Approaches to Welfare

Philip Bean, Stewart MacPherson, Philip Bean, Stewart MacPherson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429883866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1983 Approaches to Welfare provides a unique introduction to the study of social welfare in Britain. The contributions, by distinguished figures in the field of social welfare and social policy, explore all the dimensions of the study of social welfare demonstrating that not only have social policies changed in the forty years since the establishment of the welfare state, but so too have approaches to their analysis. The contributors consider these changes in relation to a wide range of social welfare issues, illuminating the diversity and variety within the contemporary study of social policy.

Chapter 1

The evolution of social administration

Paul Wilding

My concern is to explore the changes which have taken place in social administration as a subject of academic study in the last thirty years – roughly the years spanned by the careers of the first generation of professors of social administration. The essay falls into three parts. First, I shall try to outline the essential characteristics of what I have called the traditional social administration approach – described by many as the Titmuss tradition. Then I shall look at the factors which weakened the dominance of that approach and led to new conceptions of the subject. Finally, I shall examine the nature of what I describe – rather unimaginatively perhaps – as the new social administration, its emphases, insights and preoccupations.

The traditional social administration

When the Department of Social Science was established at the London School of Economics in 1912 its purpose was clear and limited. ‘It is intended’, the Calendar stated, ‘for those who wish to prepare themselves to engage in the many forms of social and charitable effort’ (Titmuss, 1963, p. 15). Until the Second World War this remained the essential purpose of what subsequently became known as the Department of Social Administration. Marsh writes:

The study was essentially descriptive and designed to answer the question how do the social services operate, when did they come into being and when, and by whom, can they be used? All too often ‘the social services’ were studied as a ‘useful’ subject which one had to know in order to be a social worker, and few attempts were made to analyse the economic and sociological relationships and implications of the social services as social institutions, or to question their aims, purposes and methods of administration (1965, p. 10).

The development of state welfare services after 1945 raised many new issues of academic study for a subject which saw itself as essentially concerned with the study of the social services. In the years between 1950 and the early 1970s what I have called the traditional social administration developed, flourished and began to be the object of criticism.

Throughout these years there was, of course, a process of continuing evolution. There was what might be called the early social administration approach, associated most obviously with Penelope Hall, perhaps, as the writer of the subject’s basic textbook in the 1950s and 1960s, and confining itself exclusively to the study of social services and seeing them as the simple product of an expanding humanitarianism (1952). This approach was increasingly challenged by the Titmuss approach which looked at social administration in a broader perspective and saw social policy as the product of a multiplicity of factors and as having a multiplicity of roles and functions in society. Titmuss’s own ideas about the nature of the subject also changed quite considerably between his inaugural lecture in 1951 and his last lectures delivered in 1973, and posthumously published in Social Policy (1974). Nevertheless, in spite of these two stages in the traditional approach, it is possible to sketch in its essential features.

First, it was characterised by certain shared assumptions about the subject-matter of social administration – the British welfare state and the social services in particular. ‘Social administration’, Titmuss declared in his inaugural lecture, ‘may broadly be defined as the study of the social services’ (1963, p. 14).

In 1975 Donnison concluded that the social services were still the main focus of those studying social administration (1975, p. 13). ‘What has particularly characterised social administration as a field of study’, says Parker, ‘has been the attention paid to the description and evaluation of existing social services or policies’ (1972, pp. 118–19).

At times Titmuss certainly sought to broaden the scope of the subject. All commentators agree on the seminal nature of his famous paper, ‘The Social Division of Welfare’ (1963). Sinfield, indeed, describes it as ‘probably … the most cited paper in the British literature of social policy’ (1978, p. 124). Pinker argues that in that essay ‘Titmuss broke through the then conventional and narrow definitions of social policy and, by focusing upon aims rather than academic procedures, he brought a new analytical dimension to his subject’ (1977, p. vii). Few colleagues or students, however, followed Titmuss in his attempted break-out, and the burden of Sinfield’s article is that in the next twenty years few of his colleagues attempted to take up and build on Titmuss’s attempt at a reconceptualisation of the subject. Social administration continued to concentrate its attention on government and on its legislation, substantially ignoring the distributional outcomes of decisions made by other important institutions, public and private, and so limiting its analysis of welfare and dis-welfare (Walker, 1981, pp. 226–7).

