The Decent Society

Planning for Social Quality

Pamela Abbott, Claire Wallace, Roger Sapsford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138909335
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317438274
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The search for 'the Decent Society' – a fit place in which to live – has informed policy at both governmental and international level. This book analyses its nature and devises a consistent way of measuring the concept world-wide on the basis of a coherent theory of agency within social structure. Influenced by classical sociology and by the economist Amartya Sen, the book posits that societies need to create (a) economic security, (b) social cohesion, (c) social inclusion, and (d) the conditions for empowerment. The model is interactive and recursive; each component provides the requirements for each of the others.

This book outlines the sociopolitical framework underlying 'the Decent Society' and summarises a decade of research, some of which has had a formative impact on governments' policies. The first half contains studies of social quality based on surveys in the former Soviet Union and sub-Saharan Africa, while the second half describes the construction of a Decent Society Index for comparing very different countries across the world.

This book and the index it develops will be of interest both to academics and researchers in sociology, politics, economics, psychology, social policy and development studies and to policy-makers in government, local government and the NGOs.

1 The decent society

What we expect from government

A decent life is one where we can concentrate on what we do best and do not have to worry too much about bare survival. It is one where we get enough to eat, where there is shelter and clothing (and heating, in climates and at times where it is needed), where family and social life is possible, where there is decent work and where there is leisure for the ‘flow activities’ which make life more than just an unending and depressing stretch of hard labour. It allows us involvement with others but also some space to ‘be ourselves’; the balance between these two will vary from culture to culture, but both are understood in all cultures. We are protected from disasters and not least from the aggression of others, including unwarranted aggression from those who govern us. A decent life is satisfying and enjoyable, at least some of the time, and a decent society is one which provides these conditions for its inhabitants. Above all a decent society is a just society (Fraser 2009) – a society where there is parity of participation – of distribution, recognition and political representation. ‘Justice’, in the context of sorting out the competing interests and claims of the different groups in increasingly complex modern societies, is at least partly synonymous with the concept of ‘fairness’ promulgated by the American political philosopher John Rawls (e.g. 1971, 2001): that the decent life is a game whose rules need to be set in such a way that everyone benefits equally. Anything else – and most societies have advantaged and disadvantaged groups, at least in terms of affluence and often by gender, marital status, handicap, geographical location and even ethnic or religious affiliation – weakens the society’s cohesion and leads to a decent life for some but at the cost of a less than decent life for others. Fraser goes beyond Rawls in making affluence an issue – that fairness in the distribution of resources is at least as important as fair treatment under the law or political representation.

This book is about the foundations of a decent society – what conditions need to be in place for society to offer a decent life to its members. There are many notions of what a decent or good society is or might be and indeed many different understandings of what we mean by ‘society’. In this book we are generally talking about societies as coterminous with nation states and regarding wellbeing as the outcome of the totality of political, economic, cultural and social relationships; a decent society is one which provides the conditions for a good life, where individuals experience wellbeing and in which all can flourish. A decent society is one that is committed to social justice; it ensures that all of its people and communities are able to exercise their human (social, economic and political) rights and take advantage of economic and other opportunities. This cannot be managed at the level of individuals; it requires collective agreement and collective action, mobilised and directed by governments, if only to protect the weak against the strong and regulate competition. A decent society has in place the distributional and institutional structures to ensure social justice for all.

Where we use the word ‘citizen’ to denote a full member of a nation state, this is not usually in its legal sense but more inclusively to denote everyone within the borders or at least those who have been there long enough to regard themselves as potentially full members (or have the intention to stay that long). We tend to use ‘citizen’, resident’, ‘inhabitant’ and ‘member’ interchangeably. Where we are referring to citizenship as a legal category – being entitled to a vote, a passport and the protection of a country’s embassies/consulates – we will say so. Some countries of the Middle East, for example, have generously redistributive welfare regimes for their citizens but do not extend these to the expatriates working in the country (who may form a majority of the inhabitants at any one time). We would regard such countries as being pretty decent to their citizens, but we should look sceptically at any claims to be decent countries overall in terms of the country’s residents as a whole. This holds particularly true for any country where a fraction of the population count explicitly or even implicitly as second-class citizens – ethnic groups, for example, or women or older people.

