Social Policy and Welfare Pluralism

Selected Writings of Robert Pinker

Offer, John, Pinker, Robert

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781447335351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Sozialpolitik

Robert Pinker has written extensively on social policy matters since the early 1960s. His distinct approach to understanding concepts such as welfare pluralism is of particular relevance today as welfare pluralism remains an essential component of the policy mix, giving people access to a greater range and diversity of statutory, voluntary, and private sector services than unitary models of welfare provide. Social Policy and Welfare Pluralism presents the first collection of Robert Pinker's essays in one edited volume. It includes essays on the ways in which welfare theories and ideologies and public expectations have influenced and shaped the political processes of policy making. Other essays focus on clarifying some of the key concepts that underpin the study of social policy. Pinker also reviews the extent to which the United Kingdom has succeeded in creating a 'policy mix' in which normative compromises are negotiated between the claims of market individualism and public sector collectivism. The concluding chapter by Robert Pinker reviews the prospects for social policy in the UK over the next five years.

INTRODUCTION TO PART ONE

On social policy studies

John Offer

Pinker’s best known book is Social Theory and Social Policy, published in 1971. Its primary task was to review the problematic assumptions and methods in the study of social policy which Pinker found in the new academic subject of what was then called ‘social administration’. Later, in 2000, Pinker gave a lecture offering a bird’s-eye view of some of the formative influences he experienced as a Research Officer and student from the mid-1950s at the London School of Economics, which gave him his abiding interest in the broad field of social policy studies.¹ The same lecture also introduced some of the chief research concerns which were to occupy him when he launched himself on his subsequent career in academic life. It does seem appropriate, therefore, that this lecture, ‘The ends and means of social policy: a personal and generational perspective’, should, in this selection of Pinker’s writings, substitute for the full elaboration of his ideas which Social Theory and Social Policy provides. So we have placed it first as Chapter One in this selection. It provides a basic context in which all the other material included in this volume can be located.

As far as the discussion in this first chapter is concerned, neither Pinker nor those whom he was criticising were particularly wedded to the expression ‘the Welfare State’ as an attempt to describe the nature of what they were studying. Both Pinker and Richard Titmuss considered that this expression was so lacking in clear meaning that it should be only introduced into analysis to be discarded as unfit for purpose (the origins of and difficulties with the expression ‘the welfare state’ are extensively discussed in Veit-Wilson, 2000 and Wincott, 2003, 2015). However, for Pinker, there was a particular difficulty about the meaning of the idea of ‘welfare’ itself, which he felt was being taken for granted and thus left unexamined in the academic subject’s own deliberations. In place of a focus on building up pictures of ‘need’ as theorised and met in everyday life, and how in interactions between people, the nature of what was to be accepted as ‘well-being’ was routinely negotiated and accomplished, the subject itself was in effect imposing on social reality an interpretation of what it believed ‘welfare’ and associated ideas ought to be taken to mean.

It might be imagined that Pinker’s line of criticism owed something to postmodernist ideas. However, this would be a false idea. Some of the important points against and for a postmodernist perspective were reprised in Peter Taylor-Gooby (1994), and also Sue Penna and Martin O’Brien (1996). A fairly typical claim on behalf of a postmodernist perspective on social policy is that it gives us the opportunity to interrogate the assumptions about the identity of situations or persons that come to be embedded deep down in the structure, architecture and applications of a policy. It does this ‘in a way that enables us to rethink and resist questionable distinctions that privilege some identities at the expense of others. A postmodern policy analysis would not take identity as pre-given’, but would see it as constructed in the narratives, texts and discourses associated with policy; it thus ‘holds out the prospect of highlighting how policy discourses and public policies themselves are implicated in the construction and maintenance of identities in ways which have profound implications for the allocation of scarce resources’ (Schram, 1993: 349).

However, Pinker’s criticisms were voiced significantly earlier in their date than these comments. He was without doubt calling into question beliefs which in some quarters were taken as being universally shared. But it seems to me that he was doing so in a manner that did not involve a loss of faith in ‘rationality’ and ‘science’ in general. Instead, he was pointing out that in specific cases where an ‘expertise’ in knowing about what it was that counted as ‘welfare’ was claimed, there had arisen a confusion between (contestable) judgements of value, or normativity, and what could be taken as description. Moreover, this was occurring in a context in which it was simply important that the two needed to be distinguished.

