Implementing Innovative Social Investment

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Social Solidarity ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Investment Policies ◽  
The Social ◽  
Productive Potential ◽  
Original Insight ◽  
Insight Into

The turn towards a ‘Social Investment’ approach to welfare implies deploying resources to enhance human capital and mobilise the productive potential of citizens, starting in early childhood. Many influential academic and policy advocates present it as a new paradigm for the 21st Century. The book is structured in three parts around the social investment themes of: interventions in early life, labour market activation, and social solidarity. Empirical chapters offer original evidence from ten European countries: Italy, UK, Sweden, Finland,Greece, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Spain. Each of these chapters uncovers regional and local realities of social investment policies and services. Editorial chapters overview the conceptual landscape and synthesise key advances in thinking about the social investment 'paradigm', informed by original insight into what implementation of its principles can look like at street level.

Gender and attitudes toward welfare state reform: Are women really social investment promoters?

2021 ◽  
pp. 095892872097801
Author(s):  
Julian L. Garritzmann ◽  
Hanna Schwander
Keyword(s):  
Demand Side ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
Investment Policies ◽  
State Reform ◽  
Career Interruptions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Analytical Step ◽  
Political Realignment ◽  
Welfare Politics ◽  
Welfare State Reform

This article contributes to the study of the demand side of welfare politics by investigating gender differences in social investment preferences systematically. Building on the different functions of social investment policies in creating, preserving, or mobilizing skills, we argue that women do not support social investment policies generally more strongly than men. Rather, women demand, in particular, policies to preserve their skills during career interruptions and help to mobilize their skills on the labour market. In a second analytical step, we examine women’s policy priorities if skill preservation and mobilization come at the expense of social compensation. We test our arguments for eight Western European countries with data from the INVEDUC survey. The confirmation of our arguments challenges a core assumption of the literatures on the social investment turn and women’s political realignment. We discuss the implication of our findings in the conclusion.

From perspectives to policy contingencies: Conditional cash transfers as social investments

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moira Nelson ◽  
Johan Sandberg
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cash Transfers ◽  
Conditional Cash Transfers ◽  
Causal Mechanism ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
Investment Policies ◽  
The Social

Despite the popularity of social investment, there remain ambiguities regarding how to design an effective social investment approach. We review evaluations of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) in Latin America in order to draw out lessons of how to improve the effectiveness of social investment. CCTs share many of the objectives of the social investment approach and are targeted at poorer groups. Since research shows that such groups are often not adequately supported through social investment policies, analyzing CCTs holds particular promise. Our analysis finds that architects of social investment policies should consider three questions when designing a social investment approach: how much investment is necessary to fulfill social investment functions, what is the causal mechanism through which the goals of social investment are to be achieved, and what array of policies are necessary for such mechanisms to be effective?

Developing and Spreading a Social Investment Perspective

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Jenson
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
World Bank ◽  
Policy Instrument ◽  
Capital Investments ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Capital Investments ◽  
Capital Development

In the mid-1990s, the practice of international organizations began to cohere around the social investment perspective, with strategies that were child-centred and advocated human capital investments for economic growth and social development. This chapter examines the World Bank, which endorsed the policy instrument of conditional cash transfers (CCT) to allow very poor families to invest in children’s health and education—a stock-plus-buffer strategy. Then it scans the OECD, which recommended early childhood education to ensure human capital development and the labour-market activation of parents—a stock-plus-flow strategy. Both organizations developed anti-poverty positions with attention to the intergenerational transfer of disadvantage and investments in human capital. This similarity has declined in recent years, as the World Bank incorporated the social investment perspective into its new inclusive growth frame, while the OECD turned its attention to problems of inequality rather than poverty and thereby associated itself less with the social investment perspective.

Promoting social goals through economisation? Social investment and the counterintuitive case of homelessness

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Laruffa
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Human Capital ◽  
Social Goals ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
Economic Rationale ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Logic ◽  
Investment Object ◽  
The Welfare State

Within the welfare state literature, critics of social investment have argued that its economic logic replaces ‘social’ considerations (for example, focused on rights/needs) and that this could reinforce the marginalisation of vulnerable populations, as they are unattractive ‘human capital’. Against this background, this article focuses on the counterintuitive case of the social investment approach to homelessness promoted by the European Commission. Through the comparison with previous EU initiatives in the homelessness field, the analysis reveals that while social investment partially replaces values-based logics with the economic rationale, it involves the same ‘solutions’ as values-oriented approaches, that is, preventing/combating homelessness can be justified interchangeably following an ‘economic’ or a ‘social’ logic. To explain this paradoxical result, the article draws from the political economy literature, which shows how disadvantage can be transformed into an investment object. Overall, this study suggests understanding social investment as a paradigm that attempts to promote the ‘social’ through its economisation.

