scholarly journals The precarious inclusion of homeless EU migrants in Norwegian public social welfare: Moral bordering and social workers’ dilemmas

2021 ◽  
pp. 026101832110365
Author(s):  
Turid Misje

This article discusses public social welfare provision to homeless EU migrants in Norway. Most of these migrants have no or weak affiliations with the formal labour market, resulting in restricted rights to public social assistance. Drawing on the concept of precarious inclusion, I suggest that rather than being simply excluded from public social welfare, homeless EU migrants are included in the welfare state but in fragile and insecure ways through provisions directed at safeguarding bodily survival. I understand these limited inclusionary policies and practices as forming part of the Norwegian state’s management of ‘undesired’ migrants. Building on interviews with social workers in the public social welfare administration, I reflect on how assessments of cases involving homeless EU migrants signal hierarchical conceptions and differentiation of human worth within Norway’s borders and how territorial belonging emerges as a prerequisite for ‘deservingness’ in social workers’ accounts.

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nagihan Ozkanca Andic ◽  
Ekrem Karayilmazlar

The Public Expenditure/GDP ratio is one of the most significant metrics that measure the state's share of the economy. It can be said that there is an interventionist state type in countries where this rate is high, or it can be argued that the share of the public sector in the economy is low in countries where this rate is low. It is also possible to argue that the countries' economic, sociological, and political factors play an essential role in determining this ratio. Regulations, which are the most important tools of the welfare state, may arise through economic controls as well as through social policies. This study aims to find an answer to the question of whether this situation is possible for a developing country such as Turkey while Nordic countries, which determine a system different from other welfare models, succeed in raising social welfare without giving up the principles such as equality and justice that they have despite the globalization effect. The data obtained by various methods were subjected to comparison using the Data Envelopment Analysis method in order to achieve this purpose. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0777/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>


Author(s):  
George R. Boyer

This chapter explores the story of the 1942 Beveridge Report and the beginnings of the welfare state. The policies proposed by Beveridge and the 1945–48 legislation were logical extensions of government's expanding role in social welfare policy beginning with the Liberal Welfare Reforms. This does not mean that the importance of the postwar legislation should be downplayed. Because of the adoption of the National Health Service, universal coverage, and equality of treatment, Britain after 1948 deserves to be called a welfare state, while Edwardian and interwar Britain do not. Unfortunately, despite the enthusiasm with which the public greeted the welfare state, the postwar policies did not eliminate economic insecurity.


2000 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-250
Author(s):  
Norbert Berthold

Abstract The situation on the German labour market is still a catastrophe. The institutional set-ups on the labour market and the welfare state obviously no longer fit the fundamentally changed economic environment. There is next to no competition on the labour market and unions and employers' associations use the generous welfare state to transfer the burden of adjustment to changes in the economic environment onto the public at large. Institutional mismatch is prevalent. The red-green coalition government has not only realized that persistently high unemployment inflicts tremendous economic damage but that it is also politically destabilizing. It has therefore announced that the performance on the labour market during its term of office shall be its own measure of success or failure. This paper discusses whether the regulatory steps taken by the red-green coalition government, like implementing stricter employment protection legislation, reintroducing full pay when sick, and changing the law concerning low-paid jobs, are suitable for reducing this institutional mismatch.


1988 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Edwards

ABSTRACTThe welfare state is but the vehicle for the provision of welfare and the latter does not necessarily entail the former. Much recent debate occasioned by government policy and rhetoric has therefore confused means and ends. This paper argues that a defence of welfare must come before a concern for protecting the welfare state. A number of foundations for guaranteed welfare provision, including justice, rights and contract are considered but the most persuasive foundation for welfare as need-meeting is found to lie in the Kantian categorical imperatives. Not only do these provide a moral prescription that welfare ought to be provided, they also dictate the ways in which it ought to be provided. It is against these requirements therefore that the necessity of a welfare state as a means of providing welfare can be tested. The second part of the paper then considers how extensive a welfare state needs to be, and how the boundaries between the public and private domains in the provision of welfare may be drawn. The equality principle, allied to the notion of equality of welfare, is found to be a useful instrument in determining the bounds of the public domain but only (so the paper concludes reluctantly) when harnessed to objective specifications of need.