The art and purpose of government is to provide the conditions under which a decent life is possible, and the basis for such a society is social justice. A decent society is an inclusive society – one where there is a political commitment generated by common action and working together for common purpose and where there is agreement about collective rights and obligations. There is mutual recognition of difference and diversity, with everyone’s contribution being valued – equal citizenship and a right to diverse identities (Fraser 2009, Lister 2000). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948 specifies that all individuals and groups shall have a range of rights which we might summarise as:

• the right to life and security from harm (including the right to healthcare, affordable housing and enough money to feed the family across the life course);
• the right to be free and equal – equality before the law, fair treatment and the right not to be subordinated or discriminated against;
• the right to identity – nationality, citizenship;
• the right to work, to earn a fair wage and to be a member of a trade union; and
• the right to education.

Full membership of society – citizenship – requires people having social, economic, cultural and political rights and being able to exercise them. It requires legal freedoms and freedom from harassment, violence and discrimination, but it also requires access to the society’s resources. This means access to work or the equivalent, to education and to health services, but even more, as Peter Townsend (1979) so powerfully argued, it requires sufficient resources that everyone can take part in the normally accepted activities of their society. In a ‘human rights’ approach to governance, governments are duty bearers and citizens are rights holders; in other words, governments have a responsibility to promote human rights and ensure that their citizens are able to exercise them. Governments that are not responsive to the needs of their people and empower them do eventually fail (Acemoglu and Robinson 2013).

Rights entail obligations, of course – duties to the community and acceptance of limitations determined by law for the purpose of securing the rights and freedoms of others. The essence of the rights approach is that the rights are shared equally by everyone, they are collective as well as individual, and rights entail duties accepted by others. Rights are always exercised in a social context and in interaction with others. Equality and the universality of human rights is a logical necessity: if anyone is not included in the full protection of rights, then potentially anyone can be excluded from them, depending on the whim of whoever has power. (However, there remains a tension between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.)

The original list of rights agreed by the United Nations is detailed and sometimes involves cultural concepts natural and specific to Western and industrialised societies. One can imagine a society whose relations to the means of production did not involve the notion of paid work, for example, but which still protected and promulgated the rights of its individual members. There is no necessity for ‘work’ or ‘employment’ to be something salaried or waged; this is not the norm everywhere and for every kind of productive employment. The Declaration also assumes rights to private individual property which might not be recognised everywhere. Some concepts, indeed, might be thought of as applying more to some fractions of the population than others. One of the rights, for example, is ‘leisure’, which is something that tends to be lacking for married women in their childcare years, even in the West and North; leisure is a male experience in many societies and a concept that does not make much sense at all in some. We should also note that there is no society where every resident is counted as a full member with unlimited universal rights; even the Declaration qualifies the right to get married by age, and no society in the world recognises infants as full and competent citizens. However, the general picture is not purely a product of one culture; it stands as a portrayal of ‘the decent society’ for people beyond the boundaries of the cultural nexus that gave birth to it. Our experience of teaching, managing and researching in Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet Union is that these are the values that people of quite disparate historical, cultural and political backgrounds do in fact espouse, once economic need has been overcome, and that they want them if they can get them. We therefore put them forward in this book without hesitation as the values of the decent society.

Three qualifications to this picture need to be considered:

