scholarly journals Myten om velferdsstaten

2018 ◽  
pp. 15-38
Author(s):  
Hans-Tore Hansen

Title: The Myth of the Welfare State. Summary: This article takes a closer look at the legacy and relevancy of The Myth of the Welfare State. The anthology was received with great attention and debate when its first editions appeared in the early 1970s. The article examines the anthology’s individual contributions (primarily from the 1973 edition), placing them within both an historical context and more contemporary discussions about “public sociology”. The article goes on to assess the anthology’s contributions against the backdrop of one main guiding question: do the anthology’s critiques of welfare myths still have relevancy for current welfare research and contemporary discussions about the welfare state? Lower levels of poverty during the 1970s (together with little recognition of poverty as a problem at that time compared to today) weakens somewhat, the article argues, the anthology’s relevance to our contemporary understanding of poverty in Norway. Poverty continues, however, to exist as a social problem today, although Norway’s poverty levels are low compared to many other countries in the world. The article identifies common themes in contemporary Norwegian poverty debates and topics raised in the anthology in the early 1970s. The article concludes that many of the topics and discussions raised in The Myth of the Welfare State are still visible in, and relevant to, contemporary discussions on the nature of the welfare state.

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 315-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Nollert ◽  
Sebastian Schief

Most welfare state typologies still characterize Switzerland as a liberal welfare regime. However, recent research shows that its welfare state did not retrench but instead moved towards the conservative type. Nevertheless, higher social expenditure has not been accompanied by increases in taxation. Moreover, Switzerland managed to overcome the so-called trilemma of the service economy. After analyzing the shift of the Swiss welfare state from a liberal to a conservative welfare regime, we argue that the Swiss economic success story of the twentieth century is based on a favourable policy mix (tax system, labour market, financial sector) used to compete successfully in the world market for protection. We conclude that, as a political entrepreneur, Switzerland has the capability to receive taxes and investments from foreign individuals and enterprises, wealthy residents and high-skilled and well-paid immigrants to finance the welfare state and to overcome the trilemma of the service economy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-67
Author(s):  
Sunu Widianto

The purpose of this study was to understand the phenomenon of entrepreneurship activity with a coherent paradigm that has not been widely explored. Entrepreneurship has been regarded as one of the important factor that support growth and socioeconomic development of a country because it can provides so many jobs, which ultimately will improve the welfare state and competitive advantage. Prior studies have been conducted research which is none of the comprehensive approach taken to explain the factors that encourage entrepreneurial activity that occurred in various countries around the world. This study found that Individualism negatively significant influence TEA which means the higher level of individualism of a country the lower Entrepeneurial activity. Moreover, cost enforcing contracts significantly influence national entrepreneurial activity which means the higher level of cost enforcing contracts the higher level of TEA.


Author(s):  
Roger E. Backhouse ◽  
Bradley W. Bateman ◽  
Tamotsu Nishizawa ◽  
Dieter Plehwe

During the last several decades, the welfare state has come under increasing pressure around the world, with social provision often being cut or privatized. Often the justification for these changes has been made as an economic argument, especially a neoliberal argument that the welfare state diminishes growth or produces disincentives to work. These arguments are of relatively recent origin, however; many types of economists have supported the creation of the welfare state, even liberal economists. The purpose of this book is to examine the economic arguments that have been used in the United Kingdom, Japan, and Germany in support of, and in opposition to, the welfare state. Special attention is paid to the transnational dimensions of recent welfare discourse and to the ways that liberal and neoliberal arguments about the welfare state have changed over time.


2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-297
Author(s):  
Subhamay Ghosh

‘Homelessness’ is the worst form of urban poverty, and in the wake of neoliberalism it has become more pervasive in cities across the world. Taking the case of Delhi, the study focuses on the making of homelessness, the connotation of being homeless, and the nature of responses from a governing institution to homelessness in the neoliberal city. The study reveals that large scale slum demolition in the last three decades has rendered thousands of people homeless. They are denied of basic human rights and human necessities. They are not even allowed to reside in the open spaces of the city. Governing actors have bypassed their duties by setting up only a ‘few’ night-shelters in the city, most of which remained unoccupied because of several adversities. The study also reveals that homelessness is the outcome of governance failure and the failure of the welfare state. But the structural problem of homelessness is completely overlooked both in policy and by ‘other’ sections of society.


2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Rathgeb Smith

AbstractAs the articles in this special issue demonstrate, the emergence of government-voluntary sector compacts around the world is intimately linked to comprehensive transformations the welfare state is undergoing in many countries. The fact that the first compact was developed in England is significant; since the early 20th century, the development of the welfare state in many societies has been significantly influenced by the ideas coming from policymakers, scholars and advocates in the United Kingdom.


1989 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 505-526 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodney Lowe

ABSTRACTBetween 1955–7 welfare expenditure in Britain came under serious attack. The main protagonist was the Treasury and its chosen implement a five-year review of the social services, to be presided over by a ministerial Social Services Committee. The attack rebounded, for the Committee provided the opportunity for the consolidation of the defence of welfare expenditure and for a frontal attack on Treasury assumptions. This neglected episode in Conservative government social policy places in historical context the early defeat of monetarism (with Thorneycroft's resignation in 1958) and provides the background to the establishment of the Plowden Committee and of the Public Expenditure Survey Committee. It also raises questions about the degree of post-war consensus and the failure to make the constructive development of the welfare state an objective of ‘conviction’ politics.


Author(s):  
Benjamin Leruth

France has established itself as one of the most ‘generous’ welfare states in the world. The Great Recession of 2007–8 confronted French social policy with escalating unemployment and deepening inequalities. Combined with major pension reforms, these led to strong levels of dissatisfaction across the country, exacerbated by tensions over immigration, Euroscepticism, and internal security problems. This chapter examines how these issues developed in political context and uses material from attitude surveys to analyse existing and future challenges for the welfare state in France. It assesses recent reforms: governments of right and left offered contrasting programmes but failed to win public trust. France now stands at a cross-roads, facing a strong presidential challenge from the anti-immigrant, anti-EU right.


1952 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 364-367
Author(s):  
J. Edward Gerald

The first issues of the I. P. I. Report, published by the International Press Institute, appeared during this quarter. They furnish an unequalled report on communications around the world. L'Echo de la Presse became a weekly on April 11, realizing a seven-year dream of Editor Jacquemart. News developments included progress on reform of the British law of libel, evidence of the growth of advertising in Great Britain during the Socialist emphasis on the welfare state, and consideration of new basic press laws in West Germany, Pakistan and France. The chief editor of a leading Catholic daily in The Netherlands was dismissed. La Prensa of Buenos Aires reappeared as the painted darling of the Peron dictatorship and La Razon of La Paz appeared dead of intimidation by Estenssoro's revolutionary gangs. A leading Communist editor went to jail in France as part of the government's gesture of warning against armed agitation. A new international federation of journalists, the West's answer to the Communist IOJ, elected a famed British labor leader as president.


1989 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas E. Ashford

Butterfield's well-known warning to historians may hold important lessons for the analysis of the contemporary welfare state. In his view, the Whig historians distorted history by interpreting the past in terms of the present. They allowed themselves to become “dispensers of moral judgments” by dividing the world into the friends and enemies of progress. Many contemporary explanations of welfare states pose the same problem, not so much because social science intentionally excludes the past, but because the search for rigorous empirical explanations of our present choices and accomplishments is divorced from the past. As Himmelfarb noted in her comments on the study of social history, the investigations of this intricate transformation of nineteenth-century liberal states are now virtually “two cultures.”


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