1930. There are currently six data modules in SPIN, covering different social policy areas. The following research note describes the theoretical and conceptual basis of the SPIN project, as well as the data it contains.     

Towards a Radical Critique of Social Work and Welfare Ideology

A radical critique of social work and social welfare is proposed, and an outline is given of the process of mystification that occurs when the field of social problems is dominated by a welfare or consensual approach rather than by a conflictual model. With this analytical framework, the role of the social work profession as an agency of social control is examined in terms of its contribution to the persistence of the existing socio-political order. Finally, the response of the profession is considered in relation to various minority and client groups organizing themselves for social action with a view to securing their civil and political rights.