Welfare Research

Fiona William, Jennie Popay, Ann Oakley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781857282702
• eBook ISBN: 9781135367657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

First published in 1998. This book attempts to contribute a new framework for social research in the welfare field. As such, it engages with new theories, new approaches and new methods, alongside a constructive critique of both the old and the new. It attempts to illustrate approaches to conceptualization and operationalization within policy-relevant research, to reflect and explore both "new" thinking in social theory and in welfare policy, as well as to maintain a connection with "old" concerns. Our concern is with welfare research—both theory and method— broadly defined as the wider landscape of policy and provision captured, in the past at least, by the notion of the "welfare state". The "new" thinking with which the book is primarily concerned involves a shift away from seeing people as the passive beneficiaries of "welfare" provided through state interventions and professional expertise and from seeing them as fixed single social categories of "poor", "old", "single parent" or as one dimensional, objective socio-economic classifications.

Part 1

The Context

Chapter 1

Changing Paradigms of Welfare

Fiona Williams, Jennie Popay and Ann Oakley

Introduction

This book attempts to contribute a new framework for social research in the welfare field. As such, it engages with new theories, new approaches and new methods, alongside a constructive critique of both the old and the new. It attempts to illustrate approaches to conceptualization and operationalization within policy-relevant research, to reflect and explore both “new” thinking in social theory and in welfare policy, as well as to maintain a connection with “old” concerns. Our concern is with welfare research—both theory and method—broadly defined as the wider landscape of policy and provision captured, in the past at least, by the notion of the “welfare state”.

The “new” thinking with which the book is primarily concerned involves a shift away from seeing people as the passive beneficiaries of “welfare” provided through state interventions and professional expertise and from seeing them as fixed single social categories of “poor”, “old”, “single parent” or as one-dimensional, objective socio-economic classifications. Instead, new approaches emphasize the capacity of people to be creative, reflexive human beings, that is, to be active agents in shaping their lives, experiencing, acting upon and reconstituting the outcomes of welfare policies in variable ways. These new approaches point to the complex, multiple, subjective and objective social positionings that welfare subjects inhabit. Other aspects of new thinking include an emphasis on the need for sound evidence about the benefits to be expected from different forms of intervention—a call for evidence-based decision-making at all levels of health and welfare systems which embodies a demand for professionals to be more accountable.

This book does not uncritically accept the advances in theory and method that new approaches to health and welfare have revealed. Rather, we seek to highlight how, in pursuing this complex inquiry into the variability of individual agency within a discursively (rather than statistically) constituted social policy, we cannot afford to lose sight of “old” welfare research concerns with the broader patterns of inequality and the structural constraints limiting peoples opportunities and choices. As we enter the next century, with the economics of the western world in disarray and inequality within and between nations widening, this old agenda for welfare research retains its relevance (Hutton 1995; Wilkinson 1996). So a key issue addressed in the book is how far a new framework for welfare research can incorporate new approaches which emphasize individual agency without losing sight of the other approach which emphasizes structural constraints.

Before setting out in greater detail what a new more synthesized framework for social research in the health and welfare field might entail, it is necessary to understand the wider context of new developments in thinking about welfare and social divisions. There are four major dimensions to this changing context for welfare research: the organization and delivery of welfare; the forms and expressions of political solidarity; the relationship between welfare research and the policy process; and shifts in the focus of welfare research and theory per se.

