Public opinion and the privatization of welfare: some theoretical implications

The social policy of the Thatcher government is characterized by an abrupt shift in the direction of the private sector. To what extent does this reflect what people want? The Institute of Economic Affairs conclude from the only suitable national opinion survey that such a move is strongly supported. Our reanalysis of their data shows that this strand in public opinion can coexist with, and need not contradict, an equal public enthusiasm for state welfare. Such results have important implications for our understanding of social policy. We conclude, therefore, with a discussion of contrasting marxist and liberal accounts which seeks to show that the evidence of ambivalence in popular attitudes about the welfare state supports particular developments in theory.     

Mothering,equality and the individual: Feminist debates and welfare policies in the USA and Sweden

This paper addresses issues raised by ‘welfare reform’ in the USA by using the example of Sweden's women activists in constructing a ‘woman friendly’ welfare state. In the USA, feminist advocates see a tension between the argument that motherhood should be valued by the provision of care allowances, and the view that work should be reformed to meet the needs of parents. This reflects debates about gender difference/equality, the possibility of commonality, and the individual.

The Swedish ‘woman friendly’ welfare state was built on the recognition, through social policy, of the interrelationship among care, material resources, and public voice. The interrelationship was embodied in what I call the ‘social individual’, and articulated in public child care and other policies and collective services. The adequacy of those universal policies and services was frequently judged by the situation of lone mothers, who ceased being ‘deviant’, and often became a model for understanding the interrelationship. Cross-class solidarity among women was a prerequisite for, and was built on, the social individual. This solidarity is now threatened by neoliberal economic and social policies that fragment care, resources, and voice, and therefore the social individual.

It is possible to challenge the downsizing of welfare states by moving the terms of discussion away from the poor as deviant other, acknowledging that all women have much in common with the targets of current policy making. This involves the creation of concrete social policies that embody the relationship among care, resources, and voice, and recognize the inseparability of community, work and family.     

Lorenz non-consistent welfare and inequality measurement

Typical welfare and inequality measures are required to be Lorenz consistent which guarantees that inequality decreases and welfare increases as a result of a progressive transfer. We explore the implications for welfare and inequality measurement of substituting the weaker absolute differentials and deprivation quasi-orderings for the Lorenz quasi-ordering. Restricting attention to distributions of equal means, we show that the utilitarian model - the so-called expected utility model in the theory of risk - does not permit one to make a distinction between the views embedded in the differentials, deprivation and Lorenz quasi-orderings. In contrast it is possible within the dual model of M. Yaari (Econometrica 55 (1987), 99–115) to derive the restrictions to be placed on the weighting function which guarantee that the corresponding welfare orderings are consistent with the differentials and deprivation quasi-orderings respectively. Finally we drop the equal mean condition and indicate the implications of our approach for the absolute ethical inequality indices.     

Consequentialism,rights, and the new social welfare theory

Traditional consequentialist social welfare theory [SWT] is intendedly value-free and institutionless. It follows that, while unattenuated exchange and property rights are assigned an implicit, instrumental role in the achievement of first-best Paretian optima, little attention has focused on alternative rights construals, on their associated, correlative duties, and on the implications for SWT. This is true, even among economists who regard “freedom” as morally exigent.This paper argues that the rights which social welfare theorists regard as instrumentally important—and, therefore, legally sanctioned—need not, in consequentialist theory, be respected: The duties which are correlative to social welfare theorists' implicitly sanctioned rights may, in consequentialist terms, be overcome by purely utilitarian considerations. It follows, pari passu, that reliance on a goal-based efficiency standard is irreconcilable with respect for the rights which most economists either take to be intrinsically important or seek to justify. Granting this, normative analysis must take account of the logical and other tensions among consequences, rights, duties, and other dimensions of moral evaluation.     

