Reappraising State Intervention and Social Policy in Mexico: The Case of Milk in the Distrito Federal during the Twentieth Century

1999 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-99
Author(s):  
Enrique C. Ochoa
1999 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enrique C. Ochoa

This essay moves beyond the sweeping generalizations about government intervention in the economy to examine the complex factors that have led to such policies. By examining the case of milk in the Federal District during a period of historic transformation, the essay demonstrates how urban pressures, competing demands, and the relatively easy solution of importing powdered milk during periods of crisis led government officials to use the new technology of milk recombination as a solution to the myriad problems plaguing Mexico City's milk supply. / Este ensayo va más allá de las extensas generalizaciones sobre la intervención del gobierno en la economía, para examinar los complejos factores que han llevado a tales políticas. A través de un análisis del caso de la leche en el Distrito Federal durante un periodo de transformación histórica, el ensayo demuestra la manera en que las presiones urbanas, las demandas competitivas y la relativamente fácil solución de importar leche en polvo durante periodos de crísis, llevó a oficiales del gobierno a utilizar la nueva tecnología de la recombinación de leche como una solución a la miríada de problemas que plaga a la suministración de leche en la ciudad de México.


2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (574) ◽  
pp. 605-641
Author(s):  
Gary Love

Abstract This article offers the first analytical overview of the political thinking and organisational history of the Tory Reform Committee (TRC). It is also a contribution to wider scholarly debates about the making of a ‘New Conservatism’ in the 1940s and the development of Conservative thought in the twentieth century. The TRC’s leading members drew on the party’s Disraelian one-nation tradition to free them from adopting doctrinaire positions. They wanted to emphasise the merits of either state intervention, planning and social reform, or private enterprise, individualism and freedom, depending on the country’s economic and social position—and the party’s electoral position. Most Tory Reformers imposed limits on the malleability of their Conservatism by rejecting laissez-faire individualism, socialism, and the earliest signs of neoliberalism. Although the group was replaced by the Design for Freedom Movement, which adopted a similar political outlook on a non-party basis between 1947 and 1949, its broader significance relates to how its support for the principles of ‘design’ and ‘freedom’ influenced Conservative debates about economic and social policy at a pivotal moment in the party’s history. Continuities of thought suggest that we should be wary of interpretations which impose an ‘origins of neoliberalism’ or proto-Thatcherite framework on the 1940s. The TRC’s ‘New Conservatism’ was meant to be adaptable, practical and Keynesian. It was a pitch for the centre ground and it was integral to the political thought of Conservative governments between 1951 and 1974.


1977 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Moore

Late Victorian and Edwardian social reform has been studied in recent years in order to clarify that important transitional era when new state resources were being called upon to help redress the most glaring abuses which comprised the condition-of-England question. Most of these studies have emphasized the politics of social policy and have also subsumed the tangled and competitive world of philanthropy. But philanthropists were prominent in the politics and practice of social welfare. In his study of Edwardian social policy, Bentley Gilbert distinguishes three organizations as characteristic of “scientific social reform”: settlements (inspired by Canon Samuel Barnett), the Fabians, and the Charity Organization Society. His analysis of each concluded that “professionally-minded social work,” as represented by the C.O.S., least typified the transition from old to new attitudes about social policy. David Owen's examination of English philanthropy supports Gilbert's conclusions concerning the C.O.S., and less detailed surveys of social policy also cite that agency as representative of a philosophic individualism which rejected the policies necessary for reform. All agree that the charitable community called attention to many defects in the British social system, but they leave readers with the impression that it generally opposed state sponsored remedies for those ills.It is the concern of this essay to show that the “professionally-minded” world of Edwardian philanthropy was, like the state, developing new agencies and reorganizing its resources to help meet the massive and diverse welfare needs of the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
George R. Boyer

This concluding chapter summarizes the book's major findings. The road to the welfare state of the 1940s was not a wide and straight thoroughfare through Victorian and Edwardian Britain. As the previous chapters have made clear, the story of British social policy from 1830 to 1950 is really two separate stories joined together in the years immediately before the Great War. The first is a tale of increasing stinginess toward the poor by the central and local governments, while the second is the story of the construction of a national safety net, culminating in the Beveridge Report and Labour's social policies of 1946–48. The prototype for the welfare reforms of the twentieth century cannot be found in the Victorian Poor Law. The chapter then offers some thoughts regarding the reasons for the shifts in social welfare policy from the 1830s to the 1940s.


