Risk and Citizenship

Key Issues in Welfare

Rosalind Edwards, Judith Glover

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415241595
• eBook ISBN: 9781134548835
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medizin
• Subtopic: Gesundheitsversorgung

Contemporary welfare provision poses serious challenges for social policy. Large and rapid changes are said to be taking place in the way we live, work and relate to each other, characterised by anxiety and insecurity. Risk and Citizenship explores how new and diffrent forms of citizenship are evolving in the context of this 'risk society' and the implications for the development of social policy at both the macro and micro level.
This spirited and informed collection of papers by leading analysts addresses key questions related to welfare, citizenship and risk including: the nature of insecurity and social protection; the balance between inequality and egalitarianism; the relationship between governments and citizens; the parameters of citizenship; and the impact of risk assessment and risk management.
Risk and Citizenship offers a thought-provoking reading for student, practitioner or policy-maker. It provides:
* a review of current debates about risk, citizenship and welfare
* in-depth analysis of specific policy initiatives in social security and community care
* a new typology of welfare citizenship.

Chapter I

Risk, citizenship and welfare: introduction

Rosalind Edwards and Judith Glover¹

Introduction

Contemporary welfare provision poses serious challenges for social policy. Large and rapid changes are said to be taking place in the way we live, work and relate to each other. Long-term shifts in society have led to increasingly wider discussion of its character, with some social theorists characterizing it as ‘risk society’ (notably Beck 1992). Risk society is said to be marked by a pervasive and inescapable sense of concern about what is arising from past and current actions, and uncertainty about what will be encountered in the future. These shifts have resulted in debates about the nature of risk, whether and what kinds of social welfare policy interventions might reduce or modify the impact of risky events, insecurity and exclusion in such a society, and the implications for different forms of ‘welfare citizenship’.

There is an impetus and a need to take stock and appraise where we are at present, reviewing these shifts in society and the thrust and impact of the social welfare policies that attempt to deal with them. For example, in the face of rapid economic, political and cultural change, is a risk-pooling approach to welfare still possible or viable? Is cultural change leading to new sorts of risks and different forms of welfare citizenship? If welfare solutions are increasingly left up to the individual, where does this leave citizens who cannot or will not self-manage welfare risks?

Several commentators have called for, or see the politics of risk society as characterized by, an active citizenship participation in democratic dialogue, so that decisions affecting citizens’ welfare and the provisions made are taken in the context of informed debate (Beck 1996; Franklin 1998; Giddens 1994). This edited collection, based on papers given at the Social Policy Assocation's annual conference ‘Social Insecurity and Social Policy’, held at the University of Surrey Roehampton, UK, in 1999, aims to make a contribution to that informed debate. Theoretically and empirically, it addresses a range of social issues that express and reveal risk and have implications for welfare citizenship. In explicitly seeking to bring discussions of risk and citizenship together in this way, the collection throws new light on these issues and has a broader approach than texts and collections that focus on one or the other.²

In this introduction to the collection we aim to provide a brief review of the main features of contemporary discussions of risk and citizenship in relation to welfare, in order to provide a contextual backdrop to the more detailed discussions of particular topics presented by our contributing authors. It is not our intention to produce a comprehensive account of all the intricacies of debates, arguments and counter-arguments, concerning risk and citizenship as distinct topics (and allied concepts such as individualization and social exclusion). Rather, we are drawing attention to the contours of each of these issues as they interrelate with implications for welfare provision. This is one of the reasons why we use the (slightly contrived) term ‘welfare citizenship’. We are signalling our concern with the implications and impact of risk society for and on relations between individuals and the state, and between (individual and communal) citizens with respect to welfare provisions. Having said this however, we recognize that ‘welfare citizenship’ fundamentally expresses, intersects with and is encompassed within broader notions of civil, political and social citizenship, and which are subject to debate (see Lister 1997). Similarly, the issues raised by and for welfare in risk society symbolize and are inseparable from broader economic, political and cultural processes—as we discuss further below. Another reason for our use of ‘welfare citizenship’ is an attempt to reclaim the word ‘welfare’ from its increasingly narrow (Americanized) association with social security benefit systems and budgets alone, and restore its reference to a broad gamut of risks, resources and their social distribution.