The Context for Welfare Research

The Changing Organization and Delivery of Welfare Provision

At a general societal level, the major contextual shift for welfare research has been the break up of the post-war welfare settlement. This settlement was encapsulated in the classic Keynesian Welfare State—committed to full white male employment, mass educational opportunities and state-provided, professionally-delivered forms of quasi-universal protection from poverty, unemployment, illhealth and homelessness. Charles Webster has argued that the degree of consensus around the NHS and the welfare state following the 1940s legislation in the UK was much less than generally believed (Webster 1994). Whatever the situation, it is arguably the case that since the mid-1970s, in the UK and elsewhere, the key organizational characteristics of the welfare state—mass/universal state-provided, bureaucratically-run and professionally-delivered services—have been more explicity and directly challenged. The challenges came not only from the constraints imposed by economic recession. They also came from neo-conservative critiques of the welfare state’s efficiency, and from progressive critiques of its equity. These latter critiques were associated with new forms of political collectivity on the left—especially from social movements campaigning around inequalities of gender, race, disability and sexuality. Both the political left and right attacked the power of professionals and bureaucrats. The right attacked them for their inefficiency, non-accountability, monopolism, self-interest and their failure to acknowledge the diversity of individual choice. The left and the new social movements attacked them for their sexism and racism and for hierarchial forms of delivery, in which knowledge meant power and in which users had little say or control.

By the mid-1980s a new form of welfare regime was emerging in Britain, tightly controlled by the centralized state, but organizationally dispersed through the creation of the three Ms—markets, managers and mixed economies. This shift from a “bureaucratic/professional welfare regime” to a managerialist one is not unique to Britain, but has taken place in most Western industrialized welfare states. What is, perhaps, unique to Britain in the 1990s is the combination of, on the one hand, the legacies of new right political ideology and policy which have coloured this welfare regime in particular ways and, on the other, the grass-roots influence of commitment to more democratic forms of welfare. Drawing from both of these, yet emerging as a new form of centrism between left and right, is New Labour. Although they have retained managers and mixed economies, the principle of the market has been replaced by the principle of work in the welfare-to-work programme. Paid work represents a focus for reducing “welfare dependency” among young people and single mothers and for the integration of the “socially excluded underclass”. It is also presented as central to the tying of responsibilities to rights. Paid work represents that which you put into society in order to get that which you take out. It is the basis for a moral, social and economic integration as well as the basis for social rights such as pensions. At the same time New Labour, through various measures, has acknowledged some social injustices and has made some moves towards a more culturally, morally and sexually open and diverse society. In this way it overlaps with the legacy of the new social movements and welfare user-movements. This means that the new right politics of “consumer sovereignty”, “individual choice” and “diversity of needs” jostle with notions of “responsibilities with rights” from New Labour, and with notions of “user control”, “welfare citizenship” and “diversity of social rights” from the user-movements. However, common across the political spectrum is a new emphasis upon welfare citizens/consumers as, first, agents of their welfare destiny—whether through the market, moral obligations or through local, democratic forms—and second, as articulating their differential welfare needs. This emphasis is one which the new research framework developed in this book seeks to acknowledge and explore.

Changing Political Support for Welfare

Alongside the changing organization and delivery of welfare provision there have been profound shifts in the forms of political support for welfare. The Keynesian Welfare State sought to address the needs of an organized male working class, on whose solidarity it depended for its political support. Two processes have undermined this interdependence. The first is the development—or at least recognition—of a more complex relationship between social divisions and welfare. This is especially apparent in the growing realization of the gains achieved by the middle class in certain areas of universal provision-health and education in particular. It is also evident that state welfare has been limited in the extent to which it has met the specific needs of women and minority ethnic groups.

The second process undermining the interdependence between the Welfare State and the organized working class has been the break-up of older forms of work organizations and the power of class solidarity upon which the Welfare State depended. Alongside this, as noted above, there has been a rise of new forms of solidarity around gender, race, disability and sexuality. The growth of these diversely constituted solidarities has been accompanied by a reduction in opportunities for the formation of consensual politics, as well as by a weakening of the traditional organizations, such as the trade unions, representing such politics (Edgell et al. 1995). These changes point to the need for a more complex understanding of the subjective and objective elements of social position and the relationship between these and welfare needs. They also highlight changing social conditions and expectations, especially around the patterns of male and female employment and unemployment, changing household structures, and the changing arenas for the articulation of new welfare claims. All of this suggests an approach to welfare research which is much more sensitive to the complex and dynamic structuring of people’s health and welfare needs, their resources, their networks of support, their opportunities and their social relations.

