Ideal Types in Comparative Social Policy

Christian Aspalter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367279769
• eBook ISBN: 9781000294231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book introduces readers to the world of ideal types within the readings of Max Weber by giving a theoretical understanding of ideal types, as well as applying the development of ideal types to an array of social policy arenas.

The 21st century has seen the development of welfare regime analysis marked by two differing strands: real-typical welfare regime analyses and ideal-typical welfare regime analysis; the latter focusing on the formation, development, and application of ideal types in general comparative social policy. Designed to provide new theoretical and practical frameworks, as well as updated in-depth developments of ideal-typical welfare regime theory, this book shows how Weber's method of setting up and checking against 'ideal types' can be used in a wide variety of policy areas, such as welfare state system comparison, comparative social and economic development, health policy, mental health policy, health care system analysis, gender policy, employment policy, education policy, and so forth.

The book will be of interest to all scholars and students working in the fields of social policy, including health policy, public policy, political economy, sociology, social work, gender studies, social anthropology, and many more.

Part I

Introduction

1 Introduction

Ideal types and the law of social and cultural entropy

Christian Aspalter

Science is about moving forward, outward into new spaces of knowledge, toward a better understanding of the empirical world, taking away, bit by bit, the mystery that casts a dark shadow over the unknown and the things we claim or think we know (i.e., to understand fully and truly). Early seafarers invented new boats, new sails, new nautical tools to venture out to find new lands across or behind yet unknown oceans, and a myriad of developments took off and changed the course of world history, and humanity, as well as the earth itself.

This physical expansion of the real world, and the expansion of travel, trade, and human interaction of all sorts between old and new-found worlds, brought with it a continuous, and far from linear, increase in world complexity (in the Luhmannian sense, see Luhmann, 1998, 1984), and a brought with it new economic, social, political, cultural, and medical treasures, as well as new risks, and devastating consequences and disasters. As a result, to understand it all, to steer safely upon and get to know the vast oceans of empirical evidence (cf., Max Weber, cited in Ferragina and Seeleib-Kaiser, 2011: 3), gets more important and more difficult with every passing year.

This is the effect of the Law of Social and Cultural Entropy, or, in other words, the Law of Societal Entropy, where ‘entropy’ refers to the degree of disorder or uncertainty within a social system (here, any society, or parts thereof).

This becomes clear when we follow Luhmann’s logic in his very own system theory, where when the number of people increases, or the incidence and number of communications, and worldwide interactions thereof, and/or the technology enables and pushes vast expansions thereof, overall social system complexity increases as well, and in general progressively over time; with an additional tendency of spreading out in space as well (cf., the general social system theory of Luhmann, 1998, 1984).

To note, in the world of Luhmann, words (the smallest parts of communication) are the atoms of society and sentences are the smallest form of social systems, and thus his social system theory has nothing in common with other common types of social system theory and their representatives. Today there are different types and variations of theories of sociological, social, and societal entropy out there (cf., e.g., Bailey, 1990, Mavrofidis et al., 2011). But Lumann’s social system theory is unique; it is a theory of social communication. In view of this, the world system is nothing more or nothing less than the system of world communication, including every private or not so private (or seemingly private) communication, as well as nonverbal and contextual forms of communication, and—which the author adds—intrapersonal communication: feelings, dreams, notions, stereotypes, cultural and personal interpretations, memories, fears, anxieties, preferences, hopes, and wishes.

There is one vital difference between societal entropy and the kind of entropy physics talks about. This is that with society we can turn back time, and hence reverse the process of societal entropy, or freeze the very same. When we go back to the old ways of living—e.g., the Amish in the United States—we see that this is very much possible, and importantly also empirically visible and hence provable.

Increased societal complexity, if not met timely with fully appropriate counter measures (appropriate societal and social policies, etc.), leads to, in total, increased levels of all kinds of ‘disorder,’ social problems, economic problems, and cultural problems of all sorts. Hence, with the coming of one or another crisis, we are talking about a ‘new normal’ not a ‘new normal’—when we refer to the period that follows thereafter. The current case of the COVID 19 pandemic is not an exception to this law. Some societal changes that come with increased complexity (new risks, new dangers, new problems, new uncertainties, etc.) are gradual (or chronic, in a societal sense), others are rampant, some are latent, others are completely visible.