We begin our discussion of the inter-relationship of risk, citizenship and welfare with a consideration of the basis of traditional solidaristic welfare states, based on systematic risk assessment and posing welfare citizens as citizen-recipients of a rational redistributive state. We then outline the major economic, political and cultural shifts involved in globalization that are argued to undermine and/or cancel the established systems of welfare states’ risk calculations and redistributions. Such shifts mean that collective provision has come to be seen as a risk to society itself, and that citizens are posed as citizen-consumers who are increasingly aware of risks, and who can and should take rational and responsible risks in welfare provision, in place of discredited state administrators. Accordingly, we review these arguments and challenges to them. This is followed by an overview of posited frameworks for the future of welfare policy and their implications for social exclusion, as these are informed by and cross-cut with notions of risk and citizenship, and in particular consider ideas of the welfare citizen-participant. At this point, we draw out a series of questions raised by our discussion of risk, citizenship and the issues for welfare, and review the ways in which the following chapters address these. Our discussion, as well as that of a number of contributions to this collection, identifies central issues for, and developments in, welfare in the British context. However, given the arguments about the global and personal nature of risk and the dilemmas for welfare citizenship and provision, the broad issues have a wider relevance, despite the varied political and discursive histories of different national contexts (see, for example, Bussemaker and Voet 1998; Chamberlayne and Rustin 1999).

‘Traditional’ welfare states: risk sharing and citizen-recipients

The traditional model for extensive or developed welfare states is an institutional nationstate response to coping with unforeseen but broadly predictable consequences, based on actuarial principles and collectively shared rights and responsibilities. It is founded on a solidaristic state-centred response to the meeting of risks encountered within a typical lifecourse on the basis of broad social obligation as part of citizenship, together with the creation of mutual security.

The post-war British welfare state developed in this way, to act to secure risk-free presents and futures through socially collective, state-centred insurance and provision. The welfare risks facing citizens were identified on their behalfs by administrators— Beveridge's five giants: Want, Squalor, Idleness, Ignorance and Disease—as were the steps to be taken to protect and secure welfare citizens on a universal basis from the uncertainties and insecurities inherent in the market. The nature of risk was not part of day-to-day thinking and public debate. Rather, the emphasis was on needs and safety net security. The state was the rational actor, pursuing full employment and calculating the redistribution of resources to promote solidarity between social classes, and to meet the systematic and predictable order of collectively insurable risks encountered by its citizens, whether attached to the labour market or outside. The latter were citizen-recipients, in the sense that welfare citizenship was implicitly based on deference to ‘top down’ definitions and prescriptions of ‘what is best’, referred to by John Clarke and Mary Langan as ‘attributed need’ (1998:265), and on passive acceptance of policymakers’ and professionals’ authority and accredited expertise.

Citizen-recipients had evidence of their welfare citizenship through the rights and responsibilities that accrued to them, and in turn welfare provisions and practices coded the principles and boundaries of citizenship. Indeed, the notion of citizenship, welfare or otherwise, operates simultaneously as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion (Lister 1997). As Fiona Williams (1989) has pointed out, Beveridge's five giants hid the giants of Sexism and Racism, as well as other forms of discrimination on the basis of age, disability, sexual orientation and so on. While women and Black people and members of other marginalized groups benefited from the general improvements of welfare reforms, at the same time they were excluded from full welfare citizenship covered by universal protection. Caring work was ‘domestified’, with much policy and provision based on the assumed predominance of the nuclear family form, treating women as dependents of their bread-winning, tenancy-holding husbands (appealing to and reinforcing particular ideas of what constitutes British family). Residency and eligibility qualifications could mean that Black people did not have access to some welfare provisions (embodying particular ideas of national unity). (See Hill Collins (2001) for some kindred discussion of the ways that ideas of family and nation have shaped US welfare citizenship.)

Whatever its strengths and shortcomings, there are arguments that the ‘universal’ citizenship model of social welfare provision is breaking down. The transition to an unpredictable risk society means that we do not know what the risks are, let alone how to calculate and respond to them, and there are concerns about how to finance these responses (Franklin 1998). Social theorists have posited that challenges to collective social provision through welfare states emanate from two main shifts: (a) a changing international economic, political and cultural context that limits national governments’ freedom to pursue independent policies, both economic and social, usually referred to as globalization; and (b) changes in perceptions and experiences of the nature of risk interlinked with a decline in citizens’ confidence in, and reliance on, those who administer and provide welfare services. Examples of relevant texts that have been particularly influential in the UK, including in relation to welfare policy developments, include Ulrich Beck (1992, 1999; Beck et al. 1994) and Anthony Giddens (1991, 1994, 1998). These shifts mean that governments can no longer easily pursue universalist state-centred economic or social welfare strategies. They also mean that citizens are increasingly aware of risks to their welfare but are sceptical of the abilities of policy-makers and professionals to deal with them, and so turn away from supporting collective state welfare provision to other, more individualized, sources. The nature of welfare citizenship has thus changed as well.

