scholarly journals It is not Only About Equality. A Study on the (Other) Values That Ground Attitudes to the Welfare State

2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. Calzada ◽  
M. Gomez-Garrido ◽  
L. Moreno ◽  
F. J. Moreno-Fuentes
Author(s):  
Luise Li Langergaard

The article explores the central role of the entrepreneur in neoliberalism. It demonstrates how a displacement and a broadening of the concept of the entrepreneur occur in the neoliberal interpretation of the entrepreneur compared to Schumpeter’s economic innovation theory. From being a specific economic figure with a particular delimited function the entrepreneur is reinterpreted as, on the one hand, a particular type of subject, the entrepreneur of the self, and on the other, an ism, entrepreneurialism, which permeates individuals, society, and institutions. Entrepreneurialism is discussed as a movement of the economic into previously non-economic domains, such as the welfare state and society. Social entrepreneurship is an example of this in relation to solutions to social welfare problems. This can, on the one hand, be understood as an extension of the neoliberal understanding of the entrepreneur, but it also, in certain interpretations, resists the neoliberal understanding of economy and society.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kohlmann

The Introduction begins to outline a literary prehistory of the welfare state in Britain around 1900 by turning to a period that forces us to look beyond the connotations associated with the terms reform and revolution today. The chapter presents the book’s two intertwined goals, one reconstructive and literary-historical, the other conceptual and theoretical. First, British Literature and the Life of Institutions reconstructs the emergence of a reformist literary mode around 1900 by exploring how literary texts responded and adapted to the elongated rhythms of institutional change that characterized the emergence of new state structures in this period. But the book also, secondly, aims to make visible a reformist idiom which pervades literary, philosophical, political, and social writing of the period, and which insists that we need to think about the state as an idea, as a speculative figure, rather than as a set of administrative procedures and bureaucratic processes.


Author(s):  
Nils Holtug

Egalitarians disagree about the extent to which states should have open borders. Sometimes, this disagreement is due to a deeper disagreement about the scope of egalitarian justice. Egalitarians holding that equality has domestic scope only may be inclined to favor restrictive immigration policies to protect the welfare state. Egalitarians holding that equality has global scope, on the other hand, may be inclined to support more open borders in order to reduce global inequality. This chapter argues that equality has global scope and then considers the implications of global egalitarianism for the issue of open borders. Furthermore, the chapter provides an argument for why (more) open borders can be expected reduce global inequality. Then some objections to this argument are considered, based on brain drain, threats to welfare states, and in-group bias. Finally, the chapter considers the suggestion that (more) open borders is not the best (or most efficient) way of reducing global inequality.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Troels Fage Hedegaard

This article explores whether and how the neo-liberal ideology has adapted to the Nordic welfare model by studying the attitudes of voters and grass-roots members of the Danish party Liberal Alliance towards the welfare state. This inquiry into one of the key issues for the neo-liberal ideology is inspired by theory on how an ideology will adapt to its context. The expectation outlined in the article is for the neo-liberals of this party to favour features that make the Nordic welfare model distinctive – extensive governmental responsibility, especially for children and the elderly, and a universalistic approach to providing welfare. I have explored this question using a mixed-methods approach, where I analyse a survey of voters and interviews with grass-roots members of the party. Combined this shows that the neo-liberals in Liberal Alliance do support a role for the welfare state that extends beyond a minimum welfare state, especially for the care of children, but they view old age and retirement mostly as a problem each individual must deal with. Regarding the universalistic approach to providing welfare, the neo-liberals seem torn between two different tendencies, one being a perception of a fair way to provide welfare and the other the idea of a selective welfare state as a neo-liberal core idea, which leads to ambivalent attitudes. I argue that this results in a form of the neo-liberal ideology that has adapted to the Nordic welfare model.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valeriy Heyets

Nearly 30 years of transformation of the sociopolitical and legal, socioeconomical and financial, sociocultural and welfare, and socioenvironmental dimensions in both Central and Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, has led to a change of the social quality of daily circumstances. On the one hand, the interconnection and reciprocity of these four relevant dimensions of societal life is the underlying cause of such changes, and on the other, the state as main actor of the sociopolitical and legal dimension is the initiator of those changes. Applying the social quality approach, I will reflect in this article on the consequences of these changes, especially in Ukraine. In comparison, the dominant Western interpretation of the “welfare state” will also be discussed.


