The Changing Governance of Welfare: Recent Trends in its Primary Functions, Scale, and Modes of Coordination

This paper discusses four dimensions of the capitalist state's role in economic and social reproduction: its economic and social policy roles, the scales on which these roles are performed, and the modes of governance with which they are associated. It describes the typical postwar welfare regime on these dimensions, analyses the crisis in the governance of welfare that began to emerge in the late 1970s and 1980s, and characterizes the new regime that is tendentially replacing the postwar welfare state.     

日本地域福利体制研究

二战后,高速经济增长促进了日本福利国家体制的形成。但进入20世纪90年代后,经济发展停滞与人口老龄化加剧,使福利国家体制面临严重挑战。地域福利作为代替福利国家的新的理念登场。日本开始探索从福利国家体制到地域福利体制的转变。地域福利以居民为福利主体,调动社会福利协会等福利组织,形成新兴的地域共同体,及时有效地为地域社会中需要帮助的对象提供多样化的福利服务。本文主要分析了地域福利的形成过程及地域福利的理念及内容、地域福利实施体制,并对地域福利的核心老年人地域福利进行了阐述。地域福利作为一种协作模式,将对中国发展社区福利也具有启示作用。     

Users as Citizens: Collective Action and the Local Governance of Welfare

Self-organization amongst users of community care services preceded the consumerist developments of the 1980s and early 1990s, but can be considered to have been "legitimized" by top-down objectives relating to "user involvement". Nevertheless, the objectives and value bases of disabled people's organizations and organizations of users (or survivors) of mental health services have not always been consistent with those of consumerism, and user groups have experienced tensions in determining the extent to which they should respond to official agendas. Drawing on theories of new social movements and of citizenship, this paper considers the developing place of user organizations within systems of local governance. It looks at the way in which groups have sought to assert the legitimacy both of experiential knowledge and of their position as citizens in the face of official responses which have constructed them as self-interested pressure groups. It draws on empirical research investigating local groups of disabled people and of mental health service users conducted in the first part of the 1990s. It discusses the significance of shared identity as a basis for collective action alongside more pragmatic motivations to influence the nature of health and social care services. In the context of appeals to "community" and "partnership" which are starting to replace the discourse of markets and contracts as the key metaphor for both policy-making and service delivery, the article considers likely future roles for groups comprising people often excluded from community.     

社会公益事业研究综述

和谐社会,公益先行。作为一种非营利性事业,社会公益事业在缩小贫富差距、缓和社会矛盾、构建和谐社会等方面发挥了重要作用,引起学者们越来越多的关注。国内学者主要从公益事业史学、当代公益事业发展,包括公益事业政策法规、公益组织、志愿服务、企业与公益、宗教与公益等方面进行研究。当然,还有部分学者对国外公益事业也做了引荐。     

Welfare Governance in the Surveillance Society: A Positive-Realistic Cybercriticalist View

In exploring the implications of information and communication technologies (ICTs), Fitzpatrick has suggested the need for a new category of rights—virtual rights. To explore this claim, we consider how developments in information management and processing differentially impact on citizens. Using examples from the public and private sectors we explore the dangers posed by the emergent surveillance society and agree these may require new rights. But we suggest that the state has by no means been an exemplar and, moreover, that many of the “surveilling” practices employed by commercial organizations might be used by the state to pursue socially just ends. We argue against a criticalist perspective that narrowly focuses on the dangers posed by new ICTs. Indeed, from a realist perspective we argue that a positive cybercriticalism that seeks to tackle exclusion by harnessing and constraining the surveillance qualities of ICTs is a pressing policy priority.     

