Social Policy and Social Reform - David Donnison: A Radical Agenda: After the New Right and the Old Left London, Rivers Oram Press, 1991, 215 pp., paperback £9.95. - John Hills: State of Welfare: The Welfare State in Britain Since 1974 Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990, vi + 395 pp., 740.00. - Thomas and Dorothy Wilson (eds): The State and Social Welfare: The Objectives of Policy London, Longman, 1991, xiii + 311 pp., paperback £14.99.

1992 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-250
Author(s):  
Catherine Jones
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
The State ◽  
New Right ◽  
Old Left ◽  
The Welfare State

Social Work and Social Welfare: The Organization of Philanthropic Resources in Britain, 1900–1914

1977 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Social System ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
The State ◽  
Charity Organization ◽  
Transitional Era

Late Victorian and Edwardian social reform has been studied in recent years in order to clarify that important transitional era when new state resources were being called upon to help redress the most glaring abuses which comprised the condition-of-England question. Most of these studies have emphasized the politics of social policy and have also subsumed the tangled and competitive world of philanthropy. But philanthropists were prominent in the politics and practice of social welfare. In his study of Edwardian social policy, Bentley Gilbert distinguishes three organizations as characteristic of “scientific social reform”: settlements (inspired by Canon Samuel Barnett), the Fabians, and the Charity Organization Society. His analysis of each concluded that “professionally-minded social work,” as represented by the C.O.S., least typified the transition from old to new attitudes about social policy. David Owen's examination of English philanthropy supports Gilbert's conclusions concerning the C.O.S., and less detailed surveys of social policy also cite that agency as representative of a philosophic individualism which rejected the policies necessary for reform. All agree that the charitable community called attention to many defects in the British social system, but they leave readers with the impression that it generally opposed state sponsored remedies for those ills.It is the concern of this essay to show that the “professionally-minded” world of Edwardian philanthropy was, like the state, developing new agencies and reorganizing its resources to help meet the massive and diverse welfare needs of the twentieth century.

The Persistence of Poverty under Welfare States and the Prospects for its Abolition

1992 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Walker
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
New Right ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Main Factor ◽  
The Welfare State

This article examines the relationship between poverty and the welfare state and attempts to answer the question as to why poverty has persisted under all welfare states. Several major reasons for the persistence of poverty are advanced, and the author argues that the main factor underlying the failure to abolish poverty is the conflict between economic policy and social policy. The challenge to welfare states from the New Right is examined—particularly the contention that welfare states themselves create poverty and dependence—in the light of evidence of the impact of the Thatcher government's policies in Britain. Finally, the author proposes an alternative approach to the abolition of poverty, one that is based on the integration of economic and social policy.

Social Steering and Household Strategies: the macropolitics and the microsociology of welfare states

1989 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Göran Therborn
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
The State ◽  
Individual Action ◽  
Public Provision ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
Household Data ◽  
Analytical Perspective ◽  
The Welfare State

ABSTRACTAn analytical perspective for grasping how welfare states relate to the ordinary life-pursuits of their population and how the latter relates to the welfare state is needed. What welfare states do is distinguished into social administration, social education, social reform, and social steering. Steering reaches furthest into people's lives. As such it is problematic both to integrative and aggregative theories of democracy; it can also include the possibility of calling forth more signals from the population than less ambitious democratic policies. A systematic overview of aggregate Swedish household data the major activities of households provides a basis for analysing how the population is affected by and affects the welfare state. The state appears as an important provider of work, housing, childcare, and leisure; the most effective signals from households to the state come forward when public provision and subsidy have created tight markets. From the household perspective, signals to government through individual action of various sorts, direct or mediated, appear crucial even in very organized Sweden.

The State, the Market, and General Practice: The Australian Case

2000 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin N. White
Keyword(s):  
General Practice ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Community Health Services ◽  
The State ◽  
Women's Movements ◽  
New Right ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Australian Case ◽  
The Welfare State

This article examines the development of general practice in the latter half of the 20th century, documenting the issues of concern to both the profession and the state. General practice developed hand in hand with the welfare state in Australia. As the structural changes associated with restructuring of the welfare state have advanced, so have the fortunes of general practice declined, despite significant attempts in the 1970s and 1980s to “save” general practice by both the profession and the state. These structural changes have operated on two fronts, the economic and the cultural. On the economic, changes to the employment of general practitioners clearly indicate ongoing proletarianization, particularly in a changing environment of labor-capital relations. At the cultural level, development of the self-help and the women's movements and the elective affinity of these groups with the individualism of the new right are leading to deprofessionalization. The author advances this argument in a review of general practice over the last 40 years and in a case study of community health services. Theoretically he argues for a combination of the proletarianization and the deprofessionalization theses.

Retrenched, Reconfigured and Broken: The British Welfare State after a Decade of Austerity

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-96
Author(s):  
Kevin Farnsworth
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Public Expenditure ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Crisis Events ◽  
Financial Base ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Welfare State

This article is an attempt to take stock and critically reflect on the UK’s decade of austerity and social policy hostility over the past decade. It distinguishes between economic and political austerity and digs deeper into the data on expenditure in order to examine the impact of austerity on British public expenditure and politics. It argues that the decade of austerity was a hostile one for British social policy which not only undermined the financial base of key parts of the welfare state, it reshaped it and redefined its priorities, setting in train a series of subsequent events that would further change, not just British social policies, but British economics, polity and politics. And, as subsequent crises – notably Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic – testify, crisis events tend to be linked, and each one shapes and influences the ability of the state to respond to the next.

Towards a whole-economy approach to the welfare state: citizens, corporations and the state within the broad welfare mix

2019 ◽  
pp. 71-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Farnsworth
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
The State ◽  
Mixed Economy ◽  
Welfare Mix ◽  
Corporate Welfare ◽  
Policy Objectives ◽  
The Welfare State

This chapter argues for a broadening of social policy focus, beyond the mixed economy approach (which incorporates social, private, informal/familial, voluntary, fiscal and occupational welfare) towards a whole economy approach that ‘brings in’ corporate welfare and a broader focus on taxation, public policies that overlap with social policy objectives, power and the economy.

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