Nationalist Reframing of the Finnish and Swedish Welfare States – The Nexus of Nationalism and Social Policy in Far‐right Populist Parties

The rise of right‐wing populist parties in the Nordic countries is slowly redefining the Nordic social democratic discourse of the universal and egalitarian welfare state. The nexus of nationalism and social policy has been explored in regions and countries such as Quebec, Scotland, Belgium and the UK, but the change of discourse in the Nordic countries has received less attention. Taking the case of Sweden and Finland, this article argues that Nordic populism does not question the redistributive welfare state per se as many other European neo‐liberal far‐right parties have done. Instead, it reframes the welfare state as being linked to a sovereign and exclusive Swedish and Finnish political community with distinct national boundaries. Although Sweden and Finland largely share a common welfare nation state discourse, the article also points to important differences in the way this discourse is able to frame the welfare nation state where access to, and the design of, social services are no longer universal and egalitarian but based around ethnicity. The article aims to demonstrate this through an analysis of the welfare discourses of two populist parties: Sweden Democrats and True Finns.     

The Role of Distributional Coalitions in Welfare Regimes: Chile, Costa Rica and El Salvador

Do social policies in Latin America promote or discourage distribution? And if they do promote distribution, are coalitions a prerequisite? Drawing from a typology of welfare regimes elaborated for 18 Latin American countries, this article explores responses to these questions by addressing three emblematic cases: Chile, Costa Rica and El Salvador – that is, countries where the management of social risks primarily revolves around markets, states and families, respectively. Although the article is exploratory, findings suggest that societal coalitions have been, and are likely to continue to be, weak in market welfare regimes, strong in state welfare regimes and contingent to policy sectors in familialistic welfare regimes.     

福利企业在残疾人就业中的作用分析

残疾人是一个需要社会各界帮助的弱势群体,残疾人就业是一个非常值得关注的问题,但在我国整体就业形势不乐观的时代背景下,对残疾人就业的关注甚少。福利企业对残疾人就业具有重要作用,本文研究了我国残疾人就业的现状与问题,并探讨了福利企业对残疾人就业的特殊意义。     

社会工作方法在残疾人福利服务中的应用

我国残疾人社会福利政策涉及残疾人事业的各个领域,而残疾人的特殊困难决定了落实残疾人福利政策并非易事。基于残疾人福利服务工作具有与健全人服务不同的特殊性和复杂性,应将残疾人社会工作作为残疾人福利服务的重要手段,不断实践社会工作方法以适应残疾人服务的发展。本文从论证残疾人社会工作对康复服务的重要意义切入,提出应持续不断发展残疾人社会工作对残疾人的服务和扶助,发展制度化和常规化的残疾人社会工作,逐步解决残疾人及其家庭面临的特殊困难,最终使残疾人更广泛地享受各项残疾人服务的实惠。     

Leaving the Nordic Path? The Changing Role of Danish Trade Unions in the Welfare Reform Process

For a long period, Denmark has been labeled a ‘model country’ with a comprehensive welfare state and a successful model of corporatist policy‐making. Danish unions are considered amongst the strongest in the world, and they have for a long time been a distinct part of the political system, and as social partners, they were strongly integrated into decision‐making processes. The analysis of the Danish welfare and labour market policy during the last two decades documents a profound change in the arrangement and in the status of the social partners (especially unions) in the Danish political system. The results show that two important pillars of the Danish model – the social partner basis and the collective trust in partnership – are eroding. Unions are no longer part of the law‐making process and, since 2007, they are formally excluded from the organization of the decision‐making process. Recent developments point at weaker unions that operate more as lobbyists instead of being strong corporatist institutions or part of the decision‐making process. The results of the study are thought‐provoking and the basis for a revised thinking of the Danish and the Nordic model.     

社会福利制度改革背景下中国社会工作发展的历史与特色

中国社会工作的发展是在社会福利制度改革的背景下，通过政府主导、教育推动和实务跟进等一系列独特的历史过程和体制变革实现的。从中国计划经济时期形成的传统行政社会工作体系与专业化和职业化社会工作发展的关系看当代中国社会工作的发展，对理解中国特色的社会工作制度和“嵌入式”的专业化与职业化方式，掌握其特点，有理论和现实意义。     

The Public's Changing Perceptions of the Condition of Social Welfare in Hong Kong: Lessons for Social Development

In the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, the Hong Kong government introduced welfare reforms to ease the pressure from fiscal challenges and swelling welfare rolls; at the same time, to maintain its development credentials, it made an effort to adhere to its colonial tradition on the provision of welfare. The government adopted various strategies to garner popular support for promoting economic development as the primary goal and for promoting social harmony under the concept of ‘helping people to help themselves’. This article examines Hong Kong people's changing perceptions of the condition of social welfare in the past decade. Using a multidimensional developmental welfare approach and data from two opinion surveys conducted in 1997 and 2008, the study finds that Hong Kong people expressed a relatively high level of satisfaction about their own lives, but varying degrees of reservation about the problem of poverty, government provision of social welfare, and opportunities for social mobility. As a result of the sectorally unbalanced welfare reforms, which are biased against the disadvantaged, some of these perceptions have become more negative in recent years. Socially vulnerable people, especially the lower classes, are now more critical of the condition of social welfare, and such feelings seem to be intensifying. It is thus suggested that special attention to the issue of class should be paid in social development programmes to ensure social equality and social justice.     