Governance and Participation in Local Welfare: The Case of the Italian Piani di Zona

This article analyses four cases of governance in Italian local welfare systems. Following Law 328/2000, the design and management of the social services system in Italy involve different public responsibility levels, mainly regional and municipal. In order to manage social policies, Italian municipalities have to join in new inter‐municipal groupings called ‘Piani di Zona’ (Area Plans). Moreover, the law provides for engaging in these Plans even local third‐sector organizations and citizens. The article attempts to highlight the implications of this complex system that is leading local authorities to open new governance arenas. We hereby present the results of a research project on two Piani di Zona in the Region of Lombardy (Northern Italy) and on two in the Region of Campania (Southern Italy), carried out by means of institutional analysis. We particularly focus on the dynamics of participation triggered by the Piani di Zona. Our hypothesis is that the role of public administration is a fundamental variable to understand the different ways of participating. In this sense, we discuss the dynamics of local governance by relaying them to four main questions: who participates in what, where and how?     

Models of Disability, Work and Welfare in Australia

In discourse around disability there has been a shift away from a ‘medical model’, which perceives disability as an individual problem to be ‘cured’ or contained, towards a ‘social model’. The latter focuses on the relationship between people with disabilities and their social environment, locating the required interventions within the realm of social policy and institutional practice. Drawing upon a small qualitative study conducted in Melbourne, this article argues that recent plans by the Australian government to introduce mutual obligation requirements for recipients of the Disability Support Pension (DSP) sit in tension with this shift from the medical to the social models of disability. Mutual obligation is based on the assumption that income support recipients need to be taught how to be more ‘self‐reliant’, to ‘participate’ in society more fully and to become ‘active’, rather than ‘passive’, citizens. This language appears to overlap with that used to articulate a social model, which places emphasis on participation in the community and attempts a shift away from reliance on the medical profession. However, examples from interviews conducted with current and former DSP recipients demonstrate that, in practice, mutual obligation is likely to reinforce a medical model of disability, frame DSP recipients as ‘conditional’ citizens and ignore the obligations of the state and society regarding access and inclusiveness for people with disabilities.     

Worlds of Welfare Services: From Discovery to Exploration

A recent thread of debate in social policy research has been the ‘discovery’ of welfare services. Previous comparative studies in this field have been largely erratic and have led to different results. This ambiguity is mainly due to flaws inherent in the data sets. In order to overcome these problems, this article uses an alternative approach of operationalizing welfare services. Employment patterns in the welfare sector provide a holistic picture of welfare services regarding quantity, kind, and organization. Cluster analysis leads to a four‐cluster structure that bears high resemblance to the conventional welfare regime typology by Esping‐Andersen and its subsequent advancements. These findings are set in the context of the welfare regimes literature in order to enhance our understanding of the functioning of welfare regimes. The study suggests that the ideological orientation of the welfare state is a good starting point for a holistic framework of welfare regimes combining the transfer and the service component.     

Querulous Citizens: Welfare Knowledge and the Limits to Welfare Reform

Governments face pressures to improve services and (at the same time) to contain taxes and to ensure that their decisions are accountable to increasingly well‐informed and challenging citizens. The dilemma of “squaring the welfare circle” confronts New Labour in a particularly acute form, since the party has set ambitious targets for improvements in the NHS, education and elsewhere, and is also committed to economic prudence and transparency. This article uses new data from a major national survey to investigate knowledge and beliefs in the main policy areas. It shows that most people are generally strikingly well‐informed in some areas and ill‐informed in others. A government which wishes to pursue a progressive direction in redistribution, increasing taxation of the better‐off, or expanding provision for those on low incomes, faces real difficulties because many people hold inaccurate beliefs about policy impact and the policy context in these areas. However, NHS costs are more accurately perceived across the population, and the proposed expansion is likely to create less controversy. Current high‐profile policies appear to follow the contours of public knowledge reasonably accurately, but further policy development will require positive efforts to lead debates and improve public knowledge.     

