The End of the Welfare State?

This paper critically examines claims of a new consensus on welfare and the end of the welfare state. We first review the concept of welfare consensus, concentrating on the idea of welfare pluralism, in particular the relatively neglected distinction between national minimum (base) and extension ladder (superstructure). We then examine these concepts in the 1990s under Conservative and New Labour governments. Important changes to welfare pluralism are noted. There have been changes in the character of means-tests, with the national minimum replaced by a series of residual minima, which represent fundamental changes to structural incentives governing the social division of welfare and work. The line between state and non-state provision has been blurred and there have been moves to achieve universalism in the private sector. It is possible to tentatively classify Labour's principles and fledgling policies into three categories: essential continuity with the Conservatives, reversing Conservative policies and extending Conservative policies. However, it is difficult to detect the degree of consensus because a new flexible language is beginning to pervade social policy, with the result that the welfare state is being redefined, notably in areas of full employment, citizenship and conditionality. It is possible to detect, in our terms, moves towards turning Beveridge inside out and from the Marshall towards the Beveridge welfare state. It is clear that the welfare state is being redefined, but reports of its death have been much exaggerated.     

Choosing Welfare or Losing Social Citizenship? Citizens' Free Choice in Recent Italian Welfare State Reforms

In the past fifteen years, the Italian welfare state has gone through various important reforms. Almost all social policy fields have been significantly challenged by the presence of both national and European constraints, and in different policy fields some fundamental principles of the welfare state have been questioned and changed. The purpose of this article is to present an analysis of the most recent arguments used for welfare state reforms in Italy, focusing in particular on one key question: have the reforms been formulated and implemented in order to increase the freedom of choice of Italian citizens with respect to social protection? After a brief introduction and conceptual clarification, each section of the article will focus on one social policy field (employment, pensions, health care) and discuss the origins and consequences of the reforms with respect to the freedom of choice of citizens. The main argument is that very limited attention has been paid in the national political discourse and reform design to the freedom of choice for citizens in welfare state policies, since other goals (such as cost containment) were much more crucial. The article will end with an overall assessment of the evolution of freedom of choice in the Italian welfare state setting.     

Social Enterprise – A New Phenomenon in the Field of Economic and Social Welfare?

Drawing upon insights from historical institutionalism, this article critically examines the origins of social enterprise and its emergence into the mainstream policy arena. It begins by relating the social enterprise idea to major non‐state/non‐private institutional traditions, including the European social economy, US non‐profits and the UK charitable sector, and places it within the specific field of economic and social welfare. In so doing, the article contests the idea that social enterprise is a new phenomenon in the social welfare field and proposes instead that the supposed ‘novelty’ of social enterprise as an organizational form and a subject of public policy lies primarily in the nature of the socio‐political and economic context of the 1980s–1990s, during which time it became ‘en vogue’. The process of institutionalization of social enterprise and its ascension into the mainstream policy arena is examined in more detail in the case of England during the time New Labour was in office and beyond, and lessons are drawn from this experience concerning both the role that social enterprise plays or is expected to play as a vehicle to address economic and social needs, and how this is intertwined with both a dominant neo‐liberal discourse, as well as alternative perspectives that emphasize more equalitarian and sustainable development paths. The article concludes with some reflections in relation to the apparent consensus that seems to exist around social enterprise as a legitimate subject of public policy and the resulting social enterprization of public services which is currently taking place in England.     

The Role of Government in Social Welfare in China

文章认为,20多年来,"高福利的负面效应"和"市场机制的高效率"是对中国影响最大的西方经验。在这种思想影响下,中国政府从社会福利责任中的退出是导致经济与社会发展失调的重要因素。例如,我们在市场化条件根本不存在的情况下,实行"社会服务市场化",其结果是强势集团的霸权化;在未能保证社会成员基本社会服务权利前提下的"服务收费",使得对于绝大多数人来说,缴费是获得任何服务的前提条件。这种做法使贫苦人群更难抵御风险,是对"社会公平"这一社会发展的核心价值观的颠覆。 文章提出重建政府在社会福利中积极角色的命题。作者认为,政府在社会福利中应当发挥主导作用,应当加强自己的社会政策能力建设。由于中国缺乏工业文明的积累,以及计划经济重输入、输出而轻过程、细节和人的动机的二重原因,中国政府的社会政策能力较弱。这种情况需要改变。     

Beyond Continuity? Understanding Change in the UK Welfare State since 2010

One approach to identifying policy change stresses policy instruments, settings and policy paradigms, while another also considers the process and culmination of various shifts and consequent outcomes. This article illustrates the debate through an examination of how far developments in social security policy between the 1997–2010 New Labour and 2010–15 Coalition Governments in the UK constituted real policy shifts. It shows that, despite continuities in instruments and approach, there have been substantial changes in the impact of welfare state policies related to short‐term benefits, employment and housing. The article identifies new policy directions leading to a different kind of welfare state, concerned less with living standards and equality and more with individual responsibility and paid work. It suggests that this has been achieved without the need for radical changes in instruments and their settings.     