Second, the traditional social administration was characterised by a shared approach to its subject-matter, an approach which can usefully be summed up as particular, prescriptive and parochial. The approach was particular in the sense that students and scholars tended to focus on particular issues, problems and services rather than to look generally at social policy and social welfare. They took their cue from Titmuss who posed the rhetorical question, to which in his mind, at least, there was only one answer, ‘To understand better what it is all about have not we in the end to ask concrete questions about specific policies and services rather than to generalise broadly about “social policy” in the abstract?’ (1974, p. 49). Such an approach clearly has value. It can help to delineate the size and nature of specific problems, it can alert administrators and policy makers to shortcomings in services, it ‘has value as a watchdog and buttress for the welfare state’ (Taylor-Gooby and Dale, 1981, p. 28) but it does limit and narrow the scope and range of the subject.

The traditional approach has been unashamedly prescriptive. It has been committed to the production of knowledge for use by policy makers and governments, rather than knowledge for understanding by scholars and theorists. The concern of the subject, says Mishra, has been

not in knowledge about social welfare institutions for its own sake but rather in understanding the nature and dimensions of a particular social problem with a view to its solution … stated simply, the advancement of welfare rather than the accumulation and refinement of a body of tested knowledge is the central concern (1977, pp. 3–5).

Other commentators make the same point. Social administration, Joyce Warham argued in 1973, can be distinguished from the other social sciences

by an overt and primary commitment to the promotion of individual and social welfare through the process of social reform. Its pursuit of knowledge is directed not exclusively to understanding how social services function as social institutions, but also to considering how they could be and possibly ought to be modified (1973, p. 193).

This ‘commitment to welfare’ – and to welfare to be promoted and achieved through the development of certain particular social institutions – limits the subject to those who share such a commitment. This ‘heavy load of human longing for a better world’ (Pinker, 1977, p. xiv) is clear in the social administration literature of the 1950s and 1960s.

Parochialism is another important element in traditional social administration. All the leading scholars insist that social administration cannot be studied except in combination with the other social sciences and the study of society as a whole. ‘Social policies cannot be understood’, Donnison wrote, ‘if they are treated as a separate sphere to be studied in isolation from the rest of society’ (1974, p. 53). Marsh insists on the same point. Social services, he writes, ‘cannot be studied in isolation, they must be looked at as one feature of the economic, social and political systems of the society in which they operate’ (1965, p. 16).

The sad fact is, however, that in the traditional social administration more often than not social policies and social services were studied in a kind of vacuum. Hilary Rose describes herself as brought up

within an older tradition of social policy [what is described here as the traditional social administration] where – to gently caricature it – the economy was relegated to the background, the social relations of class were to be left to the sociologists, power was to be ignored, and where social policy itself was to be discussed in regal isolation (1981, p. 477).

Students of social administration were expected to know some economics and politics and sociology but social policy was seldom, if ever, firmly located in the context of the kind of society revealed by economic, sociological and political analysis. Social policy was regarded in some strange way as susceptible to study in isolation from its environment.

Third, the traditional social administration shared certain values and certain assumptions about society. These assumptions were seldom made explicit but they underpinned – and eventually undermined – its basic approach. There were the assumptions about the continuance and easy inevitability of economic growth which everyone except the congenitally pessimistic held in the 1950s and 1960s. There were the assumptions about agreed social objectives which seemed so evident in the Butskellite years when ideology was clearly dead. There was the belief that gradual reformism on classic Fabian lines was the way to change and improve society and that society could be changed in this way – eventually perhaps fundamentally. There was the faith that the proper mechanism for such change was the state operating through the social services and that all that was needed was rather more of them, rather better directed, staffed and organised. There was the belief that policy making was a rational kind of business and that if needs were proven and ‘facts’ produced ‘society’ would respond with policies to tackle the ‘problems’ which were revealed.

