Justifications of citizens’ subject positions in public debates on welfare

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janne Mikael Autto ◽  
Jukka Törrönen
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Day Care ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Social Situations ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Welfare State

Foucault’s work has inspired studies examining how subject positions are constructed for citizens of the welfare state that encourage them to adopt the subject position of active and responsible people or consumers. Yet these studies are often criticised for analysing these subject positions as coherent constructions without considering how their construction varies from one situation to another. This paper develops the concept of subject position in relation to the theory of justification and the concept of modality in order to achieve a more sensitive and nuanced analysis of the politics of welfare in public debates. The theory of justification places greater weight on actors’ competence in social situations. It helps to reveal how justifications and critiques of welfare policies are based on the skilful contextual combination of diverse normative bases. The concept of modality, in turn, makes it possible to elaborate how subject positions in justifications and critiques of welfare policies become associated with specific kinds of values. We demonstrate the approach by using public debates on children’s day care in Finland. The analysis illustrates how subject positions are justified in relation to different kinds of worlds and made persuasive by connecting them to commonly desirable rights, responsibilities, competences or abilities.

Drugs and change in the welfare state framework as reflected in newspaper editorials

2003 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pekka Hakkarainen ◽  
Jukka Törrönen
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Drug Policy ◽  
Drug Users ◽  
Service System ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Drug Problem ◽  
Action Programme ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Welfare State

This article presents a comparative analysis of the treatment of the drug problem and drug policy issues in Finnish newspaper editorials across three periods, viz. 1966–1971, 1972–1985 and 1993–2000. The material for the first two periods was obtained through Alko Inc.'s library and information service, while the editorials published in the 1990s were drawn from the newspapers' own electronic archives. The analysis reveals three main shifts in the welfare state's drug policy rationality over the past 35 years. First, there has been a shift from the closed nation to a global world. During the first drug wave of the 1960s Finland was categorised as a separate, isolated corner beyond the reach of the world's trafficking routes, and the aim was to create a united national front in defence against the external enemy. In the 1990s, the enemy is both on the outside and in, and Finland is positioned as an integral part of global processes. Secondly, there is evidence of a transition from the protection of deviant individuals and groups to the protection of the whole population. When drug use began to attract attention in the 1960s, it was categorised mainly as a problem for youths. The aim was to keep Finland clean above all by protecting the youth: this, it was hoped, could be achieved through police control, on the one hand, and education, on the other. In the 1990s drugs were no longer categorised solely as a youth problem, but the whole population is affected. The newspapers began to deconstruct the deviant label by arguing that drug users were ordinary Finnish youths who needed to be helped rather than isolated. The need for help and support was raised alongside the issue of protection (care and harm reduction). The shift in emphasis from deviance control to the development of treatment and care clearly illustrates the shift in the welfare state framework from paternalistic protection to client-ism that underlines the individual's rights and clienthood. Third, there has been a shift in the way that the actors in the drug problem are positioned. The control-oriented action programme that stressed the subject position of the police in the efforts to combat the first drug wave, was widely endorsed in the print press in the 1970s, even though there were other proposed positions in the newspapers in the 1960s. In the 1990s this model was called into question. The position take in the press was that it would no longer be possible to fend off the second drug wave simply by means of control and policing. There were growing calls for prevention, treatment and harm reduction alongside criminal control. According to the predominant line of thinking in the editorials, the new action programme was to be based upon equal cooperation among control authorities and other actors. In this programme the concept of drug offender was broken down into the components of sellers and users. The subject position of the control authorities was defined above all through combatting drug trade. Drug users, by contrast, were to be integrated into society: responsibility for this was given to the welfare state's service system and to various community actors. In the division of labour among state authorities, this model implied a strengthening of the position of the service system in the field of drug policy. There are also important continuities to be seen in the welfare state's drug policy rationality. Key among these is that related to the view of young people as the major group at risk that requires national protection. There has also been a strong emphasis in all three periods on collective welfare state responsibility.