The Changing Research/Policy Interface

The third crucial dimension of the changing context for welfare research is the relationship of the researcher to policy In the 1960s, the heyday of the old welfare regime in the UK, social policy research and analysis was dominated by Fabian and social democratic academics, whose relationship to the Labour governments had been close and influential. For example, Michael Young (late Director of the Institute for Community Studies in London) made a major contribution to the 1945 Labour manifesto, and David Donnison and Richard Titmuss at the LSE had leading roles in the Supplementary Benefits Commission in the 1960s and 70s. The marshalling of facts, the documenting of social conditions and the presentation of rational argument often led directly to policy changes (Peter Townsend’s The Last Refuge on old people in 1962; Brian Jackson and Dennis Marsden’s Education and the Working Class also in 1962 and John Greve’s Homeless in London in 1971 are examples of texts which influenced policy thinking). By the 1980s that relationship had become far more distant and less direct. With the New Labour administration which came into office in the UK in 1997, the relationship between researcher, civil servant and policy-maker is set to change again. To be influential, research findings have to negotiate the discursive balance of power held by different groups—politicians, the media (in particular), organizations representing business interests, professional groups, single-issue campaigns, social movements, international political organizations, and so on. The capacity to influence policy rests not so much on the incontrovertibility of one’s research findings as on the capacity to engage with, and control, the movement of the dominant welfare discourses (Bartley 1990; Bryant 1995).

The Changing Focus of Welfare Research

Finally, as the wider social and political context for welfare has changed, so too has the focus of welfare research itself. Up until the mid-1980s most British social policy research—both empirical and theoretical—contextualized itself within the state, and, in particular, the nation-state. This research traditionally tended to neglect the voices and lived experiences of the recipients of welfare, documenting these primarily through statistical proxies such as level of income and indicators of deprivation. A number of processes have changed this. Importantly, the development of a mixed economy of welfare provision, along with a greater recognition given to the informal provision of welfare, especially by unpaid women as carers in the home, has meant that the informal, voluntary and commercial sectors of welfare have acquired much greater significance within research during the 1980s (although they were on the agenda of welfare “pluralists” from the 1970s).

Additionally, for a number of reasons, the boundaries of welfare research have moved beyond the nation state. First, researchers have recognized that the international dimensions of economic recession and social changes were having variable and comparable effects upon welfare states in different industrialized countries. Second, the re-drawing of national and political boundaries between eastern and western Europe and the developments in the European Union provided new administrative and political contexts for the study of the development of social policies. Third, analyses of economic, social and cultural globalization pointed to an increasingly interconnected international social order. Fourth, in a different direction, moves towards devolution may redraw again the administrative bound-aries of policy formation and implementation. Where once the British Welfare State had represented a contrast to the US system, comparisons are being drawn, first between Thatcher and Reagan and most recently between Blair and Clinton, especially in the approach to the so-called “underclass”.

Together these processes pushed mainstream welfare research in the UK and Europe in the direction of a rapid development of concepts, theory and method based upon comparative social policy. At the same time, however, though much less visible, there was a growing body of complex, finely-textured research attempting to untangle the dynamics of social relations involved in, for example, the provision of care—such as relationships between young mothers and health visitors. Work began to focus on the experiences and identities of welfare subjects and the psychological and sociological dynamics of processes of care and dependency (see Finch 1989; Graham 1983; Ungerson 1987), and provided an opportunity to unravel issues of agency and subjectivity.¹ This also resonated strongly with the larger American literature on coping, stress and social support which began to be seen by many to provide a source for the new paradigm for welfare research. However, as the chapters in this book show, this body of work on care and dependency is importantly different in its reliance on qualitative methods and the exploration of subjective meanings. Comparative work has, with exceptions (Duncan & Edwards 1997), remained relatively marginal to large-scale welfare research projects. The theoretical core of welfare disciplines in Europe took off to more expansive international contexts, but in ways that still privileged the social relations of class and the relationship between the state and the market over and above issues of gender, race, the family and the informal sector, and still neglected the voices of welfare recipients themselves.

