Social Policy

A Critical and Intersectional Analysis

Fiona Williams

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781509540402
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Welfare states face profound challenges. Widening economic and social inequalities have been intensified by austerity politics, sharpened by the rise in ethno-nationalism and exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, recent decades have seen a resurgence of social justice activism at both the local and the transnational level. Yet the transformative power of feminist, anti-racist and postcolonial/decolonial thinking has become relatively marginal to core social policy theory, while other critical approaches – around disability, sexuality, migration, age and the environment – have found recognition only selectively.

This book provides a much needed new analysis of this complex landscape, drawing together critical approaches in social policy with intersectionality and political economy. Fiona Williams contextualizes contemporary social policies not only in the global crisis of finance capitalism but also in the interconnected global crises of care, ecology and racialized borders. These shape and are shaped at national scale by the intersecting dynamics of family, nation, work and nature. Through critical assessment of these realities, the book probes the ethical, prefigurative and transformative possibilities for a future welfare commons.

This significant intervention will animate social policy thinking, teaching and research. It will be essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the complexities of social policy for the years ahead.

1
Introduction

Welfare states face profound challenges. Widening economic and social inequalities and insecurities have been intensified by the post-financial crisis austerity politics, sharpened by the rise in ethno-nationalism, and cruelly exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. At the same time, recent decades have seen a resurgence of social justice activism at the local and transnational levels. Major global movements such as Occupy, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and Global Women’s Strike have been as compelling in their necessity as in their massive mobilizations. Yet the transformative power of feminist, anti-racist and post-/decolonial, and ecological thinking is still relatively marginal to core social policy theory, while other critical approaches – around disability, sexuality, migration, childhood and old age – have found recognition only selectively.

This book offers an analysis that attempts to bring many of these issues together. Combining critical and intersectional approaches with ideas to have emerged out of contemporary struggles for social justice, it examines key issues and themes in social policy today. These range from questions of agency; the constitution of welfare subjects through austerity; the social, ethical and contested relations of welfare; global crises; and the transnational social and political economy of care. The approach informs and connects critical and intersectional analyses of multiple social inequalities and social justice with questions of political practice: not only how to ‘do’ social politics but also how our lives together might be better lived.

The analysis has three integral elements. First, I argue that we need to contextualize the development of neoliberal and austerity welfare not only in terms of the crisis of financialized capitalism but also in terms of the interconnected global crises of care and social reproduction, the environment and climate change, and the external and internal racializing of national borders. Together these threaten human and planetary sustainability while also generating multiple and intersecting inequalities. The second element translates this global context into national social policy through an analysis of the dynamics of intersecting social relations of power; these are articulated through the meanings, materialities and policies attached to family, nation, work and nature. Third, I explore how the contestations for social justice that these crises provoke provide new political ethics and prefigurative politics, especially in the understanding of new formations of interdependence, relationality and democracy, solidarity, and humanity. These provide a guide to consider the transformative possibilities for a future eco-welfare commons.

There is for me a sense of déjà vu about the marginality of radical and transformative thinking in mainstream social policy. In 1987 I published an article entitled ‘Racism and the discipline of social policy: a critique of welfare theory’ (Williams 1987). This outlined a new analysis of how imperialism, colonialism and nationhood had framed early social policy and the post-war welfare state; how this analysis should be informed by the struggles of racialized groups; and how these were intersected by class and gender relations. Social Policy: A Critical Introduction: Issues of ‘Race’, Gender and Class, followed, in which I argued that these three social relations needed to be interconnected and central to an analysis of social policy. I offered an analytical framework of family, nation and work through which these social relations were articulated (Williams 1989). I was one of many scholars in the UK at the time pursuing such analyses shaped, as we were, by the strength and limitations of Marxism reflected in the new social movements of the time, especially around feminism, black feminism, anti-racism, and gay and lesbian liberation (Weeks 1977; Wilson 1977; Hall et al. 1978; Lewis and Parmar 1983; Amos et al. 1984; Bhavnani and Coulson 1986; Phoenix 1987; Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992; Brah 1996).

