Transformation of the Welfare State

Abstract

This book is the outgrowth of a large‐scale comparative project on the changing landscape of the welfare state initiated by the author in 1997. In it, it is argued that the changes in welfare policy being witnessed in Europe and the USA are not marginal adjustments to the borders of the welfare state, but represent a fundamental shift or transformation in the design and philosophy of social protection. The author argues that there has been a turn away from the conventional welfare‐state emphasis on broad‐based entitlements, passive income supports, and publicly delivered benefits, towards a new ‘enabling’ approach under which welfare allocations are more selective on the bases of income and behaviour, and are activity related, and privately delivered. The shift to this ‘enabling state’ is traced, and evidence provided of how the new system promotes work and economic inclusion over protection, and how it changes the nature of social cohesion, diluting the role of government and thickening the glue of civil society. The likely readership is sociologists, political scientists, economists, historians, and social workers.

Tying Up the Loose Ends: The Determinants of Active Labour Market Policy in the Western Countries 1985-2013

“…He maintains that strengthening economic globalisation increases the political credibility of neoliberal arguments, which can also lead to decision-making that will contract the welfare state. Due to the tax-funded nature of ALMP, combined with its unclear short-term impacts on employment (Card, Kluve, & Weber, 2010) and tendency to interfere with the free labour market mechanism, its importance should decline along with the growth of globalisation (Gilbert, 2002).…”

Sanksjoner – arbeidslinjas nattside?

“…Gilbert (2004) karakteriserer endringen med det positivt ladete uttrykket «den mulighetsskapende stat» (the enabling state), Jessop (1994) med det negativt ladete uttrykket «arbeid for velferd»-staten (the workfare state). For alle typer stønad er nå aktivering til arbeid en målsetting.…”

‘We nicked stuff from all over the place’: policy transfer or muddling through?

“…While there are likely to be continuing 'institutional pulls' of the kind outlined here, it is also the case that a series of pressures -global economic, cultural (as a result of migration, for example), the rising influence of business and waning power of organised labour -are posing challenges to existing institutions that mean that policy learning is becoming less 'bounded' by past assumptions and arrangements even as policy makers attempt to impose a rationality and logic on their actions and decision making. There is no space to go into detail here but recent work on welfare state 'transformation' indicates that institutionalised principles and welfare mechanisms are gradually loosening (Ferge, 1997;Ferrera et al, 2001;Gilbert, 2002;Ellison, 2006). Thus demographic issues associated with ageing populations across OECD countries are having quite dramatic effects on pensions policies in, for example, Sweden, Denmark, Australia and the UK (Mann, 2001).…”

“…A further reason for reassessing the idea that the US is somehow mainly responsible for the current stress on 'activation' and conditionality in UK welfareand the implication that something called 'policy' can be learned and transferred in this way -has to do with the possibility that what were once conceived as institutionalised or embedded welfare arrangements are more fragile and open to transformation than they once were (Gilbert, 2002;Ellison, 2006). Paradoxically perhaps, the contention here is that, although institutional influences continue to play a role in shaping policymaking, de-institutionalising and 're-calibrating' pressures -both global and local -are adding to the complexity of policy learning and transfer in ways that undermine traditional welfare regime characteristics, and both pluralise and de-institutionalise sources of policymaking.…”