Thus, on the journey forward in time, and through space in times of heightened, from a historical perspective, societal, economic, and cultural globalization, and with it into greater societally and technologically caused increasing levels of (communication and hence) complexity, it is ever more crucial to find ways—or, as here, to rediscover neglected old ways—to manage, cope, or catch up with it all: the method of setting up and using ideal types in comparative social science, and comparative social policy in particular.

And, as it is with targeting a drug against a bacterium or certain type of bacteria, it used to (until now) take a couple of years to develop a new drug—a new technique, a new solution—and mass produce and distribute the very same. With viruses, in general, it used to take on average at least ten years to create a vaccine, i.e., a solution to the problem at hand.

So, in truth, we are always, in medical science, as in social science, running late, running behind developments, desperately trying to catch up, while the culprits that we are chasing, the social and societal problems that we are trying to get a grip on, are always moving on ahead of us. Hence, we are always obsolete in the present—and science, with it, is a thing in the past (not of the past). In other words, science is, in part, only as good as the time that has passed and the corresponding progress that has been made. As we cannot travel to the future (not in a practical and realistic manner), we need to work on the second variable, the progress of science, i.e., the relative progress of knowledge compared to the possible progress. We also need to focus on the skills to process and apply the very same knowledge and our understanding of the culprits that we are (and/or should be, or a great deal more at least) chasing.

This book is, in the tradition of Max Weber (cf., Radkau, 2009), a group effort to push forward the frontiers of science, and here, in particular, methodology, the often neglected or even forgotten (and/or taken for granted) child of science.

In this way, for all readers (in a perfect world), there will be a new tool or improved tool, or an old tool put to new use; the way one wants to look at it (i.e., it is not new, but new for most social scientists). With the tool of setting up and checking against ideal types, and/or using ideal types as an instrument for measurement and comparison, the ever more fast-changing empirical world and its more and more unfortunate (more than fortunate) events, circumstances, and problem constellations, its unfortunate and suboptimal outcomes—or, in other words, the problems that need to be coped with, or found a cure or vaccine for—are now to a greater extent accessible and manageable.

But, this is only to be true, if this tool is used correctly, based on many empirical analyses and explorations, and in any appropriate manner (and the outcome, its fruitful application by the many, will tell, in time, if this is the case).

The structure of the book is straightforward, with an introductory and a concluding chapter at the front and the back, respectively, and the first main part revisits the past and current developments in comparative social policy, and welfare regime analysis, in particular, with the different uses of welfare regimes with the two worlds of ideal-typical welfare comparison and real-typical welfare regime comparison. In addition, there is a brief chapter on the root of ideal types, the rationale for their existence and application, in the world of Max Weber. After going back to the workshop of Max Weber, where he fabricated the tool of setting up and putting to use ideal types, in the second main part of the book the authors go on to apply ideal types in different areas, and with different levels of comparative analysis: first, in the light of welfare state system comparison, on a global scale, and then, with regard to special fields of social policy; that is, health care policy and long-term care policy in particular. Thereafter, we descend into the policy field, using ideal types to compare the different sub-fields of welfare benefits and services, and last but not least we turn to the topic of developing the methodology, yet again, a step further, by quantifying qualitative data, as this is an additional application of ideal types.

Chapter 2, by Varvara Lalioti, deals, on the one hand, with the definition, the boundaries and the significance of comparative social policy, as well as previous efforts by social policy scholars to summarize and classify comparative welfare theories. The classification into descriptive, explanatory, and normative theories stands out, in particular, as it serves the purpose of gaining clarity of the aim and functions of particular theories, as well as their strengths and weaknesses in fulfilling them. Descriptive and explanatory theories see things as they are. Normative theories, however, analyze the advantages and disadvantages of what is going on in the empirical world, and provide the way to bridge the gap to what the goals social policy and/or social development should achieve and aim for, by providing pragmatic, efficient, and effective policy solutions, system designs, and development paradigms (hence, in essence, applying a management perspective, but not for profit, not for generating merely economic growth, but for the purpose of enabling, boosting, and defending social development and societal well-being, as well as avoiding and eradicating social and societal problems, and that includes a number of key economic problems).