By the 1990s, a conceptual gap had emerged in European welfare research between the largely production-centred analysis of welfare regimes (Esping-Andersen 1990) or of post-Fordist welfare states (see the essays in Burrows & Loader 1994), and the small-scale studies on kinship, care and communities, although the recent development of a feminist comparative social policy has begun to challenge some of these analyses (Lewis 1992; Sainsbury 1994; Williams 1995). The creative, reflexive, welfare subject thus found herself in something of a conceptual vacuum. The problem has therefore become, not only how to explore the nature of subjectivity and agency, and the complexity of social divisions, but also how to find the middle-range concepts which can tie these concerns to the structural contexts of widespread poverty, inequality, globalization and the international restructuring of welfare.

The Management of Personal Welfare: A New Paradigm Emerges

The ESRC/Rowntree Foundation Welfare Research Programme: 1991–1995

The changing context for welfare research in the UK and elsewhere was, predictably, to have an influence on the policy of research funding bodies. This influence is clearly apparent in the history of the Management of Personal Welfare Research Initiative, funded jointly by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Rowntree Foundation, a charitable funding body. This programme of research ran for four years from 1991 to 1995 and had a budget of around £450,000. The ESRC is the main UK agency (in addition to the core funding for universities, which also includes an element for research infrastructure) allocating public funds for research in the social and economic fields. Welfare research, largely but not exclusively the domain of social policy, is therefore within the Council’s remit, and in the mid-1980s the Council’s Social Affairs Committee held this brief.

In 1985, a sub-committee of the ESRC’s Social Affairs Committee, chaired by Nicholas Deakin, advertised for an academic consultant to produce a proposal for a new programme of research in the welfare field. Following a competitive process, Michael Hill, then a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bristol, was appointed to undertake this task. Over a period of 12 months, from around March 1985, he consulted widely with the social policy/welfare research community in the UK, commissioned five detailed reviews of specific topics, organized three one-day seminars to debate these, and made a number of overseas visits. A final report was submitted to the sub-committee in june 1986. This was an attempt to set out a coherent yet pragmatic agenda for a new welfare research programme which addressed the themes that the research community had identified as being of central concern in the mid-1980s, without taking an identifiable political position. Six priority themes were identified in the report: the market for private care and regulation; voluntary organizations and informal care in the community; evaluation of social work; community resources and service delivery; social security and the labour market; and the private pension industry. There can be no questioning the continued relevance of these themes to debates about welfare policy and provision today. They also resonate well with the contours of the changing welfare research landscape described in the previous section, giving primacy to structural issues, but incorporating different sectors of the mixed economy of welfare and the notion of community resources for welfare (although they do not touch on more complex notions of social divisions and identities).

It is important to note that Hill’s report was prepared in the midst of the “Thatcher revolution” and welfare, in its many forms, was a politically highly sensitive issue—and remains so today. The academic community, like any other sector of society, can be expected to reflect the political divisions around welfare that are apparent within the wider society and, in this context, it is to be expected that the proposal would have had a stormy passage through the Council’s decision-making processes. It appears to have done so. It was agreed by the subcommittee, with whom Michael Hill had maintained close contact throughout the consultancy period, and then by the full Social Affairs Committee. However, even at this stage it appears to have hit opposition and it failed to be agreed by the Council—the final arbiter on funding for the ESRC’s programmes.

Some of the ideas put forward in Hill’s proposal have subsequently been ta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Part 1 The Context
• Part 2 Concepts
• Part 3 Methods
• Part 4 Social Relations of Welfare
• Part 5 The Future
• References
• Index