Single Mothers’ Post-Separation Provisioning: Child Support and the Governance of Gender

Sociology ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 554-570
Author(s):  
Kristin Natalier ◽  
Kay Cook ◽  
Hayley McKenzie
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Single Mothers ◽  
Child Support ◽  
The State ◽  
Interview Data ◽  
Support Programme ◽  
Financial Benefits ◽  
Government Workers ◽  
Child Maintenance ◽  
The Welfare State

This article uses single mothers’ pursuit of child support (child maintenance) to examine how the state governs gender through post-separation financial responsibilities. We draw on interview data to detail how the Australian welfare state compels single mothers’ child support provisioning through claims work and the associated strategies of managing information, emotions and government workers. Despite their sustained efforts, provisioning afforded single mothers’ limited financial benefits. We argue that this outcome reflected a gendered policy and implementation regime that normalised masculine financial discretion and simultaneously compelled single mothers’ provisioning and failed to accord it legitimacy. Provisioning did, however, benefit the welfare state, which appropriated single mothers’ time and knowledge to claim and perform key functions. We conclude that the necessity and challenges of child support provisioning were not indicative of a failing child support programme but rather reflected its role in the reproduction of gendered power, responsibilities and rewards in post-separation parenting.

In Need

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordanna Bailkin
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
The State ◽  
Ethnic Identities ◽  
Refugee Camps ◽  
Downward Mobility ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Welfare State

This chapter asks how refugee camps transformed people as well as spaces, altering the identities of the individuals and communities who lived in and near them. It considers how camps forged and fractured economic, religious, and ethnic identities, constructing different kinds of unity and disunity. Camps had unpredictable effects on how refugees and Britons thought of themselves, and how they saw their relationship to upward and downward mobility. As the impoverished Briton emerged more clearly in the imagination of the welfare state, the refugee was his constant companion and critic. The state struggled to determine whether refugees required the same care as the poor, or if they warranted their own structures of aid.

scholarly journals Social innovation as a policy response to restructure the welfare state

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 269-276
Author(s):  
Doğa Başar Sariipek ◽  
Gökçe Cerev ◽  
Bora Yenihan
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Social Innovation ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
The State ◽  
Welfare Provision ◽  
Civil Society Organisations ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Social Risks ◽  
The Welfare State

The focus of this paper is the interaction between social innovation and restructuring welfare state. Modern welfare states have been reconfiguring their welfare mixes through social innovation. This includes a productive integration of formal and informal actors with support and leading role of the state. This collaboration becomes significantly important since it means the integration of not only the actors, but also their capabilities and resources in today’s world where new social risks and new social challenges have emerged and no actor can overcome these by its own. Therefore, social innovation is a useful tool in the new role sharing within the welfare mix in order to reach higher levels of satisfaction and success in welfare provision. The main point here is that this is not a zero-sum competition; gaining more power of the actors other than the state – the market, civil society organisations and the family – does not necessarily mean that the state lost its leading role and power. This is rather a new type of cooperation among actors and their capabilities as well as their resources in welfare provision. In this sense, social innovation may contribute well to the debates over the financial crisis of the welfare state since it may lead to the more wisely use of existing resources of welfare actors. Thanks to social innovative programs, not only the NGOs, but also market forces as well as citizens are more active to access welfare provisions and social protection in the broadest sense. Thus, social innovative strategies are definitely a solid step taken towards “enabling” or “active” welfare state.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kohlmann
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
British Literature ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Administrative Procedures ◽  
The Welfare State

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.

Welfare and the State

2000 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 105-120
Author(s):  
Melanie Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Moral Worth ◽  
The State ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Welfare State

Once upon a time, there was a consensus in this country that the welfare state was the jewel in the crown of the post-war settlement. It was a national badge of moral worth. It was held to embody certain virtues that people told themselves were the hallmark of a civilised society: altruism, equity, dignity, fellowship. It defined Britain as a co-operative exercise which bound us together into a cohesive society. Or so we told ourselves.

The State of the Welfare State

2003 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
The State ◽  
The Welfare State

Nouveaux principes de référence et différenciation des arbitrages politiques : le cas des politiques à l'égard des sans-emploi

1998 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gérard Boismenu ◽  
Pascale Dufour
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
The State ◽  
Unemployed People ◽  
Level Of Abstraction ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
Reference Et ◽  
The Welfare State

AbstractThis article underlines three principles of reference that renew discourse on and comprehension of the role of the state in social protection towards unemployed people. At a certain level of abstraction, those principles of reference are present in many countries. They lead to label and to understand situations in different terms of which we were familiar during the Welfare State apogee. At the same time, they permit and open up to various political orientations and mechanisms of implementation. This dualism is emphasized. Four countries are referenced for this discussion: Canada, France, Germany and Sweden. The study considers the way in which problems are stated in their principles and the implementation of programmes. Policies and programmes implemented reveal logics of intervention which suggest different ways to consider the articulation between the « integrated area » and the « excluded area » of the society.

The State and Sport Development in Alberta: A Struggle for Public Status

1996 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Pitter
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Organizational Factors ◽  
The State ◽  
Private Interest ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Public Status ◽  
The Welfare State

This paper contributes to research on and theories of the state’s role in Canadian sport development by examining factors that led the Alberta government to create the Alberta Sport Council, Canada’s only Crown corporation with a sport mandate. The data used were collected from interviews and numerous documentary sources. The analysis drew from theories of the welfare state and from Claus Offe’s discussions of corporatism and the attribution of public status to private interest groups. Accordingly, the study identified key individuals, organizational factors, and the unique political and economic characteristics of Alberta that influenced the council’s creation. The paper concludes that despite this organization’s uniqueness, it reflects the same contradictory form of sport intervention found in other Canadian governments.

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