Author(s):  
Julia Moses

T. H. Marshall’s claims that the twentieth century was the era of social rights, embodied in education and welfare policy, has found enduring favour with a wide variety of scholars and social commentators. To what extent, however, was his theory of citizenship and social rights a reflection of the specific moment in which he was writing? This chapter places T. H. Marshall’s concept of ‘citizenship’ within its historical context. Through examining his biography, this essay suggests that Marshall’s theory of citizenship was informed by an appreciation for continental, and especially German, conceptions of social policy, the role of the state, and the nature of community. Parsing this aspect of Marshall’s intellectual biography has important implications for our own understanding of British ideas about the purpose, structure, and scope of social policy during the formative middle decades of the twentieth century.


2003 ◽  
Vol 108 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-144
Author(s):  
Tim Dwyer

This article considers the emergence of policies for localism within the Australian commercially networked TV industry. By historically reflecting on the construction of equalisation policies of the late 1980s, their trajectory is traced through to the ABA's regional TV news inquiry in 2001–2002. Against a background of late twentieth century international trends to deregulation, the reregulation of Australian regional TV is linked with a discussion of possible alternative rules for content distribution. The origins of localism in US commercial TV and comparable recent US developments in TV news are reviewed. It is questioned whether the intended beneficiaries of the equalisation policy — under-served rural and regional TV audience — have in fact had their promise of increased television choices compromised, with the winding back of the key genre of local news programs in some areas. It is further argued that broader contextual data — for example, information arising from economic and social policy research in rural and regional Australia — could appropriately inform the development of localism policies for the longer term.


2020 ◽  
pp. 434-450
Author(s):  
Simon J. Potter

This chapter examines the twentieth-century British press in its imperial and transnational contexts. It demonstrates how Britain's imperial press system, which developed during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to allow news to flow around the British empire, increasingly failed to serve British geopolitical interests from the mid-twentieth century onwards. It considers the relationship between the British government and the news agency Reuters, and the role of the Empire Press Union. It argues that although contemporary journalists often emphasised the importance of the ideal of press freedom when talking about their profession, state intervention in the affairs of news agencies represents a significant thread in the history of the twentieth-century British press.


Author(s):  
Robert Pinker

In this chapter, Robert Pinker discusses T.H. Marshall's concern with welfare pluralism, his study of citizenship and welfare, and his contribution to the development of social policy and administration. He begins with an overview of Marshall's achievement in the field of sociology and some of his major works such as Sociology at the Crossroads and Social Policy in the Twentieth Century, along with the essays entitled ‘Value Problems of Welfare-Capitalism’ and ‘Citizenship and Social Class’. Pinker continues by analysing Marshall's thoughts on the relationship between the inequalities of class and the prospective equality of citizenship and his argument that collectivist social services contribute to the maintenance and enhancement of social welfare so long as such interventions do not subvert the operation of the system of competitive markets. Pinker concludes with an assessment of Marshall's views on social and political rights, the problem of poverty, and the concept of ‘democratic-welfare-capitalism’.


2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Moses ◽  
Eve Rosenhaft

According to the sociologists Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, modern societies have become increasingly preoccupied with the future and safety and have mobilized themselves in order to manage systematically what they have perceived as “risks” (Beck 1992; Giddens 1991). This special section investigates how conceptions of risk evolved in Europe over the course of the twentieth century by focusing on the creation and evolution of social policy. The language of risk has, in the past twenty years, become a matter of course in conversations about social policy (Kemshall 2002). We seek to trace how “risk” has served as aheuristic toolfor understanding and treating “social problems.” A key aim of this collection is to explore the character of social policy (in the broadest sense) as an instrument (or technology) that both constructs its own objects as the consequences of “risks” and generates new “risks” in the process (Lupton 2004: 33). In this way, social policy typifies the paradox of security: by attempting literally to making one “carefree,” orsē(without)curitās(care), acts of (social) security spur new insecurities about what remains unprotected (Hamilton 2013: 3–5, 25–26). Against this semantic and philological context, we suggest that social policy poses an inherent dilemma: in aiming to stabilize or improve the existing social order, it also acts as an agent of change. This characteristic of social policy is what makes particularly valuable studies that allow for comparisons across time, place, and types of political regime. By examining a range of cases from across Europe over the course of the twentieth century, this collection seeks to pose new questions about the role of the state; ideas about risk and security; and conceptions of the “social” in its various forms.


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