The "Social": The Global Career of an Idea

Abstract

This special issue assembles contributions from the global North and South to inquire into the future of the "social" from an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing on sociology, political science and law. What does "social" mean, and do social policy and the welfare state have a future in a global age? The issue is published on the occasion of the eightieth birthday of Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, who is considered the doyen of the sociology of social policy in Germany (see his recent books, translated into English, Kaufmann 2012, 2013a, 2013b).Kaufmann's ambitious sociological approach, which emphasizes national state traditions and notions of society and culture, contrasts with the dominating approaches to social policy, which are either normative (prominently Titmuss 1987; for a critique see Pinker 1979), descriptive (much of the textbook literature), political economy (Lenhardt and Offe 1977; Esping-Andersen 1990, the most influential recent writer on the welfare state) or policy studies. Although there is a vast literature on social policy and the welfare state, surprisingly few scholars have investigated the societal and cultural dimensions of social policy and the welfare state in depth. 1