• The Universal Declaration also tends to assume an evolved Western form of government, with some form of representation in the selection of legislators and administrators and with courts and laws which are independent of the administration. In principle the decent society is not necessarily one which elects its governments nor one where the judiciary are independent of the administration; benevolent dictatorial arrangements could achieve the same effect. However, in practice benevolent dictators cannot be constrained to stay benevolent, nor can the benevolence of their successors be guaranteed, and history suggests that benevolence at the top has often acted as a cloak for bureaucracy, self-seeking and outright malevolence in the lower tiers of government. There is much to be said for the freedom to monitor and report on officials without fear of reprisal and for being able to replace one’s government without recourse to arms.
• In particular, the decent society must be able to encourage citizens to be critical of government and challenge the government’s position, both individually and by organizing into groups to put forward points of view. If it cannot encourage this then it must at least tolerate it and give some space for dissident voices to be heard. In other words, a fair measure of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly is a prerequisite; the decent society is one where there is the possibility of (peaceful) conflict over ideas, not just a state ideological monopoly. This is currently seen as something of a Western liberal ideal, but it is necessary for all because the society which suppresses dissent cannot remain decent for long.
• Our account, and the whole human rights approach, is predicated on the assumption that governments have as their goal the improvement of their citizens’ lives. If they have some other goal – an economic or theological one, for example, or the righting of historic wrongs as an aim in itself or the personal enrichment of those who govern – then the values we are taking for granted here will not hold. We cannot say absolutely that such societies are invalid or ‘wrong’, though they are not to our taste. We can, however, say that they are not aiming to be ‘decent’ in the sense in which the word is used in this book, though they might achieve this state accidentally while following some other goal.

It is worth stating at this point that no current society can be held up as ‘the decent one’ – as having entirely achieved the goal – and that we do not believe any society will ever reach the stage where no more criticism and improvement are possible. The decent society is never completed but always in the making; it is what might be, the kind of society we would like to build and in which we would like to live. Every society – even those held up in this book as good examples – can do better by its citizens than its current achievements would suggest. To take an example, the 2014 Gallup/Healthways Wellbeing Index, a subjective evaluation of quality of life, found that globally only 17 per cent of the population think they are thriving on three or more of the five elements that make up their scale. This varies from 33 per cent in the Americas to 9 per cent in Sub-Saharan Africa (Gallup/Healthways 2014). The UNDP 2014 Human Development Index (UNDP 2015) has an average score of 0.702, ranging from a high of 0.944 for Norway to a low of 0.337 for Niger, suggesting that even the most developed societies still have some room for improvement.

The Decent Society is located, ideally, within a Decent World. Economic security for all and respect for human rights assume that nation states, like citizens and groups within nation states, will share a vision of how to live together peaceably, how to coexist without damaging or threatening each other’s interests or those of each other’s citizens and how to resolve disputes without recourse to armed conflict. In the Decent World, resources which are needed by all would be conserved for all and not appropriated and squandered by those who currently have the economic or political advantage. In the Decent World there would be both equity and a just measure of equality; all would have access to sufficient food, clothing, shelter, decent work, healthcare and the opportunity to develop and exercise capabilities. This is one of the purposes of the United Nations, expressed for example in the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals which have replaced them; these are the world’s commitment that no one shall starve or lack the basic resources for health and education. These efforts made at the level of governments and international agreements do not penetrate very deeply into our everyday consciousness and discourse, but in the Decent World the plight of the disadvantaged would be everyone’s responsibility, irrespective of where they are to be found. We do not live in such a world – which is, perhaps, a topic for another book. We shall not attempt to deal with it in this one.

Understanding decent lives

‘Quality of life’ and ‘wellbeing’ are often used in ways that overlap and in different ways in different disciplines; ‘wellbeing’ is more generally used in medicine and psychology and ‘quality of life’ in sociology and social policy. We generally use ‘quality of life’ as an evaluation of major aspects of a total society, the context in which people live, and wellbeing to refer to the actual experience of individuals. Ultimately, however, ‘quality of life’ is something that individuals have, and indicators are often validated by the extent to which they correlate with subjective satisfaction. Our approach builds on and is complementary to the Quality of Life approach. This has provided an understanding of the things that make life good for people, in terms of the conditions under which they live. In this book we try to specify the preconditions for a society to deliver a good life for all its citizens. It is beyond its scope to review all the existing approaches (for reviews see, for example, Berger-Schmitt and Noll 2000, Hagerty et al. 2001, Phillips 2006, Stiglitz et al. 2010). Rather, we consider what we can learn from them that enables us to understand what a decent society must deliver.