Social Investment

2021 ◽  
pp. 187-205
Author(s):  
Julian L. Garritzmann
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Knowledge Economy ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
Investment Policies ◽  
Policy Paradigm ◽  
The Social ◽  
Human Skills

This chapter reviews the paradigm and spread of social investment policies, which come in many variants, and discusses them as key elements of the ‘knowledge economy welfare state’. Social investments are policies that aim to create, preserve, and mobilize human skills and capabilities. The chapter discusses the emergence of social investment as a new social policy paradigm, presents different variants of the social investment approach, provides a mapping of social investment policies around the globe, discusses effects of social investment policies, and weighs in on important debates regarding the politics of social investment. The chapter then closes with an outlook on avenues for future research.

Changing labour markets, changing welfare across the OECD: the move towards a social investment model of welfare as a response to competition

2017 ◽  
pp. 33-52
Author(s):  
Naomi Finch ◽  
Dan Horsfall ◽  
John Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Investment Model ◽  
Labour Markets ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
Economic Competition ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Expenditures

This chapter examines in more depth one of the attempts to develop a ‘progressive’ modernisation of welfare: the social investment model. The notion of a ‘social investment welfare state’ has gained increasing ground over recent years, playing an important role in the discourse of international organisations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and EU. It forms a part of a number of concepts — others include ‘active social welfare’, the ‘new welfare state’ and ‘new risk welfare’ — that might be grouped under the label ‘new welfare’. All are based around a shared view that developed welfare states have begun to place less emphasis on income protection and more emphasis on investing in human capital. Put differently, they stress the growing importance of the ‘productive’ elements of social policy, chiefly on the basis that this may square the circle of maintaining social expenditures while responding to increased economic competition. The chapter then reviews how far reform agendas match the reality of the social investment model theory and, moreover, evaluates the effectiveness of the approach in reconciling social and economic pressures.

The critique of Sociology of Childhood: Human capital as the concrete ‘social construction of childhood’

2021 ◽  
pp. 175774382110116
Author(s):  
Stefano Ba’
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Social Construction ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Theoretical Understanding ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sociology Of Childhood

The ‘New Paradigm’ of Sociology of Childhood famously maintains that childhood is socially constructed and supposedly places a much greater emphasis on the agency of children: children should not simply be framed as the passive receivers of socialisation. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that such a ‘social construction’ of childhood is not concretely articulated and that the theoretical understanding of the ‘social construction’ of childhood is simply delegated to historiographical or ethnographic accounts. In doing so, it advances a new criticism of the New Paradigm and radicalises previous ones. Here, key is the theoretical engagement with the concept of ‘human capital’: foregrounding its critique, this article proposes the link between ‘human capital’ as a neoliberal version of labour power and the concept of socialisation. The aim is to show that the ‘social construction’ of childhood is central, but the New Paradigm uses categories that are at the same time founded on neo-liberal views and abstracted from concrete social relations. This article maintains that a concrete critique of processes of socialisation (which is here understood as the socialisation of childhood as human capital) is needed instead of abstract critique of reified childhood. Two alternative pedagogical practices are used to provide an example of such a concrete critique.