The Dutch and Danish Miracles Revisited: A Critical Discussion of Activation Policies in Two Small Welfare States

Denmark and the Netherlands are usually considered to belong to two different families of welfare states: the Scandinavian and the Continental model respectively. Yet, in both states active labour market policies, or activation, have increased during the 1990s and are currently prominent. Both in Denmark and in the Netherlands activation has been viewed as an important reason for the low unemployment rates which both states have experienced since the early to mid‐1990s, hence explaining the so‐called Dutch and Danish jobs miracles. The paper examines critically the activation measures taken in both countries and their alleged positive effect upon (un)employment. It further examines their effect on rights and obligations from a citizenship perspective. The paper concludes that in both cases the positive development of labour market performance cannot primarily be attributed to activation measures. Furthermore, activation has reduced the entitlements and increased the obligations affiliated with social citizenship.     

Discourse, Learning and Welfare State Change: The Case of German Labour Market Reforms

In this article we argue that Germany has significantly changed its approach to labour market policies (LMPs) during the past decade; in many instances Britain has served as a model to learn from. In a first step, we identify the core institutional arrangements of the conservative approach to LMP in Germany and contrast them with the liberal approach, using the UK as an example. Secondly, we trace the development and nature of changes in German LMP since the 1990s. We show that the policy has increasingly incorporated elements of, and to a considerable extent shifted towards, a liberal approach. Thirdly, we review competing theoretical approaches that might explain this turn in LMP and conclude that changed interpretative patterns have been crucial to understand the overall shift. Fourthly, utilizing the policy transfer framework, we show that in regards to the specific policy instruments German policy‐makers have learnt from the experiences in the UK.     

Programme Effectiveness in Activating Welfare Recipients to Work: The Case of Hong Kong

Some theories and research based on data in the West have implied the effectiveness of measures using the work-first approach, human capital development, community work experience, and financial incentives to promote welfare recipients’ transition from welfare to work. Nevertheless, the generality of the implication does not hold without examining the effectiveness in a non-Western setting. The present study thus employs survey data from 1,240 welfare recipients in Hong Kong to investigate the effectiveness of various measures for raising the recipients’ work motivation and diminishing their welfare dependency. The measures examined include the Intensive Employment Assistance Project (IEAP), Community Work (CW) Programme and Disregarded Earnings (DE) arrangements. Findings reveal the effectiveness of these three measures. Particularly, help received from various services of the IEAP was the principal factor in the effectiveness of the IEAP and the IEAP was effective for welfare recipients who were older or less skilled. The findings thus offer support to the generality of the claim about the effectiveness of welfare-to-work programmes.     

The Retrenchment of the Welfare State in Latin America: The Case of Argentina

According to the conventional approving account of the transformations which have been taking place in public policy and in markets in Latin America, Argentina constitutes one of the most successful examples of wide-ranging and rapid change. Certainly the experience of Argentina offers an excellent case-study of what in the literature is termed " the retrenchment of the welfare states"; that is those institutional transformations associated with the "neoconservative revolutions" of recent years. In this paper I analyse the characteristics of Argentinian welfare state retrenchment, distinguishing between two fields of analysis: (1) "systemic retrenchment" which is linked to changes in the "referential environment" of social policy institutions, especially changes in the economic, fiscal, labour market and politico-institutional contexts: (2) "programmatic retrenchment" which refers to changes in the institutional ordering of specific social policies. Finally I draw conclusions in respect of the strategies adopted for the retrenchment of the welfare state in Argentina and discuss probable prospects for the future.     

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.     

The Choice Revolution: Privatization of Swedish Welfare Services in the 1990s

During the 1990s, the Swedish welfare state was declared by some to be in a “crisis”, due to both financial strain and loss of political support. Others have argued that the spending cuts and reforms undertaken during this period did slow down the previous increase in social spending, but left the system basically intact. The main argument put forward in this article is that the Swedish welfare state has been and is still undergoing a transforming process whereby it risks losing one of its main characteristics, namely the belief in and institutional support for social egalitarianism. During the 1990s, the public welfare service sector opened up to competing private actors. As a result, the share of private provision grew, both within the health‐care and primary education systems as well as within social service provision. This resulted in a socially segregating dynamic, prompted by the introduction of “consumer choice”. As will be shown in the article, the gradual privatization and market‐orientation of the welfare services undermine previous Swedish notions of a “people's home”, where uniform, high‐quality services are provided by the state to all citizens, regardless of income, social background or cultural orientation.     