Fast forward thirty years. In July 2019 the UK’s Social Policy Association published a commissioned report: The Missing Dimension: Where Is ‘Race’ in Social Policy Teaching and Learning? (Craig et al. 2019; see also Cole et al. 2020). The report examined curricula of social policy courses, journal and conference content over the previous five years, and BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) representation among students and staff. In terms of the curriculum and literature, the report found the lack of focus on race and racism to be ‘dismal’. In terms of staff and student representation, this was overwhelmingly white. BAME students did not find the curriculum relevant to their concerns. This repeated the point made earlier by Craig: ‘It is still not uncommon for mainstream social policy texts to treat debates on “race” and racism as marginal’ (Craig 2007: 610). This is in spite of the fact that, as I argue in this book, since that time policies around the racialization of national borders, bordering practices within the UK, and a ‘hostile environment’ have all had detrimental outcomes on the citizenship rights and social and economic inequalities of minority ethnic and migrant groups. These have had specific gendered effects but have also provided a policy template for the abjection of other welfare subjects (Tyler 2013; Mayblin et al. 2019; Humphris 2019). Alongside this, there has been a rise across many regions of nationalist, anti-immigration movements and parties in which welfare chauvinism – blaming immigration for declining social provision – has been a central theme. Social policy as a discipline is not alone in its neglect. A Royal Historical Society report (Atkinson et al. 2018) arrived at similar conclusions. British criminology has also been held to account (Phillips et al. 2020), as has sociology (Hesse 2014). It is in these contexts that academics and students in the social and political sciences and humanities have recently put forward demands to ‘Decolonise the Curriculum’ (Bhambra et al. 2018; Rhodes Must Fall 2018).

While this marginalization is specific to both race and racism, where it is most marked, there are corresponding trends with other critiques. Far-reaching as they were, the earlier feminist analyses lost their ‘bite’ in mainstream social policy over subsequent decades (Williams 2016). No surprise, then, that in a review of the discipline Ann Orloff comments that, while the debates between feminists and mainstream scholars in comparative social policy have been productive, ‘yet the mainstream still resists the deeper implications of feminist work, and has difficulties assimilating concepts of care, gendered power, dependency and interdependency’ (Orloff 2009: 317; emphasis added). More recently and more specifically, Mary Daly and Emanuele Ferragina (2018) note the lack of integration of comparative family policies research into comparative studies of the welfare state and of austerity. Without this, they argue, not only are particular struggles around equality lost from analysis, but so are the connections of the shifts in social and cultural values and the ways family policies reinforce measures such as targeting, fiscalization or workfare. Set this against a broader political context, in which the gender pay gap, gender violence, everyday sexism, reproductive justice, and (more recently) inadequate recognition of paid and unpaid care work are high on the agenda of feminist organizations such as the Fawcett Society, Southall Black Sisters and Sisters Uncut (and see Campbell 2013; Olufemi 2020).

Other new perspectives emerging from struggles and research around disability, sexuality, migration, childhood and age also find themselves in specialist silos, obscuring their radical implications for social policy. The issue of the environment and climate change has been pushing hard to get on to the social policy agenda over the past two decades (Fitzpatrick and Cahill 2002; Fitzpatrick 2011, 2014; Snell and Haq 2014; Gough 2017; O’Neill et al. 2018). It has recently been given momentum by the arguments of Fitzpatrick (2014) and Gough (2017): that there is interdependence between social policies to improve the social infrastructure and the need to achieve sustainability. Social policy solutions are needed to ensure just adaption and mitigation policies, and social policy provision has itself to be delivered in a sustainable manner.

Continuities and changes

This complexity of continuity and change is reflected in the world outside of academic social policy. The context of neoliberalism and austerity politics, racialization and dehumanization of border practices, care crises and ecological disasters – including the 2020 pandemic – feels overwhelming. Yet recent decades have seen not only the impact of global social movements that I mentioned earlier but also a resurgence of local feminist and anti-racist activism, eco-activism and anti-austerity campaigns – the last often spearheaded by disability organizations. Alongside these, innovative democratically run decentralized initiatives have been established in communities ‘discarded by the market and disregarded by the state’, where people ‘are already doing economics differently’ (Chakrabortty 2018). These include new cooperative schemes, new unions, new forms of municipalism and community development, healthy cities, social enterprises, new models of co-production and service delivery, and new democratic modes such as citizens’ assemblies (Featherstone et al. 2020; Miller 2020). New global networks of ‘Fearless Cities’ are transforming cities through street-level democracy and feminist and anti-racist, pro-migrant solidarities (Barcelona en comú et al. 2019). Many experiments exist in generating zero growth and ecologically sustainable local economies in transition towns (Red Pepper 2020). Transnational movements have developed for indigenous peoples’ and migrants’ rights, against militarism, and for territorial justice, along with the remarkable international mobilization of school students’ strikes against climate change started in 2018. International campaigns for LGBTQI+ rights have achieved significant cultural recognition, albeit uneven and contested, that would not have seemed possible at the turn of the century (Weeks 2007; Abrahams 2019). In addition, in many areas, the Covid-19 pandemic revealed street-level actions of generosity, kindness, mutual aid and care (Solnit 2020).