Another way of expressing this point is to say that, for Pinker, Titmuss was not, on reflection, focused on trying to describe as objectively as possible how ‘welfare’ and related ideas such as ‘need’ were used, and the conditions in which altruistic acts were regarded as called for. But this focus was, for Pinker, a legitimate and desirable focus, and would build up much-needed knowledge on to what he elsewhere referred to as the ‘sociology of morals’ (1974: 8–9). In contrast, Titmuss had, in effect, endeavoured to identify an underlying, more ‘real’ and perhaps more ‘objective’ and ‘universal’ meaning for ‘welfare’ and similar ideas. But, in fact, this attempt was doomed to fail. All it could yield was an additional normative claim about what ‘welfare’ ought to mean, and not an ‘objective’ claim reflecting the condition of the ‘sociology of morals’ in the UK or elsewhere. And this neglected point was the one that Pinker was emphasising.

Thus, Pinker was criticising simply this particular attempt to discount diversity and enthrone in its place (a dubious) ‘rationality’ and ‘universality’. As is probably already apparent, Pinker is in favour of welfare pluralism, not for any broader commitment to postmodernism, whether as a theory or an ideology, but for the reasons outlined above.

Like many others who were encountering sociology and social science generally for the first time in the late 1960s and the 1970s, Pinker’s reading of The Social Construction of Reality by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, originally published in 1966, was a significant influence on his thought. This book argued that the morals, values and beliefs shared among people in social life are products of everyday, common-sense knowledge. It is by the construction, and reconstruction, of inter-subjectively shared meanings that we achieve mutual understanding and by which concepts such as ‘welfare’ are given their meanings and their legitimacy. Through his familiarity with that book, Pinker could go on to apply insights relevant to understanding social policy from the phenomenology of Alfred Schütz (1972) and symbolic interactionism, as developed by George Herbert Mead (1967). When reflecting on the sociology of everyday life, Sarah Neal and Karim Murji recently wrote that:

in everyday life social relations, experiences and practices are always more than simply or straightforwardly mundane, ordinary and routine. Rather, everyday life is dynamic, surprising and even enchanting; characterized by ambivalences, perils, puzzles, contradictions, accommodations and transformative possibilities. Focusing on what the ordinary is involves an immersion in the seemingly unremarkable and routine relationships and interactions with others, things, contexts and environments. (2015: 811–12)

When compared with other writers on social policy matters at the time, a hallmark of Pinker’s thinking was that he too experienced everyday life as enchanting. It was his familiarity with perspectives on ‘the everyday’ derived from sociology which inspired much of his writing. This feature was then unusual, but it is one of the features which is a thread recurring in the chapters in this section, and his work as a whole.

This book should indeed provide abundant evidence that while Pinker readily acknowledged the significance of the work done on policy matters by such key figures as Titmuss and Peter Townsend, he was pioneering a broader, more pluralistic conception of what the field of social policy studies should embrace, including the differing points of view provided by some other social science disciplines. It should also show that Pinker was developing a research programme different to the ‘political economy’ approach that perhaps was epitomised in the late 1970s by Ian Gough’s The Political Economy of the Welfare State (1979) and Norman Ginsburg’s Class, Capital and Social Policy (1979). Within the frameworks of the sweeping structural narratives they adopted, everyday experiences received short shrift. In that regard, the approach was reductive. For Pinker, it was at fault in that it eclipsed from view the social significance of everyday life. For some time now, however, the time has been ripe for Pinker’s own voice on how the study of social policy should be advanced to be retrieved. As Pinker himself said, such a reductive approach shifted too far ‘the focus of the debate about social welfare from micro to macro issues’ (1983: 154).

It is fair to claim, then, that Pinker was an early and influential advocate of the view that invaluable knowledge was to be gained from ethnographical studies in the advancement of the understanding of social policy and ideas of welfare as features of social life. That Pinker may not himself have undertaken ethnographic fieldwork is a side issue. The fact of key significance is that he had been convinced that the approach adopted by ethnography was able to yield unique insights. These were capable of being set against less directly faithful accounts derived from other sources which were more concerned with theoretical and/or ideological beliefs, which might run the risk of giving a reinterpretation to the social reality in question, in the process losing sight of the meaning that it possessed at the outset.

In this regard it is interesting to note that as recently as 2014, in the neighbouring discipline of public administration, we can encounter an urgent plea from Rhodes that the insights available from ethnographic research are still not universally shared: ‘ethnographic fieldwork provides texture, depth and nuance, and lets interviewees explain the meaning of their actions. It is an indispensable tool and a graphic example of how to enrich public administration’ (2014: 317). So, Rhodes continues (2014: 321):

the task is to unpack the disparate and contingent beliefs and practices of individuals through which they construct their world; to identify the recurrent patterns of actions and related beliefs. The resulting narrative is not just a chronological story. Rather, narrative refers to the form of explanation that disentangles beliefs and actions to explain human life. Narratives are the form theories take in the human sciences, and they explain actions by reference to the beliefs and desires of actors. People act for reasons, conscious and unconscious (Bevir, 1999: chs 4 and 7).

