Afterword: Welfare State Reform, Recognition and Emotional Labor

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 487-489 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arlie Hochschild
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Emotional Labor ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
State Reform ◽  
Government Aid ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Welfare State Reform ◽  
Do So

In this themed section, the editors and authors take us far beyond the usual thinking about welfare reform. How, they ask, do politicians want us to feel about welfare reform? How do we think we should feel and how do we feel about it? How does the disabled woman who has lost her government-provided caregiver and ‘hasn't been out of the house since Christmas’, feel about it? Or the man who petitions to restore his lost government aid – but fails to do so? Or the wealthy Dutch tax payer? These are are the sorts of questions that arise in the study of a changing welfare states.

Introduction: Welfare State Reform, Recognition and Emotional Labour

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evelien Tonkens ◽  
Ellen Grootegoed ◽  
Jan Willem Duyvendak
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Active Citizenship ◽  
State Reform ◽  
Emotional Labour ◽  
Western Countries ◽  
Welfare State Reform ◽  
The Welfare State

Welfare state retrenchment and its corollary, the encouragement of ‘active citizenship’, are widespread phenomena in Western countries today. While public and academic debates have focused on the practical consequences of changing rules and shrinking entitlements, there has been much less attention on how citizens experience these reforms and their accompanying rhetoric. We know even less about how welfare reform impacts upon people's emotions. Such a focus, however, is important because the reform of the welfare state is about more than changing rights and duties. Reforms tell citizens what they are worth, how they are valued and judged, and how they are supposed to feel about the new arrangements.

scholarly journals Retrenchment and restructuring in an age of austerity: what (if anything) can be learned from the affluent democracies?

2002 ◽  
Vol 18 (suppl) ◽  
pp. S7-S11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Pierson
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
State Reform ◽  
New Politics ◽  
Middle Income Countries ◽  
Policy Dynamics ◽  
Welfare State Reform

The article discusses some difficulties of drawing implications from welfare state reform in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for "middle-income countries", and whose welfare states have been less well institutionalized. It is argued that globalization's role in contemporary social policy dynamics were not unimportant, but social processes occurring within national contexts were probably more important. There is not a single "new politics of the welfare state" but distinct political dynamics in different "regimes" or "configurations", which are characterized by different problem loads and different structures of political opportunity. Different factors are crucial in explaining outcomes in different configurations and there is little reason to expect much convergence in social policy outcomes across regime type. Contemporary welfare state reform is depicted as a process of restructuring rather than dismantling, what can encourage the possibilities for developing coalitions advancing multi-dimensional agendas of welfare state reform.

What's Globalization Got to Do with It? Economic Interdependence and the Future of European Welfare States

2006 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Hay
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare Reform ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Social Models ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Usa ◽  
State Regime ◽  
European Welfare States ◽  
The Welfare State

AbstractThe appeal to globalization as a non-negotiable external economic constraint plays an increasingly significant role in the linked politics of expectation suppression and welfare reform in contemporary Europe. Yet, although it threatens to become something of a self- fulfilling prophecy, the thesis that globalization entails welfare retrenchment and convergence is empirically suspect. In this paper it is argued that there is little evidence of convergence amongst European social models and that, although common trajectories can be identified, these have tended to be implemented more or less enthusiastically and at different paces to produce, to date, divergent outcomes. Second, I suggest that it is difficult to see globalization as the principal agent determining the path on which European social models are embarked since the empirical evidence points if anything to de-globalization rather than globalization. The implications of this for the future of the welfare state in Europe and for the USA as a model welfare state regime are explored.

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