The main part of the chapter then also distinguishes between the first period of development of comparative social policy that extends up to the publication of Esping-Andersen’s Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism in 1990. This period of comparative social policy development has been marked by the concepts of the Keynesian and Fordist welfare states. Thereafter, in the post-1990 period, as per Varvara Lalioti, the Schumpeterian, and post-Fordist welfare state, and their associated paradigms, made inroads into mainstream social policy, as well as comparative social policy analysis. These two main phases of comparative social policy development have been examined and characterized in greater detail. While the former was marked by (1) a preponderance of descriptive social policy studies and, particularly early on, also (2) by studies supporting the functionalist welfare state theory, the latter gave rise to (1) an overwhelming dominance of conflict theories (as regards to explanatory theories), (2) the dominance of welfare state taxonomies (both real-typical and ideal-typical ones), and (3) the formation of fully-fledged normative theories, such as, e.g., the Developmental Social Policy Theory (cf., Aspalter and Teguh-Pribadi, 2017; Midgley, 2013, 2020).

The Developmental Social Policy approach opens up new roads in comparative normative social policy by, e.g., focusing on (a) behavioral social policy (developing new fields of social policy, e.g., communicational social policy, environmental social policy, and cultural social policy), (b) incentive-driven improvements in social security and social assistance provision, as well as (c) other true win–win solutions, such as, e.g., life-cycle approach in social policy (focusing on investment in citizens’ futures through healthy and active aging with a high quality of life).

In the following, Chapter 3 sets out to analyze the genesis of welfare regime theory. Martin Seeleib-Kaiser and Jakub Sowula go back to the beginnings of comparative welfare regime theory to the work of in particular Richard Titmuss who laid all of the foundations of the later success of the Esping-Andersen’s three-fold classification, which resembled almost entirely on a one-to-one basis the original classification of Richard Titmuss (in 1974) and his residual model, industrial achievement model and institutional model of social policy, all of which are an archetype of an ideal-typical classification. Thereafter Seeleib-Kaiser and Sowula carry the reader through the main themes and debates of the post-Esping-Andersen era in comparative social policy, especially the numerous efforts and advances in classifying welfare regimes and criticizing and/or supporting (substantiating) the very same. Issues and fields discussed here include the gender and care nexus in social policy analysis, health care policy, housing policy, corporatism, as well as educational poverty. In summarizing the major criticism of Esping-Andersen’s tripartite classifications, and the foundations it is built on, the authors refer in particular to the over-reliance on the average production worker and the lack of a strong social-service focus, and the inherent limits to explain particular social policy domains, coining them the blindspots of Esping-Andersen’s welfare regime theory. To answer questions regarding these blindspots, the authors highlight the importance of policy-specific approaches to bridging the gap, and serving this particular purpose of describing and/or explaining these left-out or left-behind policy domains or fields.

The authors maintain the position that empirical analyses focusing on societal outcomes have largely confirmed the three worlds of welfare regimes, as set up by Esping-Andersen, pertaining to the limits of the Western world (plus Japan). In providing a parsimonious theoretical understanding of welfare state differences in Western Europe and the Anglo-Saxon countries, the debate triggered by Esping-Andersen’s 1990 book has radically contributed to broadening and deepening the study of comparative social policy in the past three decades.

In Chapter 4, Christian Aspalter once more explains and elaborates on the difference of ideal type and real type classifications. As a number of key observers in the field of comparative social policy have noticed, a great confusion has been making the rounds and caused a poverty of (that is, delay in) the development...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Appendix
• List of contributors
• Preface
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Comparative theory and background
• PART III Applying ideal types in comparative theory and methodology
• PART IV Concluding Part
• Epilogue
• Index