‘Social theory and social policy: a challenging relationship’ forms Chapter Two. It is an essay especially written for the present book, although some parts were delivered at conferences and a section also originally appeared in 2011 in The Greek Review of Social Research. In this chapter, Pinker embarks on more thoroughgoing discussion of the role of and difficulties faced by social policy research in democratic societies. In the process, he discusses the work of the philosophers Karl Popper and Hilary Putnam. According to Pinker, theories are highly summarised versions of reality to begin with, and when they are shielded from full exposure to the evidence of the social world, they become ideologies. Therefore, our methods and conduct of enquiry must be based on accuracy of statement, objectivity of description and dispassionate weighing of evidence. Pinker takes issue with writers who insist that all knowledge is made relative by the normative contingencies of given times and places. With reference to Durkheim, Pinker goes on the make a key distinction between descriptive theory (concerned with what is) and normative theory (concerned with what ought to be). Pinker cautions us that:

Drawing distinctions between scientific theories, normative theories and ideologies is a difficult task because it involves matters of degree as well as of kind. The first distinction to be drawn is whether or not the theory is set out in a testable and falsifiable form. The second concerns the degree to which unprejudiced consideration is given to new evidence and possible alternative explanations. (Chapter Two, p 53)

For Pinker, the theoretically informed understanding that is required in particular, and as distinct from ideology, embraces the relationship between the elements of the ‘mixed economy of welfare’: private, statutory and voluntary sources of social service provision. Pinker also briefly indicates how imperatives of security and control coexist with those of freedom and risk, both within and beyond the sphere of welfare activities. However, the detailed nature regarding what Pinker has to say about these particular matters, and about the nature of felt obligation and familial altruism and how these informal welfare practices are strengthened, weakened or modified by formal social services, is of course to be unfolded in subsequent chapters.

Another key concern of ‘Social theory and social policy – a challenging relationship’ is to discuss afresh, as two ‘case study’ illustrations of the relationship, the ‘personal culpability’ thesis on the causation of poverty (based on ‘behavioural’ explanations which pinpoint the personal shortcomings of the poor themselves) and the contrasting ‘victim’ thesis (based on ‘structural’ explanations which focus on the disadvantages that the unequal distribution of wealth, income and life chances impose on the poorest members of unequal societies). In this connection, Pinker reviewed Peter Townsend’s work in Poverty in the United Kingdom (1979) and its use of the ‘victim approach’.

On the central topic of the causation of poverty, Pinker is not persuaded by the strongly ideological forms of either the individualistic ‘personal culpability’ thesis or structural ‘victim’ thesis. He aligns himself with what he understands T.H. Marshall’s position to be (Marshall, 1981: 119) in which collectivist social services contribute to the general enhancement of social welfare as long as their interventions do not subvert the system of competitive markets. Indeed, Pinker argues that Townsend’s action plan to try to combat inequality in the UK entailed ‘an awesome concentration of coercive powers in the institutions of central government’ (Chapter Two, p 56), and took no account of its likely and negative impact on wealth creation, without which there would be no resources available for distribution or redistribution.

Pinker also introduces a brief discussion of the work of Amartya Sen on the capability approach and its relevance to poverty analysis. Sen was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1998. Since this approach is attracting rapidly increasing interest, we should perhaps expand a little more on what Pinker has to say. The capability approach is primarily concerned with what people are able to do and become, in terms of their freedom to achieve well-being, not what resources they have, or how they feel. In analysing well-being, Sen believes we should shift our primary focus from income to the actual functionings that motivate people and the capabilities they substantively possess. Here, ‘functionings’ refer to the various things a person succeeds in doing, while ‘capabilities’ refer to a person’s real or substantive freedom to achieve such functionings (Sen, 1992, 1993, 1999; Nussbaum 2000; Clark, 2005).

Thus, according to Hick’s recent assessment:

The capability approach offers a framework for poverty analysis which prioritises capabilities (ends) over resources (means), adopts a multidimensional perspective and takes a broad focus on the constraints that may restrict human lives … [It] can provide additional coherence to the concept of deprivation, not because the concept of capabilities should replace that of deprivation but because the concept of deprivation should focus on people’s capabilities. (Hick, 2012: 301)

Although the question of how people have come to acquire the functionings and capabilities needs to be left open, the capabilities approach of Sen does allow us to distinguish between cases where we choose the outcome and cases where we have no opportunity to make a choice. Townsend’s work has attracted criticism for not having this featur...