When voters favour the social investment welfare state

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 194-205
Author(s):  
Marc Brazzill ◽  
Hideko Magara ◽  
Yuki Yanai
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Investment Strategy ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
Investment Policies ◽  
High Productivity ◽  
Developed Economies ◽  
Policy Context ◽  
The Social

AbstractWe investigate when voters favour social investment. Welfare states have transformed their core policies as a result of low economic growth and fiscal pressures. The social investment strategy, such as broader education provision and promotion of women's employment, aims at shifting the economy from the traditional Keynesian welfare state to the high-productivity economy by encouraging long-term and inclusive human capital formation. Social investment is popular among citizens in many developed economies, especially in the EU where governments promote social investment as part of their welfare policy packages. However, in Japan, the term ‘social investment’ is rarely used in policy discussions. Consequently, we ask what levels of voter support social investment policies have in such an environment; which voter characteristics are associated with social investment support; and whether voter support for social investment differs when placed in a broader policy context. To answer these questions, we conducted an online survey with a conjoint experiment. Our data analysis shows that social investment policies are popular among Japanese people, despite a lack of familiarity with the concept of social investment. We find that social libertarians and female respondents are more likely than social authoritarians and male respondents to support social investment. In addition, there is some evidence that higher income voters are favourable to social investment policies. Furthermore, voter support for social investment depends on the policy context. Support becomes weaker when social investment policies are presented in combination with decreasing levels of social security spending. Our results highlight what kinds of social investment policies could be achieved without damaging electoral fortunes.

scholarly journals Faiva: Trials of Skill: the Song and Dance of Tongan Politics, 1773-1993

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Wendy Rona Pond
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Martial Arts ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
Historical Reconstruction ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Challenge ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Rivalry

<p>The work embarks on a quest to discover the parameters of faiva, the dances, martial arts, aquatic and land-based sports which are exhibited on Tongan festival grounds as trials of skill. The work is organised as a succession of festivals (katoanga), shows, receptions, night concerts, funerals, and regattas spanning 200 years, from the 1770s to the 1970s. The work employs a strategy of Juxtaposing ethnographic and historical evidence. This technique enriches historical records with an ethnographic reading, and allows historical insight into the choreographic and aesthetic conventions of Tongan performances. It indicates which accounts to trust and what sense to impute to fragments. Contest on the festival ground, contest in twentieth century social status rivalry, and contest in eighteenth century political challenge, all follow the same codes. The work proposes a new paradigm for interpreting Tonga's political history. That paradigm is faiva. The work proposes a critical theory for reading Tongan records. Tongan accounts are not intended to recount historical origins, but to validate new configurations. In politics, history, and faiva, the eighteenth century objective was to harness the realm of the sacred. Part I is an ethnographic description of villagers rehearsing a dance in 1971, torn between reluctance to fulfill feudal obligations to the ruling aristocracy, and the appeal of retaining a reputation as the island's leading dancers. Of all tasks, presentation of a faiva was given priority. Part II is a historical reconstruction of the repertoire of the late eighteenth century. Here each faiva is seen exhibited in its lakanga : appropriate occasion. Martial arts and implement dances accompanied presentations between chiefs contesting for power. Mock battles followed presentations to the gods. Night dances were lit by torchlight. High-ranking women processed at the weddings of sacred chiefs. Appropriate settings enhanced the peculiar aesthetic of each faiva; political and religious agendas added force to performances. Part III describes the process of a new repertoire emerging, and the social fabrication of its legitimacy. The Appendix assembles an eighteenth century repertoire of choreographies and song texts, demonstrating that records exist for the scholarship of early Tongan music and dance.</p>

From Social Investment to Investing in the Social: Insiders’ Perceptions, Experiences, and Expectations

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
DASSI POSTAN-AIZIK ◽  
RONI STRIER
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Labour Market ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Social Investment ◽  
Human Capital Development ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
The North ◽  
The Social ◽  
Capital Development

Abstract Social investment is a policy approach intended to promote the social inclusion of excluded individuals and groups, mainly through labour market participation and long-term human capital development. Since the 1980’s this approach has spread from Europe worldwide and is now regarded as the latest shift from both ‘traditional’ welfare and the unrestrained neoliberal policy implemented under the austerity regime of the last decades. Most social investment studies focus on the social and economic impacts of policy at the macro-level. This article takes a different perspective to examine how members of excluded communities experience social investment policy in their daily lives. The study analyzes qualitative data collected from a purposive sample of 96 participants from excluded communities in the North of Israel. Findings indicate that participants strongly support social investment ideas of inclusion via human capital development and the labour market. However, their experiences in both areas point to continued struggles with social mechanisms that marginalize them and reinforce multigenerational exclusion. Findings affirm critique of social investment when implemented without major structural changes. The study implications for policy suggest that, without such changes, the paradigmatic promises of social investment may further entrench social exclusion by replicating discriminatory and oppressive practices.

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