Demise of the Developmental State? Implications for Social Policy Development in Hong Kong

This paper argues that Hong Kong is now at the crossroads of its journey towards social policy development. While economic development still seems to be the unwavering objective of the Hong Kong government, the demand for democracy and social development can no longer be ignored because of a strong civil society fostered by economic success. The current state of affairs provides a window of opportunity for the Hong Kong government to strengthen its legitimacy through the development of social policy and to promote social harmony through inclusivity in social welfare. The findings from the present empirical survey conducted by the Hong Kong Institute of Asia‐Pacific Studies (HKIAPS) in 2010 demonstrate that Hong Kong people identified social harmony as the main direction for social development, closely followed by economic development, and democracy and freedom. Respondents who chose social harmony as the main goal of social development were more likely to take a step back and find common ground when fighting for their own rights or the rights of society. This paper concludes that these findings reflect the crucial importance of taking social harmony into consideration in the social policy development process.     

Essential Partnership: Child Welfare Officers’ Perceptions of Cooperation With Rabbis in the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Community in Israel

ABSTRACT

This article describes collaborations between child welfare officers and rabbis in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Israel. The study is based on interviews with 10 child welfare officers who intervene in ultra-Orthodox communities. The analysis of the interviews showed that cooperation with the rabbis was essential for reducing the community's hostile resistance to interventions by the child welfare officers, who were perceived as threatening to community values. On the other hand, the child welfare officers had to cope with conflicts between religious values, the law, and professional perceptions. The discussion of the findings highlights the need for understanding the cooperation in terms of boundaries and power. Future research is needed to explore further the issues raised from the perspectives of the rabbis and the families involved.     

How Social is Social Policy? Fiscal and Market Discourse in North American Welfare States

Long regarded as a 'laggard' among welfare states in advanced industrial countries, the USA may be emerging as a 'leader' in the reformation of social programmes and the relationship between government, the market economy, and civil society. The dissemination and impact of this new orthodoxy is realized, in large part, through discursive practices. Fiscalization and marketization are two processes central to this growing influence of American social policy. Fiscal and market discourse, while not new, have increased in acceptance and influence, and are changing the welfare state from within by altering perceptions of issues, vocabularies used and programme reforms adopted.     

The Middle‐class in the German Welfare State: Beneficial Involvement at Stake?

The working‐class is typically regarded as the driving force of welfare state development. Yet, some argue that the middle‐classes' beneficial involvement in the welfare state is crucial for its financial sustainability and popular legitimacy. Against this backdrop, we investigate how recent welfare state reforms in Germany which affect the status of the middle‐class are viewed and discussed by this group. Germany is a particularly interesting case because its welfare state is seen to be centred on the desires of the middle‐class, especially through its focus on status maintenance and horizontal redistribution over the life‐course. However, the move from status maintenance to minimum income support in unemployment provision and the strengthening of private old age provision challenge this assumption. Thus, we ask how the German middle‐class views the emerging abandonment of the principle of status maintenance and the shift from collective to individual responsibility. Based on qualitative material from focus groups, we find that individual responsibility is generally supported, but that the state is still assigned responsibility for providing basic levels of social security. Furthermore, for those groups seen as less capable of acting individually responsible (e.g. the poor or long‐term unemployed) the ‘inducement’ of – or assistance for – individually responsible behaviour by the state is demanded. Overall, while the principle of ‘individual responsibility’ seems to find some resonance among the middle‐class members interviewed, they still try to balance individual and collective responsibility.     

Crowding Out or Welfare Promotion? How Foreign Aid Affects Social Expenditures in Latin American Welfare Systems

Foreign assistance constitutes a significant share of government revenue in many low‐ and middle‐income economies and is targeted at poverty reduction and the promotion of social and economic well‐being. This study therefore examines fiscal responses by Latin American welfare states to the inflow of such aid. As a form of external non‐tax revenue, aid can function as a substitution for public welfare expenditure, with a crowding out effect being the likely outcome. This article investigates whether overall aid and aid that is particularly targeted at the social sector substitutes public welfare provision and, if so, whether it also substitutes its function. A time‐series cross‐section analysis of 19 Latin American countries for the period 1980–2008 provides limited support for the assumption that foreign aid payments influence the welfare budget. It is only the health care sector in middle‐income countries which experiences a small decrease in expenditures. Social security and education expenditures are not affected.     