THE IMPACT OF A PUBLIC OPTION IN THE U.S. HEALTH INSURANCE MARKET

We develop a game‐theoretical framework to examine the implications of the introduction of a nonprofit “public option” in the U.S. health insurance market. In this model, heterogeneous consumers have to choose between two competing insurance plans. One plan is offered by a profit‐maximizing private insurer; the other by social‐welfare‐maximizing public option. In equilibrium, the distinct objectives of the two insurers induce adverse selection in consumer choice: the public option covers the less healthy consumers, yielding the more profitable segment of market to the private insurer. However, our empirical results suggest that both insurers will capture significant parts of the health insurance market. (JEL I11, L10, L21, L32)     

The third sector in welfare policies in Italy: the contradictions of a protected market

The paper describes how the involvement of non-profit organisations (NPOs) in welfare politics in Italy has historically developed in a mutual accommodation with the state, which has prevented the growth and the public recognition of an independent third sector. Using data from official statistics and recent research on non-profits, three analytical dimensions of the relationship between State and the third sector are considered: the resource exchange; the division of responsibility for delivering public services; and the dynamics of social policy making. The study indicates that distinctive features of the ‘welfare mix’ in Italy have been: the attribution of public status to many NPOs as a consequence of an arrangement between Church and state; the weakness of state guidance, in spite of the generous economic assistance provided to NPOs by the state; the substitutive role of NPOs in providing basic public services; and the emergence of informal arrangements between public authorities and NPOs mediated by political patronage. I thank Ralph Kramer, Ugo Ascoli, Perri 6, and three anonymous referees ofVoluntas for helpful comments they provided on an earlier draft of this paper. My research was supported by a grant from the National Council of Research of Italy, and through facilities provided by the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. An earlier version of this paper is published in P. 6 and I. Vidal (eds)Delivering Welfare: Re-positioning Non-profit and Co-operative Action in Western European Welfare States, CIES, Barcelona, 1994.     

Making welfare subordinate to market activities: Reconstructing social security in Hong Kong and Mainland China

Both the Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region governments have recently been reforming their social security policies with the emphasis on welfare residualism. This paper is intended to discuss the background to the reforms and to demonstrate how the reforms are designed to reduce the governments' commitment to meeting social needs. It argues that the two governments, by developing the entry, exit, double entry, and double exit systems of social security services, have attempted to strengthen the role of the private market in regulating people's entrance to both the labour and consumption market, and public welfare services.     

Teaching the history of women in sociology: Or Dorothy Swaine Thomas,wasn’t she the woman married to William I.?

One characteristic of feminist scholarship is the attention paid to the lost history of women in a wide variety of arenas. This interest stems from the insight that history is a social construction. As such, it is likely influenced by sexist assumptions. This train of thought led to the author’s interest in the possibility that sexism had biased both the opportunities for women in the past and the way the history of sociology had been conceived. This article describes an effort to explore these questions in an undergraduate research seminar. The article describes a variety of means the author used to unveil these problems with her students, and to engage them in asking new questions, reading standard sociological materials in critical ways, and working toward the creation of a less biased understanding of the history of sociology. The reactions of the students and professor, and the products of this course are specified. This course is one of many examples of the way feminist questions and perspectives have the potential for transforming sociology. Shulamit Reinharz is an associate professor of society at Brandies University and the author ofOn Becoming a Social Scientist (Transaction 1984). Her recent articles in feminist sociology focus on such areas as the meaning of miscarriage, the integration of gerontological and feminist theory, an analysis of the ideology of socialist Zionist feminist, Manya Wilbushewitz Shohat, and an overview of the work of Mirra Komarovsky.     

From service to social control: Implications of welfare reform for professional practice in the United States

In response to the explosive growth and the changing demographic composition of public welfare recipients, this program has undergone four major reforms over the last three decades: the 1962 'Service' amendments, the 1967 Work Incentive program (WIN), the Family Support Act of 1988, and the 1996 program of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). These reforms have had a profound impact not only on the scope and purpose of public assistance to needy families, but also on the nature of professional social work practice in this area of public social service. An analysis of the major welfare reforms over the last 35 years reveals how the national entitlement to income maintenance and social services has receded, local responsibility and private delivery of service have increased, and emphases on service functions have shifted from rehabilitative social casework/counselling to work-oriented training, job search activities, and local employment. The provision of public assistance has been transformed from a federal entitlement based on needs to a budget-driven-time-limited benefit enveloped by incentives and sanctions, with welfare clients increasingly subject to mandatory participation in work-related activities. This movement from welfare to workfare has infused the professional role of social workers with a steadily expanding function of social control, which is unlikely to encourage professional participation in the public social services.     