1997 ◽  
Vol 44 (1_suppl) ◽  
pp. 66-91
Author(s):  
John Clarke

This chapter examines the break-up of the welfare state as a process that involved a crisis of representation. In particular, social democratic images of the public and their embodiment in the organizational regimes of welfare bureau-professionalism were dislocated by the New Right's attack on the welfare state. The chapter argues that the attempt to reinvent the public's relationship to social welfare through the couplet of managerialism and consumerism created an impoverished conception of the public realm. Communitarianism has been presented as a response to this impoverishment. However, both lessons from history and the contemporary inflections of community suggest that communitarianism needs to be seen as an attempt to resolve the ‘crisis of the social’ in social welfare in regressive directions.


2008 ◽  
Vol 89 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Idit Weiss-Gal ◽  
John Gal

Seeking to understand the impact of race and nationality on the attitudes of social workers towards social welfare policy, this study compares the attitudes of Arab and Jewish social workers in Israel. This analysis seeks to determine whether the attitudes of the two groups of social workers diverge and, if so, in what direction. Based on a sample of 110 social workers, evenly divided between Arabs and Jews, the findings revealed both similarities and differences in the social welfare policy references of the two groups of social workers. Although both supported the welfare state, they also expressed a lack of enthusiasm to finance it and a degree of skepticism regarding its impact. In contrast to their Jewish counterparts, Arab social workers were more supportive of the welfare state but did not support policies that were perceived as unsupportive of Arabs.


The Forum ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-247
Author(s):  
Ryan LaRochelle

AbstractThis article sheds new light on how conservatism has affected American state development by tracing the history of how block-granting transformed from a bipartisan tool to solve problems of public administration in the 1940s into a mechanism to roll back and decentralize the welfare state that had reached its zenith in the 1960s. By the early 1980s, conservative policymakers had coopted the previously bipartisan tool in their efforts to chip away at the increasingly centralized social welfare system that emerged out of the Great Society. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan successfully converted numerous categorical grants into a series of block grants, slashing funding for several social safety net programs. Block-granting allows conservative opponents of the postwar welfare state to gradually erode funding and grant more authority to state governments, thus using federalism as a more palatable political weapon to reduce social welfare spending than the full dismantlement of social programs. However, despite a flurry of successes in the early 1980s, block-granting has not proven as successful as conservatives might have hoped, and recent efforts to convert programs such as Medicaid and parts of the Affordable Care Act into block grants have failed. The failure of recent failed block grant efforts highlights the resilience of liberal reforms, even in the face of sustained conservative opposition. However, conservatives still draw upon the tool today in their efforts to erode and retrench social welfare programs. Block-granting has thus transformed from a bipartisan tool to improve bureaucratic effectiveness into a perennial weapon in conservatives’ war on the welfare state.


2021 ◽  
pp. 152-172
Author(s):  
Willem Adema ◽  
Peter Whiteford

This chapter contributes to the discussion of public and private social welfare by drawing together recent information on these different ways of providing social benefits. It presents data on public social expenditure for 2015–17 and accounts for the impact of the tax system and private social expenditure to develop indicators on net social expenditure for 2015. The chapter shows that conventional estimates of gross public spending differ significantly from estimates of net public spending and net total social expenditure, leading to an incorrect measurement and ranking of total social welfare effort across countries.Just as importantly, the fact that total social welfare support is incorrectly measured implies that the outcomes of welfare state support may also be incorrectly measured. Thus, the main objectives of the chapter include considering the implications of this more comprehensive definition of welfare state effort for analysis of the distributional impact of the welfare state and for an assessment of the efficiency and incentive effects of different welfare state arrangements.


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