Exploring Neglected Dimensions of Social Policy: The SDW, Fiscal Welfare and the Exemplar of Local Taxation in England

Titmuss's Social Division of Welfare (SDW) thesis is a vitally important but much neglected element of social policy analysis. This article seeks to explore the SDW, with a particular focus on fiscal welfare. Fiscal welfare has been described as forming a hidden welfare state, and while taxation is one of the main ways in which governments affect the lives of citizens, studies of welfare pay remarkably little attention to its impact. Fiscal welfare is examined by using, as an exemplar, local taxation in England, a subject that itself is neglected within social policy. Local taxation in England is of interest because it illustrates the impact of a system of taxation on different groups of citizens, and how this can operate to the benefit of rich over poor citizens. This is because the current system is highly regressive, meaning that those on low and middle incomes spend proportionately more of their income paying the tax than do those on high incomes. What is of further interest is how within the debate about reform of local taxation, concern with regressivity becomes obscured and ceases to be the focus of attention. We are thus provided with an example of how fiscal welfare remains a hidden issue. The article concludes by arguing that social policy analysis needs to move beyond the narrow confines of social welfare and develop a broader understanding of welfare, based on the SDW.     

Activation,Public Employment Services and their Clients: The Role of Social Class in a Continental Welfare State

This article fills a gap in the existing literature by investigating how public employment service (PES) staff actually deal with their clients under a continental regime of activation. The results reported here are based on interviews both with PES staff and their unemployed clients in Germany. We argue that due to its Bismarckian origins as an insurance‐based system of ‘unemployment protection’, Germany's system of unemployment compensation is attractive not only for the marginalized, but also for core workers. As a result, PES staff deal with clients from very heterogeneous class backgrounds. We demonstrate that social class is a significant factor in client outcomes, and that earlier research has perhaps overemphasized the role of frontline staff as ‘street‐level bureaucrats’. While staff do have considerable power, the result of the encounters between the administration and clients also depends on the capabilities of the clients, which, in turn, are strongly related to social class.     

Hybridization instead of Clustering: Transformation Processes of Welfare Policies in Central and Eastern Europe

Welfare state theories tend to use concepts of clustering for defining the affiliation of national social security systems to overarching worlds of welfare. A closer look at the transformation processes of welfare policies in Central and Eastern Europe shows a great variability among those countries in approximating their welfare states to Western European standards. In the design of their pension systems, their health care provision and their unemployment protection, Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) follow different reform paths. Welfare clusters in Western Europe are used as reference models, but no single example applies to all sectors of social security. Thus, a generalizing picture of welfare provision cannot be drawn for Central and Eastern Europe. Instead of constituting a new individual type of welfare arrangement, a hybridization process is observable.     

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.     

Breaking Silence,Building Solutions: The Role of Social Justice Group Work in the Retention of Faculty of Color

In spite of their many diversity initiatives, predominantly White colleges and universities have a poor track record in the recruitment and retention of faculty of color. This article unpacks the White privilege inherent in barriers to retention by focusing on three standards commonly used to make promotion and tenure decisions: teaching, service, and scholarship. A story of two Native American women faculty members denied academic advancement at a predominantly White university 30 years apart illustrates the White racism that underscored these decisions. Approaches to social justice group work are suggested for addressing the retention of faculty of color in the future.     

Stuck between the Idea of Philanthropy and Social Right: Dilemma of Social Assistance in China

This article exams the social right to receive assistance from the government established through the introduction of China’s new social assistance programs. A qualitative study that included 42 social assistance recipients and 12 policy implementers in urban areas suggests that the social right to receive social assistance has not been fully established. This is partly due to the practice of philanthropy which continues to have a significant influence on social assistance. At present, the underlying idea of social assistance is stuck between the idea of philanthropy and social right to receive assistance. The competing views have resulted in the dilemma of current social assistance development. Findings from this study have implications for policy and practice change to move toward social right to receive assistance and transition out of the dilemma of social assistance versus philanthropy. Future research should be broadened to study the social assistance recipients and policy implementers in rural areas and examine their experiences.     

Envisioning the Third Sector's Welfare Role: Critical Discourse Analysis of ‘Post‐Devolution’ Public Policy in the UK 1998–2012

Welfare state theory has struggled to come to terms with the role of the third sector. It has often categorized welfare states in terms of the pattern of interplay between state social policies and the structure of the labour market. Moreover, it has frequently offered an exclusive focus on state policy – thereby failing to substantially recognize the role of the formally organized third sector. This study offers a corrective view. Against the backdrop of the international shift to multi‐level governance, it analyses the policy discourse of third sector involvement in welfare governance following devolution in the UK. It reveals the changing and contrasting ways in which post‐devolution territorial politics envisions the sector's role as a welfare provider. The mixed methods analysis compares policy framing and the structural narratives associated with the development of the third sector across the four constituent polities of the UK since 1998. The findings reveal how devolution has introduced a new spatial policy dynamic. Whilst there are elements of continuity between polities – such as the increasing salience of the third sector in welfare provision – policy narratives also provide evidence of the territorialization of third sector policy. From a methodological standpoint, this underlines the distinctive and complementary role discourse‐based analysis can play in understanding contemporary patterns and processes shaping welfare governance.