Who Loves the Swedish Welfare State? Attitude Trends 1980–2010

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Svallfors
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Willingness To Pay ◽  
Task Performance ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Large Degree ◽  
Social Spending ◽  
Public Organization ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Degree Of Stability ◽  
The Welfare State

Attitudes toward social spending, collective financing, and public organization, willingness to pay taxes, suspicion about welfare abuse, and trust in the task performance of the welfare state show a large degree of stability in Sweden, and where change is registered, it tends to go in the direction of increasing support. More people state their willingness to pay higher taxes for welfare policy purposes; more people want collective financing of welfare policies; and fewer people perceive extensive welfare abuse. Class patterns change so that the salaried and the self-employed become more similar to workers in their attitudes. Hence, no attitudinal corrosive effects from increased marketization of the Swedish welfare state can be detected on public support for welfare policies.

Sozialgerichtsbarkeit im Blick – Interdisziplinäre Forschung in Bewegung

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Social Law ◽  
Constitutional State ◽  
Junior Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Welfare State

Social jurisdiction is an essential institution of the German social constitutional state. It is here that social rights are realised and the welfare state can be experienced. At the same time, the social courts with their upstream and downstream divisions are places where social conflicts are fought out. As such, they have not yet been the subject of comprehensive research. This volume is a contribution to interdisciplinary social policy research and brings together different perspectives on the legal and judicial forms of action of the welfare state. They were the subject of a conference of the FIS-funded junior research group "Social Jurisdiction and the Development of Social Law and Social Policy in the Federal Republic of Germany". With contributions by Katie Baldschun, Minou Banafsche, Michael Beyerlein, Alice Dillbahner, Gesine Fuchs, Thomas Frank, Stefan Greß, Christian Grube, Andreas Hänlein, Armin Höland, Christian Jesberger, Lukas Kiepe, Martin Kilimann, Tanja Klenk, Sabine Knickrehm, Simone Kreher, Romina-Victoria Köller, Tanja Pritzlaff-Scheele, Stephan Rixen, Simon Roesen, Gül Savran, Wolfgang Schroeder, Solveig Sternjakob, Berthold Vogel, Felix Welti and Katharina Weyrich.

Aspects of the syntax of ce in French copular sentences

2019 ◽  
pp. 153-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabelle Roy ◽  
Ur Shlonsky
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Syntactic Analysis ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Relativized Minimality ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Syntactic Constraints ◽  
Copular Sentences ◽  
Copular Sentence

This chapter offers a syntactic analysis of French ce in copular constructions. It is argued that the distribution of ce is best understood in terms of the conditions on the agree operation inside the copular sentence. The proform ce, an expletive, is inserted whenever an agreement relationship cannot be established between an element in the subject position and an element from the PredP (Bowers 1993). Two sources of agreement failure are considered. In one case, agreement failure results from syntactic constraints on movement (Relativized Minimality, criterial freezing) together with focalization. In the other case, agreement failure results from the absence of accessible phi-features on the subject, possibly as the result of a grammatical shift taking place at the interface. This chapter further highlights the relevance of two subject positions (Subj1 and Subj2) each with their own interpretational properties.

scholarly journals Reducing loneliness among older people – who is responsible?

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 584-603 ◽  
Author(s):  
Axel Agren ◽  
Elisabet Cedersund
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Older People ◽  
Severe Problem ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
Evolutionary Perspectives ◽  
The Welfare State

AbstractIn the Swedish news-press, loneliness among older people is presented as a severe problem that needs to be solved. The issue of who is responsible for reducing loneliness and how this responsibility is designated is, however, rarely discussed. In this study, we have analysed how responsibility is designated and constructed in articles from the Swedish news-press. Focus has been on identifying responsibility in discourses proceeding from the concept of subject positions. This concept has enabled analysis on how responsibility is negotiated and who is positioned as a responsible actor with the ability to perform actions that reduce loneliness. Three dominating discourses were found. In the discourse of responsibility within politics and the welfare state, the responsibility is both self-taken and designated to other institutions held responsible for not initiating sufficient measures to reduce loneliness. In the discourse of responsibility within societal and evolutionary perspectives on loneliness, developments beyond the individual's control are considered to contribute to loneliness. At the same time ‘we’ in ‘society’ are considered capable of reducing loneliness, thereby constructing individuals as responsible actors. Within the discourses of responsibility within senior organisations, both senior organisations and people who participate in activities are constructed as responsible actors. In conclusion, the responsibility for reducing loneliness is, apart from the discourse on senior organisations, designated to those working with older people.