Shifts to economic, political and cultural globalization

Globalization refers to increasing and integrated social processes that are indifferent to national boundaries at economic, political and cultural levels (see authors cited above regarding discussion in this section). Economically, three main and interconnected processes have resulted in an expansion of international competition, and new and flexible labour markets. First, recently developing economies have emerged that can challenge and undercut more established developed economies. Second, international speculative capital has undergone massive growth to the extent that it can now destabilize national currencies and economic policies. Similarly and third, the spread both of multinational corporate companies and of trans-national organizations have also restricted governments’ abilities to manage the economy, and in turn influence the scope of welfare policy. Thus economic globalization means, for example, that levels of un-, under-or sub-employment are increasingly outside national governments’ control and they are limited in their ability to promote social equality (should they have this as an aim). Furthermore, economic developments towards global consumption can increase people's sense of themselves as consumers, including consumers of welfare—an issue we return to below.

Interconnected with economic shifts is globalization in formal political structures, whereby state sovereignty and centralized structures are weakened and shrinking. There is a transition from a nation-state to a cosmopolitan world order, and the concept of political community changes. Transnational political regimes have developed and the nation-state's control of the remit or content of national citizenship and state action can be shaped and overridden by international jurisdictions such as the International Court of Justice and the Human Rights Charter, and by supranational political bodies such as the expanding European Union. Political globalization creates the space for an institutionalized individualization of rights, including to welfare, independent of nationality—it bypasses nations and states to address individuals directly, raising the issue of multiple citizenship on several political levels and with the potential for envisaging a status of world or global citizenship.³

Culturally, globalization is furthered through instant communication and rapid developments in information technologies. While this aspect of globalization can, on the one hand, evidence a convergence in culture, lifestyle and values (for example, the ‘Coca Cola generation’), on the other hand, it can equally give people greater awareness, knowledge of and access to a diversity of lifestyles, and access to a variety of viewpoints and information (the ‘cosmopolitan gaze’ in Beck's (2000) terms). ‘Natural’ gendered divisions of labour and sexual orientation, and racialized hierarchies, for example, are open to question. This makes the claim to authoritative knowledge about ‘what is good for’ citizens and welfare users on the part of policymakers and practitioners that is implicit in traditional ‘top-down’ state welfare systems, subject to questioning and critical evaluation by those very welfare citizens. Expert knowledge becomes demystified. People are increasingly aware that opinions can be divided and contested amongst experts, and that there is a diversity of experts, so that they can no longer rely on a single authoritative guidance and action. ‘Givens’ are dissolved and transformed into choices amongst a number of courses, which entails making decisions. These decisions are presupposed by and subject to risk— uncertainty creates their being taken and there is uncertainty about their outcomes.

Questioning welfare provision: perceptions of risk and the rational citizen-consumer

The traditional remit of welfare states and the risks that they were developed to deal with were understood as the outcome of ‘natural’ forces, such as birth, sickness, old age and death, or as similarly ‘natural’ external human interventions, such as accidents and happenstance. However, social theorists of the ‘risk society’ argue that social and individual perceptions of uncertainty and insecurity in the ‘second age of modernity’ (Beck 1999, 2000) now encompass awareness that technological, economic or social interventions can generate unpredictable side effects or consequences. These then form new risks, both in the short and long terms. Risk is regarded as pervasive and central in late modernity, on both personal and global levels. The problems that welfare citizens face in their everyday lives are now seen as being influenced by global economic, technological and social forces that are both incalculable and beyond the control of governments, or at least within their control only in a limited sense. In itself this challenges the security of welfare citizenship. As described above, labour markets are at the mercy of extra-national developments and the decisions of multinational corporations, and the introduction of new technologies brings job insecurity for sections of the labour force.

The growths in life expectancy and in diversity of family forms (lone motherhood, cohabitation, step, non-heterosexual and so on) mean that treating these as collective risks has become too large an economic burden. Moreover, women's employment has increased over the last decades, further increasing the collective welfare burden. The traditional ‘invisible’ informal underpinnings of welfare state provision, whereby women, supported by a male breadwinner, cared for older and disabled people, and for their own children, in the domestic sphere, is no longer unquestioningly available. Such disruptions to traditional and predictable lifecourses mean that it has become more difficult and less feasible for welfare states to offer collective social protection against risks.

