Social welfare in the light of topic modelling

With an increased focus on social well-being in response to a burgeoning global economy exposing the weaknesses of social welfare policies, research output in the field has grown exponentially. Keeping track of the evolving research themes proves difficult due to the steady rise in the number of studies published in the interdisciplinary field of social welfare. Therefore, researchers need a comprehensive overview to confirm the current shape of the field based on the published research. Using a latent Dirichlet allocation algorithm as a topic modelling technique, this study identified 12 prominent themes from more than 10,000 research outputs on social welfare published from 2000 to 2020 in Scopus-indexed journals. Such an exploratory text-mining approach to literature review provides broad insights into the diversity of research and may serve as a foundation for further in-depth studies. Identifying these 12 thematic areas and their sub-themes allows us to articulate the complexity and diversity of social welfare issues, which go far beyond the field of well-established welfare economics or social work. The study shows that the topic of ‘social welfare’ has not only evolved over time but has significantly broadened its meaning. It can no longer be solely synonymous with institutional social security. We contend that research in this area needs to take into account a broader and more systematic range of determinants constituting the dynamic character of social welfare.     

Social work and macro-economic neoliberalism: beyond the social justice rhetoric

Macro-economic policy shapes and structures social welfare policy, services, and their implementation. As a result, the commoditisation of social welfare services and the use of markets as well as private sector management philosophies and tools have colonised and fashioned the design, provision and implementation of social welfare policy and structures. The impact has been far reaching, from limiting social welfare responses of elected democratic government to shaping the profession in a range of intended and unintended directions. Written from a UK perspective, this paper proposes a discussion of the impact of macro-economic neoliberal policies in the field of social welfare and explores the implications for social work practice. The paper also promotes a debate within the profession regarding the importance of macro-economic analysis and possible responses, as well as suggesting a way forward within European and, more broadly, international practice contexts.     

Inheritance of Welfare Recipiency: An Intergenerational Study of Social Assistance Recipiency in Postwar Sweden

Intergenerational transmission of welfare dependency has received increasing attention among social scientists, especially in the United States, as greater availability of longitudinal data has shed new light on this issue. It remains unclear, however, to what extent the intergenerational correlation of welfare recipiency observed in the United States reflects or interacts with unobserved variables, the racial composition of the population, and the institutional structure of social policies. This study focuses on Sweden, a country with an ethnically homogenous population and institutional social policy structures that differ from those in the United States. It utilizes an internationally unique longitudinal data set to test hypotheses on the inheritance of welfare benefit recipiency as indicated by reliance on means‐tested social assistance. A clear intergenerational effect is observed. This effect, however, reflects a combination of social assistance in the family of origin, children's school adjustment, and parental criminality. Children who lack this combination of problems do not show signs of intergenerational welfare dependency.     

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.     

From Welfare to Work? Social Policy for Disabled People of Working Age in the United Kingdom in the 1990s

Disabled people of working age have been at the heart of recent welfare restructuring in the United Kingdom, but this has received little attention from mainstream social policy analysis. Both Conservative and Labour governments have introduced measures to promote labour force participation among disabled people, whilst discouraging dependence on welfare benefits. Whilst this new approach has been justified in terms of reducing poverty, its underlying imperatives are essentially inegalitarian. The welfare reform process has been driven by a number of official concerns including a perception of unsustainable fiscal pressures and a belief that perverse incentives in the social security benefit system have undermined economic efficiency. Moreover, it has been legitimated by an ideology of citizenship, which has shifted the moral responsibility for needs satisfaction away from the state to the individual. The paper concludes by identifying a better approach to welfare reform for disabled people of working age.     

The concept of social care and the analysis of contemporary welfare states

Care is now a widely-used concept in welfare state research, firmly established in the literature by feminist analysis. We believe that the concept as it has been used and developed to date has limitations that have hampered its development as a general category of welfare state analysis. In essence we argue that the political economy aspects of the concept have remained underdeveloped. The main purpose of this article is to elaborate a care-centered concept--which we name social care--that countenances and develops care as an activity and set of relations lying at the intersection of state, market and family (and voluntary sector) relations. We are especially concerned to examine what the concept of social care can tell us about welfare state variation and welfare state change and development. The article works systematically through these themes, beginning with a brief historical sketch of the concept of care and then moving on to elaborate the analytic potential of the concept of social care. In the latter regard we make the case that it can lead to a more encompassing analysis, helping to overcome especially the fragmentation in existing scholarship between the cash and service dimensions of the welfare state and the relative neglect of the latter. The concept of social care serves to shift the centre of analysis from specific policy domains so that instead of focusing on cash benefits or services in isolation it becomes possible to consider them as part of a broader set of inter-relating elements. In this and other regards, the concept has the potential to say something new about welfare states.     

