New Risks, New Welfare. Signposts for Social Policy

Citation

Cheyne, C. (2001), "New Risks, New Welfare. Signposts for Social Policy", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 28 No. 4, pp. 380-391. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijse.2001.28.4.380.1

The end of one millennium and the beginning of another give occasion to writing projects which review the legacy of the previous century and speculate about the developments in the new one. Published in mid‐2000, New Risks, New Welfare consciously seeks to identify trends in social policy in the twenty‐first century.

New Risks, New Welfare is the third text in a series titled “Broadening Perspectives on Social Policy”. The aim of the series is to bring fresh points of view and to attract fresh audiences to the mainstream of social policy debate.

The book is edited by two UK academics based at the University of Nottingham, Nick Manning and Ian Shaw, whose own disciplinary links are with Social Policy, Sociology and Health Policy. I mention this because their disciplinary location is central to the themes and frameworks which feature in the text and which have their strengths as well as possibly some weaknesses. Undoubtedly, these disciplinary roots have shaped the selection of contributors, who include a number of academics from Social Policy and/or Sociology Departments in the UK and three contributors from elsewhere in Europe. As a result, there are a strong Anglo‐Saxon focus and influence in this collection of essays.

There are eight chapters in this book; overall, they seemed quite disparate and, while each one on its own had particular merits, it was difficult to have a strong sense of a coherent whole. Indeed, the inclusion of some chapters or the approach taken within some seemed somewhat idiosyncratic. The editors endeavour to introduce some unifying threads by identifying five themes which have guided the selection of chapters. These themes are as follows: social change; international or inter‐regional change; welfare state typologies; the connections between industrialism, changing relations of production and social welfare; and an examination of “welfare work”, defined broadly as the work necessary for the production of welfare. However, these five themes are not explicitly or evenly addressed in the various chapters. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to reconcile the content of some chapters (in particular the one on resources for social policy) with the broader themes of the book.

The overriding impression left at the conclusion of reading this collection of essays is one of the superficiality of much millennial thinking and writing. A juncture in human history such as a new millennium or new century provides cause for pausing and reflecting on the course that has been charted and the way ahead. It can also be a convenience, a short‐lived opportunity to be seized, to indulge faddish thinking (for example, the current interest in globalisation, governance and risk). I don’t claim to be immune myself from such a tendency. Nor do I reject the value of all faddish thinking. Undoubtedly, the concepts of “governance” and “risk”, for example, have considerable, and more than just contemporary, currency. However, in a book that chooses themes which are described as stretching the boundaries of social policy, some more profound insights would be warranted if there are to be signposts for the new millennium.

Notwithstanding these shortcomings and irritations, there is much that is of value in this book which I see as having potential application in postgraduate social policy courses. It is not the signposts – ironically – but the backward glance over the evolving nature of welfare that is provided in the introductory chapter that first enhances my reflections on the future direction of social policy. In that opening chapter, Manning and Shaw trace the origins of the development of European welfare states back to the withdrawal of Roman occupation in Europe and the subsequent “regional development of domestic political order” (p. 2).

Readers of this journal will perhaps be assured by the observation by Manning and Shaw that “social policy has historically followed social change, and that the engine of social change is economics” – which becomes a theme in a number of the chapters in the book (p. 10). While not specifically described as a text on the UK and European welfare state, the authors, as I have earlier noted, are located in that part of the globe, and their focus on globalisation and other contemporary phenomena is substantially coloured by that geographical location. However, for readers such as myself who live outside Europe, and/or who are involved in research on welfare states outside Europe, this book provides some data and discussion that are useful to non‐European concerns. In particular, I found Chapter 4 (“The Welfare Modelling Business”) by Peter Abrahamson to offer a refreshing perspective, moving as he does beyond Europe to encompass in his discussion of welfare state typologising a large number of other countries (albeit mostly those which are members of the OECD). There are, to give their due to those authors, references to welfare state developments outside Europe in other chapters (for example, in the discussion of non‐labour social movements and of colonisation in the Introduction). However, there remains a need for social policy theorising to transcend its Eurocentric origins in the twenty‐first century. Bob Jessop in his chapter argues that the nature of governance has changed from that found in the Keynesian welfare national state to that associated with a Schumpeterian workfare post‐national regime. This change in the core organisational principles of the welfare state is seen as being “a condition for the renewed coexistence of capitalism and the welfare state” (p. 21).