While this resurgence signifies challenge and change, there is also a sense of intensified continuities – the ‘unfinished business’ of everyday and institutional racism, sexism, ableism and ageism finding consequential logics in different forms of inequalities, insecurities and child poverty, all of which were magnified by the pandemic crisis. The increased precarity of working conditions, combined with austerity cutbacks in services and benefits, disproportionately affects the wellbeing of black and minority ethnic women (WBG and Runnymede Trust 2017). A systematic account of ethnicity, race, discrimination and racism published in 2020 found that these were entrenched for all minority groups in all areas of society – education, employment, housing, health, criminal justice and policing, as well as politics, the arts, media and sport (Byrne et al. 2020). Even the Conservative government’s Racial Disparity Unit worried in 2018 that ‘there is still a way to go before we have a country that works for everyone regardless of their ethnicity’ (Cabinet Office 2018: 1).

These forms of inequality were reproduced in the disproportionate effects of the Covid-19 pandemic: in the UK, BAME men and women were over four times more likely to die than their white counterparts (ONS 2020a). The high numbers of deaths of care-home residents (ONS 2020b) underlined the low value given to both residents and workers in care homes and the creaking health and social care infrastructure. Disability organizations have been at the forefront of campaigns around welfare benefit cuts; at the same time they have also been the target of a big increase in hate crimes (Burch 2018). Transgender activists have made headway in challenging transphobia, yet trans and gender-diverse as well as LGBTQ people face significantly greater risk of unemployment, hate crime and homelessness, risks which are heightened for BAME trans groups (Bachmann and Gooch 2017; Hines 2013; Abrahams 2019).

New critical thinking that has been inspired by and inspires such activism also involves a double movement of continuity and change: introducing new ideas as well as interrogating and resituating ‘old’ concepts. In addressing the continuing forms of marginalization both on the ground and in social policy’s mainstream, I develop an analysis that is informed by contemporary thinking and activisms within and outside social policy and also connects to critical thinking in social policy that came out of social movements from the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, intersectionality emerged in the 1970s to make visible the struggles of women of colour whose experiences were reconstituted through the intersections race, gender, and class relations of power (Combahee River Collective [1977] 1995; Hull et al. 1982; Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983; Lewis and Parmar 1983; Crenshaw 1989). This re-emerged in the twenty-first century both as a reassertion and a reflection of the power of black feminist thinking and as ‘the most important theoretical contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction with related fields, has made so far’ (McCall 2005: 1771). It serves as a methodological and political concept to reflect the multiplicity of identities and forms of domination and subordination as well as the need to recognize the connections that link theory and method to political practice (McCall 2005; Cho et al. 2013; May 2015; Hill Collins and Bilge 2016; Carastathis 2016; Hancock 2016; Romero 2018; Nash 2019).

That connection between the struggles of then and the possibilities of now has been likened to two bookends holding between them half a century of neoliberalism (Barnett 2020). At one end are the struggles for civil rights, solidarity with the Vietnamese against American imperialism, the Prague Spring, the 1968 student uprisings and the new social movements that followed. Within these were fundamental critiques of exclusions of those marginalized from the so-called universal progress of modernity since the Enlightenment in social, civil and human rights. At the other end, the global struggle for a new humanism is again asserting itself in different forms – the surfacing of a seam of activism that has continued in parallel to neoliberalism. Its impact was marked by the fact that, when Covid-19 struck, most governments felt obliged to prioritize, however incompetently and short-run, people’s lives and health over the financial interests of capitalism. This feeling of the value of human life, structured in people’s consciousness across the world, was given expression by the support for the Black Lives Matter protests in May 2020.

The ‘bookends’ metaphor is relevant to social policy. The development of a critical approach to social policy emerged from those sharpened understandings of welfare states in the 1970s and 1980s which provided feminist and anti-racist critiques of social policy and revised the class-centric perspectives of Marxist political economy. In particular, along with critiques based on disability, sexuality and age, they elaborated the social and organizational relations of power within welfare states and looked to participatory democratic and alternative ‘prefigurative’¹ ways of meeting people’s needs. The uptake in activisms in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis combined with the changing political context has shaped critical reflections on these earlier concepts. For example, the social concepts of ‘race’ and ‘Black’ once served to politicize and unify experiences of racialized oppression, yet, on their own, they do not convey the specificities of experiences of those constituted as minority ethnic groups (Modood [2007] 2013; Murji 2017) or the reconfigurations of diverse migrations (Vertovec 2007; Phillimore et al. 2021). Ethnicity, religion, nationality, language and migrant status (not to mention class, gender, sexuality, disability and generation) shape those experiences in different ways at different times. However, those categories are given shape and meaning through social policies and public (and popular) discourses. Such developments challenged the fixed binaries (male/female, Black/White, gay/straight, etc.) attached to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability and generation and introduced more fluid and dynamic interpretations of diverse subjectivities, identities and social positionings.

From the 1990s critical efforts were concentrated in reinstati...