Relative inversion and non-verb-initial imperatives in Early Modern Swedish

2013 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Magnusson Petzell
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Additional Assumption ◽  
Structural Difference ◽  
Initial Position ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Syntactic Differences

This article deals with two syntactic differences between Present-Day Swedish (PDSw) and Early Modern Swedish (EMSw): first, only EMSw allows VS and XVS word order to occur in relative clauses; second, only EMSw permits non-verb-initial imperatives. One structural difference between the varieties is assumed to be a prerequisite for all these word order differences: the subject position was spec-TP in EMSw but is spec-FinP in PDSw. Only the lower position (spec-TP) is compatible with inversion (VS) and fronting of non-subjects (XVS) in relative clauses as well as with imperative clauses having elements other than the imperative verb in the initial position. To be able to account for the latter phenomenon, however, an additional assumption is needed: the imperative type-feature, [imp], always accompanies the verb in PDSw but is tied to an operator in EMSw. The first assumption about differing subject positions is independently motivated by findings already in the previous literature. The second assumption about the differing behaviour of [imp] in the two varieties is supported by the distribution of imperative verbs over a wider range of syntactic contexts in EMSw than in PDSw.

Patients as `Safeguard' and Nurses as `Substitute' in Home Health Care

2009 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stina Öresland ◽  
Sylvia Määttä ◽  
Astrid Norberg ◽  
Kim Lützén
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Home Health Care ◽  
Analytical Method ◽  
Home Health ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
The Subject ◽  
To Receive

One aim of this study was to explore the role, or subject position, patients take in the care they receive from nurses in their own home. Another was to examine the subject position that patients say the nurses take when giving care to them in their own home. Ten interviews were analysed and interpreted according to a discourse analytical method. The findings show that patients constructed their subject position as `safeguard', and the nurses' subject position as `substitute' for themselves. These subject positions provided the opportunities, and the obstacles, for the patients' possibilities to receive care in their home. The subject positions described have ethical repercussions and illuminate that the patients put great demands on tailored care.

scholarly journals Pladsgaranti - men ingen garanti for indholdet. Børns dagpasning i Danmark 1960-1996

1997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanne Thorsen
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Day Care ◽  
Care Service ◽  
Age Group ◽  
Workforce Participation ◽  
Public Discussion ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
The Welfare State

Denmark has the most developed public day care service in the world. The day care system is the daily condition of 281.076 children in the age group 0-5. The Nurshing of children is a timeressource that women purchase from the Welfare State institutions, and at the same time an instrument of the labour-marked which create the basis for the high workforce participation of Danish women. The ongoing subject for public discussion has been the waiting list problem. How does local councils provide room enough for the children without raising the public spendings. Surprisingly the discussion of the pedagogical contents has played a secondary role. The article ends up by recommending a serious discussion of the pedagogical aims and contents, in order to qualify the children to cope with a changing society.

Historical Context

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Welfare Policy ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Social Welfare Policy ◽  
Charitable Organizations ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Assistance Programs ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Welfare State

The chapter explores the origin of social welfare policies in welfare states in Western democratic countries. It traces the state of poverty in most Western democracies before the Great Depression of 1930s, and states' interventions with welfare social assistance programs previously handled by communities, churches, and charitable organizations. The chapter, therefore, examines the historical context of social welfare policy, the nature of the welfare state regime, modern welfare state approaches to social welfare policy, and the market and global economies and the welfare state.

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