韩国社会福利法人组织的运作模式研究

在韩国,提供社会福利服务的主体是公共部门和民间部门。公共部门的主体是中央和地方政府,民间部门包括个人、社会福利法人、宗教团体、志愿者团体等。在民间部门中起主导作用,处于核心地位的是社会福利法人组织。在社会福利法人中,国家资源和民间资本结合在一起,共同承担着增进国民福利的责任。本文主要分析韩国社会福利法人的特征,考察韩国社会福利法人发展现状和运营模式,探讨社会福利法人发展过程中存在的问题及改善方案。     

Targets and Taxes: Explaining the Welfare Orientations of the Australian Public

Australia's welfare model – targeted payments alongside low but progressive taxation – exemplifies the targeted approach, prioritizing the needs of poorer citizens within the constraints of low taxation. But does this approach match the welfare orientations of Australia's voters? Does the public hold other views about welfare, emerging out of competing interests in welfare debates? We consider results of two questions included in the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2005. The first question asks respondents about four welfare goals that outline competing welfare orientations: targeting poverty, expanding health and education, enforcing the welfare rules and reducing welfare. The second question asks about four taxation goals drawing on similar orientations as established for welfare: targeting tax cuts, taxing for welfare, enforcing tax rules and reducing overall tax. Asking about both enables us to tell whether voters approach tax and welfare ‘consistently’ and to see whether, in Australia's case, there is a preference for Australia's targeting model. We reach three conclusions: (1) voters hold diverse preferences about welfare and taxes, but the targeted model has a relatively strong voter base; (2) voters hold ‘pro‐welfare’ orientations, choosing poverty reduction and expanding public services over both paternalism and cutting welfare, and (3) multivariate analysis indicates a level of consistency in welfare and tax orientations among voters.     

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.     

Postmodernity and Welfare: When Worlds Collide

Social policy is just about the last social science subject to take the postmodern challenge, though we have seen a rash of contributions in recent months. These have proved catalytic but may have been presented in a manner that is careless as to the nature of welfare as a boundaried academic realm. These offerings have also illustrated the difficulties involved in splicing poststructural analysis with a historically structural subject. Equally, definitions of social policy generated within the welfare community may also act as a de facto barrier to the postmodern. Consequently we seem to have the makings of a non-debate of incompatible analyses, making even the possibility of a third position a remote one. However, a sideways glance at the chronologically more advanced postmodernism–feminism debate offers some hope that a welfare-adapted postmodernity may emerge in the future.     

Nash Bargaining Theory,Nonconvex Problems and Social Welfare Orderings

In this paper we deal with the extension of Nash bargaining theory to nonconvex problems. By focussing on the Social Welfare Ordering associated with a bargaining solution, we characterize the symmetric Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS). Moreover, we obtain a unified method of proof of recent characterization results for the asymmetric single-valued NBS and the symmetric multivalued NBS, as well as their extensions to different domains.     

From Defamilialization to Degenderization: Toward a New Welfare Typology1

This article discusses the debate on gendering welfare states. It criticizes typologies based on the differentiation between degrees of familialization and defamilialization and proposes a new typology based on the notion of genderization and degenderization. It also argues against the notion of regime types, which includes outputs in their classification systems. Instead it argues that typologies should concentrate on policies to make it possible for researchers and policymakers to analyze the influence of different types of policies on different societies. It is important to know whether similar policies would lead to different outcomes under different socio‐economic or cultural conditions. The article goes on to show how one could analyze family policies based on a typology based on genderization and degenderization.     

Changing Welfare Regimes in East and Southeast Asia: Crisis, Change and Challenge

The Asia‐Pacific region is a latecomer to the development of the welfare state. However, in some countries, governments have implemented ambitious programmes to extend social security systems and to enlarge the institutional structure of their welfare states. Comparative study of the welfare systems in East and Southeast Asia is, however, underdeveloped and there still is a relative lack of accurate knowledge about welfare systems in the region. Since the Asian financial crisis, more attention has been paid to the social policies of the countries. This paper examines features of welfare regimes in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand, and undertakes a systematic review of the development, levels and patterns of welfare regimes in the region. Two core questions are answered: can the existing welfare systems help mitigate the social impact of the financial and economic crisis? What are the needs, challenges and developmental perspectives that inform the future of welfare regimes in this region?     