Reconstituting China''''s Social Security System——A Survey of the Seminaron Theory and Practice of Social Welfare

As China's market-oriented economic reforms deepen, an urgent task lying ahead of us is to develop, standardize and improve the system of social security. What, however, is meant by a unified, standardized and perfect social security system? How can we institute such a system? These questions remain urgently in need of study.This then was the setting of a national seminar on "The Theory and Practice of Social     

Contingent on Context? Social Work and the State in Australia, Britain, and the USA

Correspondence to John Harris, School of Health and Social Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. E-mail: j.harris{at}warwick.ac.uk Summary The notion that social work is an international profession,operating with generally similar goals, methodologies, and commonvalues is considered critically. Examining the political andsocial contexts of three countries with liberal democratic governments—Australia,Britain and the United States—the role of social workwithin the welfare processes of each country is compared. Whilesocial work as an identifiable professional activity sharessome features, it is argued that the idea of its having a coreessence needs to be tempered with a realistic assessment ofthe importance of contextually created difference. Recent andrapid developments in the institutional context, such as thoseexperienced in these three countries, further underscore thelimited utility of the notion of a common professional project.     

Changes in the Form of Knowledge in Social Work: From the 'Social' to the 'Informational'?

This paper examines the changing form of knowledge in socialwork over the past thirty years and its implications for theoryand practice. In particular, it considers the impact of newsystems related to a range of new information and communicationtechnologies (ICTs) and the shift from a narrative to a databaseway of thinking and operating. In doing so, it attempts to identifya series of key challenges and questions which need to be consideredin order to engage with the changes. In particular, it addresseshow far social work is still primarily concerned with subjectsand their social relationships and argues that social work nowoperates less on the terrain of the ‘social’ andmore on the terrain of the ‘informational’. Suchchanges have implications for the relationship between theoryand practice in social work and the nature of ‘social’work itself.     

The Great Recession and Welfare State Reform: Is Retrenchment Really the Only Game Left in Town?

By 2010, when the Greek sovereign debt crisis changed into an existential crisis of the euro, all developed democracies entered a phase in which they had to consolidate their budgets, typically implying a politics of austerity. The scholarly literature, as well as the popular press, suggests that – consequently – welfare retrenchment and cost containment became the only games left in town. In this article, we study the welfare state reform measures taken between 2010 and 2012 in four countries characteristic of mature welfare state regimes (liberal, UK; conservative, Germany; social democratic, Denmark; and hybrid, the Netherlands) to examine empirically whether austerity has indeed become the only item left on the policy menu. Our analysis reveals that retrenchment features prominently on the agenda everywhere, but nowhere by itself. While compensation for income loss is rare since 2010, this still happens. More unexpectedly, reforms in line with a social investment agenda (like expansion of child care or active labour market policies) are still being pursued in all our four cases.     

Changes in the Model of Social Prevention of AIDS in China

China has adopted a series of new decisions and important measures against AIDS since 2003 and tactics seen by the international community as effective in reducing the risk of AIDS are also beginning to receive policy support from the Chinese government. However, we need further investigation of     

Do Public Officials Trust Citizens? A Welfare State Perspective

In this exploratory study, we investigate whether public sector officials and non‐public sector officials differ in the trust they have in members of society and whether this difference is associated with the welfare regime in which they work. Using survey data from the sixth round of the European Social Survey, we compare public sector officials' trust to that of non‐public sector officials in 13 countries with four different forms of welfare regimes. Our results demonstrate that public officials have a higher level of trust than non‐public officials do. Furthermore, trust among both public and non‐public sector officials is much higher in social‐democratic regimes, followed by corporatist countries, liberal regimes, Israel (as a unique case) and, lastly, southern European regimes. As expected, public officials' degree of trust reflects the general trends of their societies. Interestingly, in social‐democratic regimes, differences between trust among public and non‐public officials are the highest compared to the other regimes. In addition, an individual‐level analysis in five countries illustrative of each welfare regime indicates that while income, belonging to a minority group, and age are significant factors in explaining public officials' trust, socio‐demographic variables contribute little to the differences between public and non‐public officials. Given the critical role of trust in the functioning of the welfare state, our results imply that further awareness and mechanisms for increasing the degree of trust of citizens among public officials are warranted.     

The Capacity of a State to Institu-tionalize Social Movements De-pends on the Relations betweenthe State and Society

Studies on social movement and theoryof revolution are of utmost importance topresent-day China. Generally speaking, in faceof a movement challenging the local or cen-tral government, countries of different typeshave different capacities to bear the bruntand take measures to deal with the situation.In the same country, the reaction from theparticipants in the movement to the measuresthe state takes to deal with the movementalso varies with their organizational ability andtheir understanding of…     

Cultural Considerations on the Rise of Great Powers in the Mod-ern Era

An independent and prosperous na-tional culture is a powerful spiritual force and,like material force, also serves as one of theindispensable bases and preconditions for therise of a nation-state. Under specific histori-cal conditions, the cultural-spiritual forcesometimes is more important than materialforce. Culture gives a concrete expressionto the overall national strength of a country.No nation with a backward economy andpolitical disintegration can rise into a power-ful state. Likewise, …