But it is not just that traditional state-centred methods of welfare provision may no longer be able to cope, it is said, but that citizens perceive the welfare risks to which they are potentially subject as more pressing and the future as more uncertain. The awareness and apprehension of risk and insecurity permeates society (although, as Peter Taylor-Gooby (2000a) has argued, for some social groups, such as the middle classes, this is to a much greater extent than the actual welfare risks they face themselves). Furthermore, as noted earlier, citizens have far less trust in received wisdoms and the state as a welfare provider that can deal in any adequate way with these current and future uncertainties. Citizens’ confidence in the power of authoritative administration to plan for and control economic and social life, and accredited professionals’ abilities to meet their individual needs, is undermined. Politicians and professionals are increasingly seen as having their own interests at heart (votes, power, budgets, etc.), rather than the welfare needs of citizens.

Citizens have thus become critical of the role of government in welfare provision, and there has been a growth in social and lifestyle pressure groups and self-help movements, forming new active welfare citizenship identities (Eyerman and Jamison 1991; Touraine 1981; Williams 1989, 1999). Groups constructed as outside of, or marginalized by, traditional notions of citizenship and its civil, political and social rights on the basis of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and disability, no longer accept this top-down imposition. They challenge not just access to citizenship but the basis of it, extending the very constitution of welfare citizenship. Such groups and movements have also been instrumental in highlighting new social risks, such as domestic violence and child abuse, homophobia, and racial violence and discrimination.

The traditional version of the welfare state is also under attack from both the New Right and Third Way political proponents, who argue that the state's proper role should now be the management of risk, rather than collective social provision, and that citizens are rational welfare-consumers.

The New Right perceives the welfare state, not as a source of protection from insecurity and uncertainty, but rather as a source of economic, moral and cultural risk generation in itself. It poses risks to entrepreneurship and initiative, and to work incentives and economic competitiveness, and concomitant risks of dependency and an underclass, and of inefficient and expensive public sector services (for example, Green 1998, 1999; and see discussion by Culpitt 1999). The institution introduced to mitigate risks to citizens’ welfare has generated the risk of social breakdown. Fundamentally, citizens are regarded as self-interested individuals who make rational choices after assessing their personal risks, weighing up the costs and benefits of courses of action available to them, and then pursuing the one that maximizes their personal benefit and limits the costs to them. Within this view of life, the logic of collective responsibility and provision is anti-rational, inappropriate and harmful. People will not contribute towards collective efforts to realize social profits if they can achieve such profits without participating. The provision of ‘generous’ welfare benefits and services has thus perversely altered the proper balance between citizenship rights and obligations (stressing the former over the latter), and affected the parameters for rational decision-making. It has enabled, for example, men to live without undertaking paid work, mothers to bring up children without fathers, and children to evade responsibility for their elderly parents. Welfare rights turned citizens into passive claimants with no obligations, and the resultant ‘welfare dependency’ has become a perverse form of social inclusion.

In addition, it is argued that because the welfare state has led to ‘scrounging’, ‘good’ citizens no longer identify with a wider common welfare ‘community’, and are less prepared to finance collective state-centred provision through taxes. The private sector, with its substantial resources and individualized customer ethos, is seen as more satisfactory in both providing choice and avoiding dependency culture. The charitable and voluntary sector will provide for those who are unable to purchase their own welfare provisions (Green 1993).

Risk theorists can also pose people as rational choice-makers, including in relation to welfare provision. (See Culpitt (1999) for a broader discussion of risk theorists in relation to social welfare policy.) Both Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, for example, argue that individualization is associated with risk society, whereby risk perception and protection is focused in and on the dimension of the individual rather than a given, communal collectivity and hierarchy. Both regard the individual in a risk society as a creative agent. However, Beck (1996, 2000) sees the individualization process as an automatic reflex-like epistemological paradigm shift beyond rational choice and towards indistinctness and ambivalence, not merely an increase in the significance of knowledge and reflection. In contrast, Giddens (1991, 1994, 1998) tends to focus on the latter.

Giddens stresses a more rational human agency within a deliberately formulated and pursued ‘Third Way’ ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• 1  Risk, citizenship and welfare: introduction
• 2  Social insecurity and social protection
• 3  Transparent and messy contracts—how do they serve social security?
• 4  Live and let love? Reflections on the unfinished sexual revolution of our times
• 5  Widening the scope of social policy: families, financial services and the impact of technology
• 6  Complex equalities—redistribution, class and gender
• 7  ‘Work for those who can, security for those who cannot’: a third way in social security reform or fractured social citizenship?
• 8  Managing the risk of unemployment: is welfare restructuring undermining support for social security?
• 9  Managing the body: competing approaches to risk assessment in community care
• 10  Social insecurity and the informal economy: survival strategies on a South London estate
• 11  Social capital and waves of innovation in the risk society
• Index