创新福利模式 优化社会管理

创造适合国情的福利模式,是社会管理成功的基础和奥妙所在。一个好的福利模式要能保持四个基本均衡:经济发展与福利支出的均衡,福利支出中的基础部分与非基础部分的均衡,福利机制中的刚性与柔性的均衡,福利责任结构中的政府与市场、家庭、个人之间的均衡。中国一些富裕农村所搞的集体福利为实现这些均衡提供了实践经验,而这些经验与底线公平理论非常契合。底线公平福利模式具有四个特点和优势:教育为基,劳动为本,服务为重,健康为要。它充分发挥中国优秀文化和社会结构优势,把发展性要素内置于福利模式之中,可以实现社会福利的内外平衡,为社会安全奠定基础。     

Le genre des politiques sociales. L'apport théorique des « gender studies » à l'analyse des politiques sociales

In English-speaking countries and Scandinavia, where feminist and gender studies have developed over the past thirty years, the issue of sex and then of gender has led to a very fertile renewal of social policy analysis, in particular in the field of comparative welfare state studies. By insisting on the cultural, social, normative and historical construction of welfare states and social policies, this approach sheds light on the societal paradigms that define how social policies are drawn up and their impact in terms of gender. It enables us to undertake a critical, original examination of the concepts, theories and analytical tools traditionally used in comparative welfare state litterature. This article presents an inventory of the theoretical advances made in writings on this topic.     

Ethnic Organizations and the Welfare State: The Impact of Social Welfare Programs on the Formation of Indochinese Refugee Associations

The expansion of the welfare state during the 20th century has altered the conditions shaping the formation of ethnic organizations. Drawing upon research in the divergent fields of social policy, immigrant communities, and social movements, this article argues that social welfare programs promote or suppress ethnic organizations depending on how they affect an ethnic community's institutional completeness. This welfare state channeling theory is contrasted with ethnic competition and resource mobilization explanations for the formation of ethnic organizations. An analysis of 800 Indochinese refugee associations finds that public assistance has no effect on the prevalence of these organizations, but that privatization of federal social service expenditures does, thus partially supporting the welfare state channeling theory.     

Social work and social control in the penitentiary system: an empirical study in northern Italy

In Italy there is a prison and probation system based on a rehabilitative model, which is connected with social policies and entrusts relevant tasks to the helping professions. Among these, social work is affected by changes in social policies, marked by the influence of neoliberal thought. Contemporary sociological studies highlight the transition from a model mainly focused on ensuring social welfare, to a model in which the dominant interest is to increase effective social control. In this transition there has been an impoverishment of social protection for the most vulnerable segments of the population. This article presents the results of a qualitative research study carried out in northern Italy, among professionals working in the penitentiary sector (mainly social workers). Research has focused on the representations of the respondents on specific issues, including: the relationship between the crisis of the welfare state and the penal-welfare system; the culture of control and the changes in the role of social workers. Results show, inter alia, that social workers reject punitive responses, especially those towards the most disadvantaged social groups. Moreover, in this crisis of the welfare state and the rehabilitative model, political ideals, felt by the entire professional community, seem to be lacking.     

Social policy and social work in the voluntary sector: the case of Ukraine

Over a decade has passed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This major political change has had profound effects on how social welfare is delivered in countries in transition from communism. Using material derived from the author's involvement in social work education projects in Ukraine, this article examines the changing relationship between statutory social welfare provider agencies and the burgeoning voluntary sector. A confusing and rapidly changing picture has emerged. Some prominent themes likely to shape future directions are identified, particularly the imperative to ensure that social work education continues to be sensitive to local political and cultural contexts, rather than relying on importing Western solutions.     

Race,Hyper‐Incarceration,and US Poverty Policy in Historic Perspective

In this article, I bring scholarship on welfare reform into discussion with work on crime control and racial and ethnic relations. I locate the genesis of hyper‐incarceration and the moral suasion imposed on the recipients of contemporary social welfare services through the poverty policies of the Victorian era and later the postbellum south, implicating the checkered history of racial domination in the United States in the development of social welfare and criminal justice policy. I conclude by discussing the ways in which the United States has been reconfigured to facilitate these trends and of new terrain in the study of marginality in the neoliberal age. Doing so demonstrates the long‐standing collusion between welfare state and criminal justice actors, identifies the racialized target of punishment and poverty management, highlights the significance of race in the development of social policy, and exhibits the importance of social welfare policy in contemporary race and ethnic relations.     

Contesting the Welfare State in a Neo-Conservative Era

With the triumph of neo-conservatism, the Left has faced a number of dilemmas. The example of Britain is used to show that while the Left has attempted to remain critical of the liberal welfare state without giving support to Right attacks, it has also learned to be more concerned with issues of individual choice and state control in social welfare than it has in the past. Analysis of the problems of the "old welfare state" and an understandmg of the roots of the ideological successes of the Right provides one basis for a new progressive politics of social welfare.     