Risk and the welfare state

The British welfare state developed as a state-centred response to the problem of handling the risks encountered in a typical life-course. The influential work of Giddens and others implies that the traditional welfare state is under attack from two directions: a changing international politico-economic environment limits the freedom of national governments to pursue independent policies involving relatively high taxation to finance social spending. At the same time, changes in the experience of risk and declining confidence in the expertise of welfare state planners and professionals undermine support for state-centred solutions. This approach fails to acknowledge that available non-state services are often inadequate to meet many everyday life risks and that the authority of private sector advisers, insurers and professionals is also increasingly open to question. This article discusses whether people reject welfare state solutions to problems of risk in the context of research on the perceptions and behaviour of people buying or selling their homes, considering provision for long-term care needs and defrauding social security carried out by the ESRC's Economic Beliefs and Behaviour programme. Individual responses endorse the continued provision of state welfare in order to meet unprovided risks alongside disenchantment with the record of both state and private professionals and planners and awareness that state retrenchment requires greater individual responsibility for meeting one's own needs. The theory of risk society requires development to recognize that citizens are not necessarily alienated from state welfare.     

The moral economy of austerity: analysing UK welfare reform

This paper notes the contemporary emergence of ‘morality’ in both sociological argument and political rhetoric, and analyses its significance in relation to ongoing UK welfare reforms. It revisits the idea of ‘moral economy’ and identifies two strands in its contemporary application; that all economies depend on an internal moral schema, and that some external moral evaluation is desirable. UK welfare reform is analysed as an example of the former, with reference to three distinct orientations advanced in the work of Freeden ( 1996 ), Laclau ( 2014 ), and Lockwood ( 1996 ). In this light, the paper then considers challenges to the reform agenda, drawn from third sector and other public sources. It outlines the forms of argument present in these challenges, based respectively on rationality, legality, and morality, which together provide a basis for evaluation of the welfare reforms and for an alternative ‘moral economy’.     

Masculinity and male dominance

The problems with established sociological and socio-psychological conceptions of masculinity are discussed, and it is argued that object-relations theory can provide a clearer understanding of masculinity. An ideal type of the development of masculinity is built up in contrast to similar ideal types of human development and the development of femininity as portrayed by recent feminist writers. The status of the ideal type is then discussed, drawing out its implications for the relationship between psychoanalysis and sociological analysis, and for the nature of social change.     

The contribution of non-profit organisations to the management of HIV/AIDS: A comparative study

This article elaborates a typology of organisational responses during the first decade of AIDS/HIV in a dozen Western European countries.Welfare mixes: that is, the division of task between all producers of welfare (both private and public), and the processes at work in these policies, are analysed. Three types are identified, presenting unexpected variants in respect to general typologies of Western welfare states. They underline the importance of non-profit actors and also argue that new forms of co-operation between those actors and public ones can lead to renewed management of the main social issues currently facing Western welfare states.     

Lorenz non-consistent welfare and inequality measurement

Typical welfare and inequality measures are required to be Lorenz consistent which guarantees that inequality decreases and welfare increases as a result of a progressive transfer. We explore the implications for welfare and inequality measurement of substituting the weaker absolute differentials and deprivation quasi-orderings for the Lorenz quasi-ordering. Restricting attention to distributions of equal means, we show that the utilitarian model – the so-called expected utility model in the theory of risk – does not permit one to make a distinction between the views embedded in the differentials, deprivation and Lorenz quasi-orderings. In contrast it is possible within the dual model of M. Yaari (Econometrica 55 (1987), 99–115) to derive the restrictions to be placed on the weighting function which guarantee that the corresponding welfare orderings are consistent with the differentials and deprivation quasi-orderings respectively. Finally we drop the equal mean condition and indicate the implications of our approach for the absolute ethical inequality indices.     

The “Peculiar Eclipsing” of Women in Sociological Theory: Moving from Nearly Total to Partial

This paper revisits the observation made by Ward and Grant (Current Perspective in Social Theory 11:117–140, 1991) that there had been a “peculiar eclipsing” of women in sociological theory. It provides longitudinal studies of women’s participation and recognition in three conventional outlets for sociological theorizing: the theory section of the American Sociological Association (ASA); sociological theory textbooks; and sociological theory journals. It finds that the percentage of ASA Theory Section members who were women increased from 12% in 1982 to 31% in 2008, but is not nearly as high as the 53% in all ASA sections taken together; that women’s recognition in sociological theory textbooks grew, more between the 1980s and the 2000s than between the 1960s and the 1980s, undoubtedly reflecting the increasing respectability of feminist theory within the profession; and that women’s relative participation as authors in sociology theory journals increased from the 1980s to the 2000s by about 33%, but nowhere near as much as their participation as authors in the American Sociological Review, where their relative participation in the 2000s was more than three times what it had been in the 1980s. We speculate that, given women’s increasing leadership roles in both the Theory section and the theory journals, women may be using less conventional outlets for their theorizing than is offered by either the section or the journals.     