Assumptions about society and shared values fused together. The leading figures of traditional social administration were all implicitly or explicitly Fabians. They were united above all by a shared vision of a more equal, more just society, with ‘better’ social services financed through redistributive taxation. Scholarship and advocacy coexisted easily in this consensual world. Social administration became identified with a particular political philosophy and a particular approach to social welfare.

This belief in state social services as the road to social welfare is a limiting one. It leads to what Taylor-Gooby has described as the ‘perspective of the State that is the hallmark of the social administration tradition’ (1981, p. 8). It narrows the subject to a concern with state services and can easily lead to the adoption of the state’s criteria for their evaluation.

Any brief description of a subject as broad in its concerns as social administration and one which embraces scholars and students from such diverse backgrounds, must be an oversimplification. In the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, however, a recognisable social administration evolved characterised by shared – and limiting – assumptions about subject-matter, by a shared approach which I have categorised as particular, prescriptive and parochial and by certain shared social values and assumptions about society.

The undermining of the traditional approach

For twenty years there was little challenge to the orthodoxies of the traditional social administration. Indeed, its assumptions took on the status of facts and were no longer regarded as contestable. In the early 1970s, however, the dominant view of the subject began to be challenged. Its underpinnings – a consensus model of society, a rational model of policy making, a view of the state as independent arbiter – were all exposed as assumptions which were fundamentally problematic and which could no longer be regarded as necessarily sound.

It is possible to distinguish five main reasons for the challenge to the traditional social administration which led to the broadening and deepening of the subject. First, there was a self-conscious critique which emerged from within the subject. In 1971, for example, Pinker wrote scathingly of ‘the current poverty of social administration as a theoretical discipline’ (1971, pp. 5 and 12). He concluded:

The question that faces us is whether or not social policy and administration is becoming little more than a motley collection of skills which are applied, on a largely ad hoc basis, to a series of problems in the field of social welfare (1971, p. 13).

In 1974 Parker felt able to write of ‘a steady enlargement of the conception of the subject’ and asked – rather plaintively – ‘was the subject destined to be for ever occupied with description, evaluation and practical prescription?’ (1974, p. 567). There was a dissatisfaction within the subject with its implicit ideology, its lack of theory, its failure to establish its claim to be regarded as more than a conglomeration of the ad hoc, and with what was felt to be its continuing lack of academic respectability. This contributed to a re-examination of its basis and tools.

Second, the fundamental consensus which had characterised British politics in the 1950s and 1960s came to an end. No longer was there consensus about social ends or how they might be attained. Economics and social policy became political again. There were different views about the proper role of the state in welfare which were the product of different values and ideologies and different economic and social priorities. ‘Society’ was clearly not agreed about the things which it had seemed to be agreed about. In fact, at times in the years after 1970, ‘society’ did not seem to be agreed about anything.

Social administration had developed in the consensus atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s and owed more than most people realised to that particular confluence of circumstances. Students had assumed agreement about means and ends, they had assumed that ‘facts’ would vanquish mere opinions. The ending of this state of bliss unloosed a barrage of questioning about the nature of social policy, the role of the state in welfare, the costs and benefits of social services – questions which had been unasked in the previous two decades.

A third blow to the traditional social administration was the ending of the assumption of continuing and automatic economic growth which followed the Arab-Israeli war of 1973. The end of growth meant the end of painless welfare expansion. It meant that choices had clearly to be made – and such choices are clearly, at the end of the day, value judgments. The ultimately political nature of welfare policy was emphasised again. Politics re-entered social administration.

So too, more obviously, did economics. The costs of welfare became more apparent and less acceptable. Measurement of benefits became an obvious necessity. Social administration had to seek to adapt to this new harsher world and forge new tools to measure efficiency and effectiveness, and to determine the ‘fair’ allocation of scarce resources.

A fourth factor in the decline of the traditional social administration was the realisation, which became stronger in the late 1960s and early 1970s, that social welfare services were failing to achieve their objectives. Inequality of opportunity in education had not been abolished. Neither had inequality of access to health care. Poverty still existed. Homelessness had reappeare...