The flight from universalism

Up to the beginning of the 1990s Sweden had been considered a paragon welfare state in its realisation of universalist principles and an institutional welfare model. This seems to be changing rapidly. Mass unemployment, welfare expenditure cuts and institutional transformation have introduced several selective mechanisms into the Swedish welfare system, adding up to a retreat from universalism. New forms of selectivity can be seen in all layers of the welfare system, both transfer benefits and social security, public personal social services and the relation between state and voluntary organisations. The shifting of burdens from universal social security and insurance-based welfare onto local means tested systems has already meant a restigmatisation of unemployment, as the unemployed lose eligibility for the insurance-based systems, and an increase in the proportion of people who have to rely on poor relief instead of rights-based welfare, and when unemployment has gone up, so have work requirements for benefits. A rising proportion of labour market programmes are now municipally organised obligations instead of state administered rights. Conditioning the right to day care, appraising needs-tested services for the elderly, like home help and care, make personal social services change in the same directions. This may endanger the classical alliance between women and the welfare state.     

Policy-practice in social work and social work education in Israel

Policy-practice is a form of social work intervention that is intended to influence social policy. It is linked to an understanding of the role of social workers which places the struggle for social justice at the forefront of social work activity. However, this form of social work intervention has remained on the sidelines of social work practice and education in most welfare states. This paper seeks to understand the role that policy-practice and social policy play, and have played, in social work and social work education in Israel. The findings indicate that, despite a growth in interest in the political role of social workers in Israel during the 1970s, policy-practice has remained a mode of practice adopted by a minority of members of the profession in Israel. An empirical study of the curriculums of the schools of social work in Israel indicates that this is the case for the study program in most of the schools. The reasons for this can be linked primarily to the overwhelming influence of American social work upon the development of the Israeli profession and to the process of liberalization and privatization of the Israeli welfare state in the last two decades.     

Recent Developments in Welfare to Work in Hong Kong

Summary

The Asian financial crisis (1997) has created a social care crisis resulting in rising unemployment, poverty, income inequalities and homelessness. Although faced with dwindling public finances, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) government had been compelled to tackle these problems. However, it has been attracted to the neo-liberal recipe: changing the subvention system to a block grant, curbing social spending, and tightening eligibility for social assistance. Notably, the introduction of the Intensive Employment Assistance Projects (IEAPs), which are the first welfare to work programs in East Asia, has become a major policy tool. This paper reports on a study of the impact of the projects, one of the key pillars for welfare to work programs. The IEAPs were found to have brought about positive changes in welfare clients' motivation to work and sense of self-reliance. Social workers from both traditional and progressive NGOs have etched, in various ways, their place in the welfare to work programs and contributed to the debate on welfare reform in Hong Kong.     

What is mixed in welfare mix? Welfare ideologies at stake in the Lithuanian case of social service delivery

The article deals with the development of social welfare and social services in Lithuania by describing cultural contexts and disclosing evaluations of social service providers and recipients and needs of social service delivery. The authors of the article discuss the changing role of the state, pose a question as to what the institutions and the actors are and to what extent should they participate in the creation of social welfare. One of the aims of this paper is to describe the development of the welfare mix in Lithuania, by showing that welfare is inevitably woven into the historical, economic, political and social context; the distinctive cultural configuration of the welfare mix in social services delivery in Lithuania is revealed. Empirical research (survey of social services recipients and providers) presented in the article discloses that actors of social services delivery experience tension and ambiguity between the demand of neoliberal policy to choose and be responsible and the expectation that the state will participate in the social service market. At the same time social services recipients and providers express a need for different actors to take an active part in the welfare system.     

Social Welfare of the Aged Comments on some Overseas developments

I must first make a brief comment on this very broad title. Such a vast topic could not be reviewed in one paper, even if I had at my fingertips all the knowledge it would require. What in fact I aim to do is simply to comment on trends in programmes of social welfare for the aged which I became aware of while on study leave in 1966. My primary object was to observe developments in the field of medical social work, but since the practice of social work in hospitals is concerned to a large and ever-increasing extent with the social needs of the aged, and community endeavours to provide for those needs, the welfare of the aged always has a very central place in the medical social worker's interest.     

“A Black Benefit”: Racial Prejudice Among White Welfare Recipients in a Low-Income Neighborhood

Welfare has been stigmatized as a benefit for poor African-Americans, in particular for blacks accused of sexual promiscuity and a weak work ethic. Stigma has been found to demoralize welfare recipients, alienate middle-class voters who resent tax expenditures for public assistance, and fuel conservative support for legislation limiting welfare. This article describes another aspect of the stigmatization of welfare as a “black benefit”—the belief by some poor whites that they have experienced racial discrimination when trying to access cash assistance and other benefits. Drawing on data gathered as part of a larger, 18-month qualitative study, this article examines how impoverished whites in Philadelphia view welfare receipt and race. Ugly racial epithets and stereotypes were typically used when describing frustration over lack of access to welfare and other social services.