There are essentially two main approaches to measuring the quality of life: objective measures and subjective or evaluative ones. The judgement can be made by individuals themselves or by others. Those who stress the importance of subjective feelings of wellbeing, happiness and satisfaction take a purely utilitarian, hedonic approach; wellbeing is measured by the individual emotional experience of life at the time when the measurement is made. Those that argue for more objective measures of the quality of life that people are living in a society are more concerned with people’s way of life and whether they are able to lead a good life which enables them to be happy – a eudemonic measure “which focuses on meaning and self-realisation and defines well-being in terms of the degree to which a person is fully functioning” (Ryan and Deci 2001: 141) of which, in principle, the people involved might not be fully conscious.

There has been a move away from using objective economic standing (generally GDP) as the sole or main measure of social progress to using a range of objective metrics that measure quality of life and from that to using subjective measures – asking people how they see their life and using the answers either on their own or in combination with objective indicators. For example, the Human Development Index and the MDGs use only objective metrics, while the Happy Planet Index, the OECD’s ‘How’s Life’ Dashboard and the Social Progress Index (Porter et al. 2015) use both objective and subjective indicators, and the same is true of the Good Society Index (Anderson 2012). The univariate happiness/satisfaction scales and the Gallup/Healthways Wellbeing Index use only subjective metrics.

There has been a groundswell of support from politicians for adding subjective measures of satisfaction and other objective indicators to GDP as a measure of how well people are doing. Academics have been arguing for this for much longer, especially sociologists and others involved in social indicators research (Maggino and Ruviglioni 2011, Michalos 2011, Noll 2011). There remains a debate about the relative weight that should be placed on subjective measures (taking people as the final judges of the quality of their lives) versus measures of the objective conditions (opportunity structures) in which they live. However, there is a large body of research which shows that the objective metrics that are generally taken as important for people’s quality of life – including economic circumstances, health, education, having people to rely on in times of need, being integrated in civil society, trusting other people and having confidence in government and other organisations – do make independent contributions to explaining the variance in subjective satisfaction across the globe. We discuss this question further in Chapter 6.

The aim is to meet the general concern about the extent to which things are getting better, to measure progress and also to inform policy. Governments and international organisations are keen to compare countries and measure progress, and there has been considerable debate about how to do this. Four common ways have been put forward and are in use for comparing countries and/or looking for changes over time:

• GDP (the gross domestic product, an economic measure);
• univariate measurement of ‘happiness’ or ‘satisfaction with life’ (subjective measures);
• indexes which combine a number of objective and/or subjective indicators of quality of life/wellbeing to assess underlying ‘wellbeing’ or some similar concept – for example the UNDP Human Development Index (which goes beyond economics into areas which we might call ‘human empowerment’) or the Gallup/Healthways Wellbeing Index, which combines subjective measures of how people evaluate their lives; and
• ‘dashboards’ such as the Millennium or Sustainable Development Goals and the OECD’s ‘How’s Life?’ instruments, which measure progress across different domains and do not combine them into a single index.

We need to keep in mind, however, that the indicators of progress are not neutral; they are collected and used for a purpose and embody assumptions about what progress is. Using GDP, for example, entails the assumption that economic growth is a good and necessary thing, and using happiness assumes that being happy is our major goal in life. The Happy Planet Index developed by the New Economics Foundation includes measures of environmental sustainability, seeing these as just as important as other indicators. Gallup Polls and the Legatum Institute (which publishes the Legatum Poverty Index) are both formally nonaligned bodies but are committed to individual liberty, prosperity and entrepreneurship. The Legatum Institute’s commitment is explicitly to ‘prosperity through revitalising capitalism and democracy’.

One of our concerns about recent research is the way in which wellbeing has been demoted from a social responsibility to something that is the responsibility of individuals, downgrading the importance of social factors (Sointu 2005). Wellbeing has come to be seen as a normative obligation and the responsibility of individual agents. The problem can be summed up as ‘the privatisation of welfare’: individuals are seen as responsible for their own wellbeing rather than it being the state’s responsibility, and people’s happiness and satisfaction are seen as the responsibility of the individuals themselves. If people’s lives are miserable, this is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• 1 The decent society
• 2 Economic security
• 3 Social cohesion
• 4 Social inclusion
• 5 Social empowerment
• 6 Social quality in transitional societies: A summary of research
• 7 Constructing a Decent Society Index
• 8 Using the Decent Society Index
• 9 Conclusions and future directions
• References
• Appendix
• Index