American Social Welfare Policy

Dynamics Of Formulation And Change

David Rochefort

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429709487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Social welfare activities stand at the heart of the modern democratic state as they absorb ever-increasing budget allocations and stimulate debate over the proper role of government. This study analyzes the development of social welfare policy in modern America, beginning with a critical assessment of the dominant "progressive and "social control t

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Theoretical Perspectives on Social Welfare Policy

In a recent book that discusses the philosophical underpinnings of social welfare policy, political scientists Norman Fumiss and Timothy Tilton make the perceptive point that the welfare state has never had a distinct ideology of its own.¹ Instead, the development of measures to cope with the problems of the needy in advanced industrial society has tended to draw its supporters from splinter groups within the camps of liberalism and Marxism, two well-established and starkly opposed philosophical traditions. Fumiss and Tilton identify these two sources of welfare state philosophy respectively as a “socialistically inclined liberalism” and a “liberalized socialism.”²

The development of theoretical perspectives to analyze the historical growth of social welfare policy has likewise followed two main lines of thought that originate in the liberal and Marxist philosophies. In the former instance, “progressive” scholars have tended to see social welfare as meliorative in nature and as evidence of the expanding capacity of modern social institutions to respond to human difficulties. Authors in the “social control” tradition, for their part, have explained that social welfare policies are simply another means to support the existing class system and thereby perpetuate inequality.

In spite of their predominance in the study of social welfare policy, neither the progressive nor the social control perspective has received sufficient critical examination. What different themes make up the progressive and social control models? What are the implicit assumptions that distinguish the models from each other? Alternatively, what assumptions do they hold in common? A review of literature answers these and related questions. This discussion, in turn, provides the basis for the further development of theory that can respond to a number of shared deficiencies within the progressive and social control models.

The Progressive Perspective

The idea of progress has a long and influential history. Robert Nisbet observes that “no single idea has been more important than, perhaps as important as, the idea of progress in Western Civilization for nearly three thousand years.”³ As it has unfolded over time, this grand idea of progress has subsumed a variety of changing beliefs, but its most basic form includes a unilinear sense of the passage of time and the view that man passes through a number of developmental stages in a gradual, inexorable process. Both elements unite within an overarching conception of human society as advancing from some inferior form to a superior one.⁴

During the twentieth century the idea of progress became allied with the political philosophy of liberalism.⁵ According to this most recent version of the concept, mankind achieves progress through “the direct use of the central government’s planning, regulatory, and directive powers.”⁶ Social welfare policy figures centrally into this scheme as a collective response to the age-old problems that have burdened man-poverty, hunger, infirmity, and various forms of insecurity.

Common to all authors treated here is this liberal conviction that the historical development of social welfare policy has been generally progressive in both intentions and results, a record of the purposeful adaptation of state power to the social needs of the citizenry. A number of different themes have appeared among those adopting a progressive perspective on social welfare policy, each offering a particular explanation of this historical process.

One of the simplest and most straightforward progressive themes identifies social welfare policy as in part a manifestation of beneficent human nature. It is common, for example, to read histories of social welfare that imply the existence of a ubiquitous humanitarian impulse that links modern programs and services to welfare practices followed in preindustrial societies. One text sees a common thread of helpfulness winding its way through time from the Code of Hammurabi in Babylonia (c. 2000 B.C.) through the charitable works of guilds during the Middle Ages to the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601, the first systematic social welfare policy of industrializing society.⁷ Some authors attempt to go back even further to establish the primacy in modern social welfare policy of man’s caring capacity. Walter Friedlander and Robert Apte, and Helen Crampton and Kenneth Keiser, the authors of introductory texts for students of social welfare and social work, cite studies of primitive societies to substantiate their views of human nature. Respectively, they write:

Modern anthropology and sociology have shown that with the beginning of human society the feeling of belonging, and the readiness to provide mutual protection, were just as influential as the selfish desire to dominate weaker human beings. Dating from this early phase of human development, mutual assistance can be called one of man’s fundamental drives.⁸

All patterns of culture known to anthropologists have emerged from a need to protect the group, a need that has also manifested itself in the cohesion and solidarity of people undertaking the care of the less fortunate. Many of our social values reflect such patterns: compassion and mercy, good will and loyalty are qualities evolved from the need to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves.⁹

This humanitarian theme implies a harmonious rather than conflict-filled view of the workings of the social system. It is revealing to read that the author of another introductory text defines social welfare policy “as including all those forms of social intervention that have a primary and direct concern with promoting both the well-being of the individual and of the society as a whole.”¹⁰ Conspicuous by its absence here is some caveat concerning a possible divergence of interests between these two supposed beneficiaries. At times the humanitarian strain within the progressive theoretical perspective almost seems to reflect a concept of the social system as dominated by two basic groups: those who need social assistance and those who recognize a duty to attempt to meet that need. The existence or implications of any power differentials corresponding to this dualism generally do not receive extensive consideration.

Strictly speaking, the humanitarian theme does not really account for the progressive development of social welfare policy over time. It merely presents an argument concerning the motives that inspired the first social welfare measures and that supposedly continue to express themselves in current programs. In other words, it is not clear from this argument alone why efforts in the social welfare field should expand or evolve from one period to the next. To explain this forward development logically requires that another ingredient be added to a humanitarian spirit, an element that some scholars have identified as the acquisition of knowledge. Thus a second major theme found within the progressive perspective is the idea that social welfare policy develops as a function of the level of information concerning social problems; as the latter increases, the former becomes more responsive.