Child welfare workers and social justice: Mending the disconnect

While professional social workers are clearly obligated to pursue social justice, controversies abound surrounding what that means in theory and practice. Perhaps nowhere are the paradoxes inherent in practice for social justice seen in sharper contrast than in the field of child welfare. Intended to protect the rights of children, child welfare systems themselves have been characterized as instruments of oppression. This article hopes to enrich that discourse through an examination of how these issues are conceptualized and acted upon by front-line child welfare social workers. Through in-depth interviews with 25 child welfare workers, and 3 focus groups, in two Canadian provinces, and employing grounded theory strategies for data collection and analysis, we have explored understandings of the social justice mandate and how it is expressed in practice. Participants in this study conceptualized social justice in terms of both wider societal goals of fairness and equality, and of the quality of interactions and relationships between social workers and those with whom they work; conceptual emphasis on one or the other of these we found to be associated with differences in practice. We reflect on the implications of each of these emphases for effectiveness in advancing social justice aims in the child welfare context, and make recommendations regarding a grounding for educators and practitioners in theoretical orientations that includes attention to the linkages between macro and micro opportunities to advance social justice.     

Correlates of Fashion Leadership: Implications for Fashion Process Theory*

This paper suggests possible implications of a study of clothing fashion leadership for current sociological theory in regard to the process of fashion diffusion. Theory of the diffusion of innovations was chosen as the framework for the investigation. Fashion innovativeness and fashion opinion leadership were studied in relation to selected social, psychological, and economic variables. Since the test of collective selection occurs in the local social system it would seem appropriate that theories regarding the operation of the fashion process account more fully for the rate and degree of acceptance and rejection of innovations in the local social system, and for the functions of local participants in the process. Does current sociological theory account for diffusion of new ideas, practices, and products as well as their development and selection?     

Child welfare: A view from Australia

In this article the author presents an analysis of family and child welfare in Australia. The author explores the philosophical approaches underlying the development of child welfare policies. Through a historical perspective the author identifies factors which may have influenced some current child welfare policies and practices. Characteristics of the Australian child are described and selected child welfare services in Australia are discussed.She is Editor ofAustralian Child and Family Welfare Journal. She has worked in child welfare in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.     

A home from home: the organization as family

The basic unit of human organization has always been the family, although the meaning and composition of “family” has altered over the millennia of human existence. The current view in Western thought is that there is a distinct schism between the family and other social organizations, particularly those organizations associated with work. As a broad distinction, the family is held to be in the private sphere of human interaction and work organizations in the public. Much feminist theory is predicated on this private/public split, and one of the reasons proposed for the social inequality of women is that the private, which is women's “natural” domain, is held to be of lesser social significance.

The paper considers, in a light-hearted (but we hope not lightweight) manner, the metaphor of the organization as family. We provide analogies between the notions of “family” as a private social institution and the work organization, drawing no conclusions, but providing some small insights into affinities and congruences which blur the private/public distinction. If we assert anything at all, it is this: because the work organization is family, we are able to slip from one to the other each day with the minimum of psychic stress.

“Travail, Famille, patrie” (the slogan of the Vichy régime)     

A feminist critique of rational-choice theories: Implications for sociology

I consider the relationship between two currents affecting sociology, rational-choice theory and interdisciplinary feminist theory. In particular, I consider how the feminist critique of the separative model of self applies to one version of rational-choice theory, neoclassical economics. In discussing this I identify four assumptions of neoclassical economics: selfishness; interpersonal utility comparisons are impossible; tastes are exogenous and unchanging; and individuals are rational. I argue that each of these harmonizes best with a view of separate rather than connected selves, and that this imbalance distorts theories, particularly those that claim to understand women’s experience. These distorting assumptions are less prevalent in sociology than in economics, but some of them are implicit in some versions of sociological rational-choice and exchange theories. I conclude by using research on marital power to illustrate how removing distorting assumptions and bringing questions about separation/connection to center stage can help illuminate sociological research. Her forthcoming book,Comparable Worth: Theories and Evidence (New York: Aldine deGruyter), discusses this controversial policy issue from a perspective that draws upon sociology, economics, and feminist theory.