Yet this is only a partial account of the evolving form of the welfare state as it responds to the challenges of recognising diversity and difference, which reflect not just economic processes but cultural processes, much more sharply delineated in settler societies. Perhaps this is the focus of further work, not discussed in this chapter due to space limitations, which addresses subtypes of the Schumpeterian workfare post‐national regime. It is to be hoped that the work on subtypes acknowledges the criticisms of mainstream welfare state theorising by feminist and other critical theorists for whom the relationship between capitalism and the welfare state is further mediated by other structural processes associated with patriarchy and racism.

Chapter 2 explores a range of “resources for social policy”. Unconventionally, if not idiosyncratically, “resources” means such things as the source of revenue for welfare services (such as taxation by the population in the labour force) or the source of in‐kind provision of welfare (such as care by families and care by professionals), and it also encompasses the “raw materials” provided by the environment. A key concern for the author is the changing supply of such resources and changing demand for such resources arising from demographic and other processes. In Chapter 3, Nicola Yeates provides a concise yet thoroughgoing analysis of the notion of globalisation and also reviews the social policy literature on globalisation. She advocates the utility of the concept of global governance (derived from Gordenker and Weiss). This chapter lived up to the promise of its title, providing critical commentary, and stands out as one of the more substantive chapters in the text. The chapter by Abrahamson on welfare state modelling provides an overview of the history of welfare state typologising – a relatively recent development in social policy – and acknowledges the shortcomings of some of the eurocentric models. A recognition of the impact of perspective on, and distance from, the object of study (in this case, a cluster of welfare states) is central to more adequate typologising. In addition, Abrahamson notes the different ordering principles that might be used and also the impact of programme sensitivity (where focusing on a particular programme – such as income support for the unemployed – may produce a particular typology). Changes in central and eastern European welfare states as a result of the transformation from communism are the focus of Chapter 5. Chapter 6 focuses on labour market reforms, and also the role of unions in governance processes. Some interesting and, at least for this reviewer, unexpected trends are identified. The chapter explores the intimate relationship between work and welfare and the different rights associated with occupational and universal citizenship. This is one chapter which casts its perspective forward and poses a number of questions to be faced by social policy makers and analysts in the twenty‐first century, particularly in the case of contributory social insurance systems. The author, Colin Crouch, notes the way in which these formerly benign systems became highly perverse in the 1980s with the changes in labour force participation and the technological changes which displaced labour.

The influence of sociological perspectives on this collection is seen in Chapter 7 which introduces the importance of culture. This is a large and possibly unwieldy topic but the focus very quickly narrows to the gulf between public policy analysis and popular understandings and perspectives of welfare issues. This chapter flags some issues that are likely to be more to the fore in social policy theorising in the twenty‐first century as the post‐positivist turn in social theory impacts more widely on those disciplines such as social policy and economics which have thus far been relatively unshaken by this theoretical development. Chapter 8 follows up some of the signposts in Chapter 7 by critically reviewing the concept of “risk society” articulated by German sociologist Ulrich Beck. The author’s concern is not specifically or at least not exclusively with Beck: it is with the tendency in so much sociological theorising, which the author, Robert Dingwall, regards as irrelevant to the real world and concrete concerns of social policy.

Like most of the chapters in this book, Chapter 8 presents important challenges for contemporary efforts to address social problems and other public policy issues. The editors of this collection are to be commended for providing a platform for a number of insightful analyses of social policy developments. In providing such a platform the editors have gone some way towards achieving their goal of bringing fresh points of view to the mainstream social policy debate. While there was reference to a set of five themes, in fact the individual contributions addressed these themes only partially, patchily and peripherally. A strong editorial hand is needed to bring these fresh points of view into dialogue with one another. The extent to which the editors’ goal of attracting fresh audiences to the mainstream of social policy debate may stretch, may be limited, given the sociological dominance and the disparate nature of the collection. Of course, economists and other social scientists are to be encouraged to engage with sociological writing but equally their disciplines need to be represented in texts such as these, particularly given the interdisciplinary nature of social policy.