The idea that the accumulation of knowledge undergirds the process of social melioration has long been a part of the historical faith in progress. Nisbet identifies it as one of two propositions that consistently recur in man’s thought from the Greeks to the twentieth century. Progress is seen to depend, in his words, on “slow, gradual, and cumulative improvement in knowledge, the kind of knowledge embodied in the arts and sciences, in the manifold ways man has for coping with the problems presented by nature or by the sheer efforts of human beings to live with one another in groups.”¹¹ It is easy to see that many modern social welfare historians write within this tradition in their attempts to show how social welfare programs have grown out of increased knowledge about social problems, a process often described in such terms as the “recognition” or “discovery” of social needs, and the “bringing to light” of the causes of social problems.¹² Friedlander and Apte specifically join the ongoing accumulation of knowledge to the humanitarian impulse to characterize the history of social welfare:

At the same time as humanitarian ideas developed about our responsibility to assist those who need help, progress in the biological and social sciences and in modern technology have provided new tools for investigating the causes of human suffering, poverty, deficiencies, and dissatisfaction, opening ways to alleviate or cure certain social and individual problems.¹³

A third theme within the progressive theoretical perspective relates the development of social welfare policy to the evolution in the Western world of man’s political and social rights. According to T. H. Marshall, there are three forms of “citizenship” that developed in different historical periods.¹⁴ The most

elemental form is “civil citizenship,” which includes the basic rights of individual freedom, such as freedom of speech and religion, the right to own property, and the right to receive equal justice.¹⁵ These civil rights had their formative period during the eighteenth century. A second and more advanced kind of citizenship is “political.” This refers to basic political rights, such as the franchise, which developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for most social groups in Western society.¹⁶ Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, social welfare practices generally reflected the incomplete development of the concept of citizenship by their punitive and coercive character. Because it was not seen as a right of membership in Western society, social welfare assistance was given grudgingly.

Marshall’s third category is “social citizenship.” This concept embraces a broad range of socioeconomic rights “from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society.”¹⁷ Marshall locates the development of social citizenship within the twentieth century, a process reflected in the supposed abandonment within current social welfare policy of restrictive and stigmatizing practices that accentuate the distinction between those who need welfare assistance and the rest of society. In their place have come varied social services and income support programs that work toward implementing the principle that “society should, and will, guarantee all the essentials of a decent and secure life at every level, irrespective of the amount of money earned.”¹⁸ In short, Marshall argues that social welfare policy has become progressively liberal over time and that this progression is part of the ongoing expansion of the concept of citizenship.¹⁹ He writes, “The modern drive towards social equality is, I believe, the latest phase of an evolution of citizenship which has been in continuous progress for some 250 years.”²⁰

By far the most influential progressive theme could be called the “modernization approach.” It specifies a fundamental link between social welfare policy development and the process of modernization within Western society since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Dealing with such a complex and macro-cosmic phenomenon, this argument understandably has a number of particular variants that focus upon different aspects of widespread social and economic change.

In one of the most widely influential works in the field, Harold Wilensky and Charles Lebeaux elaborate a multidimensional theory of the relationship between social welfare practices and the development of industrial society.²¹ These authors argue that industrialization has simultaneously determined the demand for, supply of, and organization of welfare services within modern social systems. First of all, they explain that social problems—such as indigency in old age, unemployment, and juvenile delinquency—directly result from industrialization and its impact both on the economy and on traditional social institutions like the family. But at the same time, industrialization has stimulated the economic growth that, in turn, makes possible the income for welfare expenditures. Finally, industrialization creates bureaucratic and hierarchical forms of organization, a pervasive social impulse fixing the way social welfare services are formally administered and delivered.

Wilensky and Lebeaux place special emphasis on professionalism in the historical development of social welfare. Because of the specialization and complexity of modern life, they argue, social work has been called upon to play a “liaison function” on behalf of clients seeking guidance “through a kind of civilized jungle, made up of specialized agencies and service functionaries the citizen can hardly name, let alone locate.”²² In a diagram meant to encapsulate the argument of their book, the authors make explicit the linkages between professionalism and both antecedent and succeeding variables within the causal model that connects industrialization and social welfare.²³ Industrialization determines the “characteristic modes of social organization,” giving rise to a need for specialized social service personnel and stimulating the development of professionals in the tertiary sector of the economy. As noted above, it is this same industrialization process that creates social problems. But social work professionals themselves also play an influential role in the formal recognition and definition of these problems. Although Wilensky and Lebeaux express concern over the inherent tension between social reform and professionalism, they generally approve of the values that guide social work as a profession: functional specificity, emotional neutrality, impartiality, and the ideal of service to troubled people.²⁴

Wilensky and Lebeaux have had great influence in proposing a classification scheme for the social services.²⁵ As a summary of their analysis of the historical development of social welfare policy, this scheme places them squarely within the progressive tradition. According to these authors, two conceptions of social welfare exist: residual and institutional. The former sees social services as responses to the emergency needs of citizens until “the regular social structure-the family and the economic system-is again working properly.”²⁶ The institutional conception of social welfare suggests no emergency, no stigma. In Wilensky and Lebeaux’s words, “Social welfare becomes accepted as a proper, legitimate function of modern industrial society in helping individuals achieve self-fulfillment.”²⁷ For these authors, history clearly flows toward this latter, more progressive idea of social welfare.

As the residual conception becomes weaker, as we believe it will, and the institutional conception increasingly dominant, it seems likely that distinctions between welfare and other types of social institutions will become more and more blurred. Under continuing industrialization all institutions...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Theoretical Perspectives on Social Welfare Policy
• 2. Origins of the “Third Psychiatric Revolution”: The Community Mental Health Centers Act of 1963
• 3. Public Policies for a Graying America: Medicare, the Older Americans Act, Social Security, and Supplemental Security Income
• 4. Responding to the New Dependency: The Family Assistance Plan of 1969
• 5. Toward A Theory of Policy Change
• Postscript: Reagan’s Social Welfare Policies
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index