Slippery Concepts, Shifting Context: (National) States and Welfare in the Veit-Wilson/Atherton Debate

The debate between Veit‐Wilson and Atherton raises key conceptual questions for the analysis of welfare states. Veit‐Wilson, in particular, focuses on the important, but strangely neglected question of when and why a state qualifies as a welfare state. Atherton usefully draws attention to historical debates about the legitimate purposes of state welfare policies and worthy recipients of state benefits, particularly in the Anglo‐Saxon countries. His contribution may draw our attention to the shifting meaning of concepts (such as poverty) over time. In this contribution I seek to broaden the debate. First, without underestimating the importance of such criteria, rather than presenting one single (normatively based) “discriminating criterion” defining welfare statehood, I argue that other conceptions of “the welfare state” may be useful as well—so long as analysts are clear and explicit about how they are using the phrase. Second, in the current conjuncture of the perceived “transformation” perhaps even “destruction” of the welfare state, historical and comparative research grounded on clear and explicit concepts is crucial.     

Welfare Policies and the Construction of Welfare Relations in a Residual Welfare State: The Case of Hong Kong

Each welfare system has its own welfare relations for shaping and maintaining certain types of welfare practices and welfare ideologies. Welfare relations concern the distribution of welfare responsibilities among various social institutions, the public's welfare expectations and entitlements, and the status of welfare recipients. Welfare policies, which are a legal basis of the dominant class's philosophy as well as a mechanism for policing welfare recipients' use of benefits, play an important role in shaping and constructing the welfare relations of a country. This paper discusses how welfare policies construct the required welfare relations with regard to Hong Kong's social security system. It is argued that the persistence of Hong Kong's residual welfare model is partly based on the residual welfare relations which facilitate family-centred and market-oriented welfare practices.     

An Audit of the Welfare Modelling Business

The ‘welfare modelling business’ has become central to comparative social policy in recent years. However, we argue that one important element in this literature, the usefulness of identifying ‘ideal types’ of welfare production that support theoretical development, has been neglected. While much effort has been devoted to the results of the number and composition of the worlds, insufficient attention has been paid to the analytical basis of welfare regimes. This article attempts an audit of the ‘welfare modelling business’, with a review and consideration of the main concepts used in the literature. Our main conclusion is that definitions, concepts and methods need to be given urgent priority for the investment in the business to produce future returns.     

Analyzing the Productive and Protective Dimensions of Welfare: Looking Beyond the OECD

Several theorists have argued that social policy in East Asia can be seen as representing a distinctive welfare ideal type based around ‘productive welfare’. However, we have contested such claims in earlier work (Hudson and Kühner 2009) and, in common with theorists such as Castells, have suggested that some of the welfare states of the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) have a distinct bias towards the ‘productive’ rather than ‘protective’ dimensions of welfare. In this article, we build on our earlier work, utilizing fuzzy set ideal type analysis (FSITA) to explore the balance between ‘productive' and ‘protective’ dimensions of welfare state activity. Here we extend our analysis beyond the OECD, incorporating a range of nations on the ‘fringe’ of the OECD from Latin America, East Asia and the non‐OECD parts of Europe. In so doing, we contest simple notions of welfare regimes aligning with regional blocks. Primarily, however, we highlight the advantages of the ‘diversity‐orientated’ approach to data analysis that fuzzy set methods facilitate in comparison with standard quantitative techniques. In particular, we utilize FSITA to avoid data availability and reliability issues that have plagued quantitatively informed classifications of global welfare regimes. Not least, we argue FSITA allows for the contextualization of cases in a way that is sealed to quantitatively driven, comparative research. Thus, we argue FSITA has an important role to play in attempts to extend the inclusiveness of the ‘welfare modelling business’ in a manner that reflects diverse and highly significant cases beyond the Western lens that dominates the literature.