Author(s):  
Simon Ball

This chapter characterizes the relationship of the British state to war over the long term. It analyses two epistemic turning points for the war–state relationship, one occurring in the 1860s, the other in the 1970s. It explains the importance of war to the British state under the ‘fiscal security’ compromise.The chapter traces the long and uneven emergence of the ‘welfare state’ as a successor to the ‘warfare state’. It argues that the ‘warfare state’ paradigm loses much of its empirical and conceptual force if it were to be extended beyond 1970. The relationship of the state to war changed so fundamentally at that point that history, the chapter suggests, ceased to be a useful guide for future conduct.


1970 ◽  
Vol 41 (116) ◽  
pp. 77-87
Author(s):  
Peter Simonsen

HAPPINESS ON EARLY RETIREMENT: THE WELFARE STATE AND AFFECTIVE MOBILITY IN JENS BLENDSTRUP’S GUD TALER UD | The article takes its point of departure in current happiness studies and probes the possibly fruitful interdisciplinary relation between research in social science that suggests close links between the Nordic welfare model and the high levels of selfreported happiness we find in the region, and literary criticism which instinctively seems to hold that unhappiness is most conducive to inspire the literary mind. To demonstrate that things are never as simple as that, the article reads Jens Blendstrup’s novel, Gud taler ud (2004), as an example of both a welfare narrative and of what it coins ”an affective mobility story”: a story about a person’s enhanced feeling of happiness in retirement. On the one hand, the novel portrays a person who finds happiness when he is granted early retirement from the welfare state. On the other hand, the novel relates this in such a manner that we are reminded that one man’s happiness may be another’s unhappiness.


2003 ◽  
Vol 33 (130) ◽  
pp. 119-139
Author(s):  
Silke Van Dyk

Due to rising unemployment in many European countries and the far spread view that this is linked to the crisis of the welfare state, tripartite co-operations arose between government, unions and employer associations recently, Promotion of international competitiveness, consolidation of public finances and reduction of unemployment are the three main political goals, which are considered to be the new consensus between the actors, This consensns arose because of the unions' adaptation to key positions of the other actors' analysis and it is widely held to be an expression for the overcoming of unions' heavily discussed crisis, With the Dutch polder model, which is celebrated as a successful prototype of a consensus model, one can illustrate that the assumed consensus is much more ambivalent and fragile than the current debate suggests, It is possible to demonstrate on the basis of Foucault's governmentality studies that the creation of the supply side consensus is not an expression of reason and responsibility, Instead, due to the unequal distribution of power and rule some actors manage to implement their interpretations of the world as being ,true'.


2000 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Y. Welke

Leading works published since the 1980s relating to law and the modern administrative state that privilege economy and politics—work by scholars like William Novak tracing the nineteenth-century common law roots of the modern regulatory state, Stephen Skowronek on the construction of a national administrative state, and Martin Sklar on the intersection of reform with the rise of corporate capitalism in reshaping the political economy of the American state—remain intensely engaged with the work of Willard Hurst. Leading works published in the same period relating to law and the modern administrative state that privilege gender—work by scholars like Kathryn Kish Sklar on Florence Kelley and women's political culture, Linda Gordon on the welfare state, and Leslie Reagan on abortion—do not cite Hurst in the footnotes or, for the most part, in their bibliographies. For that matter, those from one subfield do not cite the other and vice versa. There is a simple, innocuous explanation for these silences—we all have too much to read.


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