Social Suffering in the Neoliberal Age

State Power, Logics and Resistance

Karen Soldatic, Louise St Guillaume

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367675561
• eBook ISBN: 9781000580822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Politica sociale

This book provides a rich synthesis of research and theory of nascent and emergent critically engaged work examining changing welfare structures, regimes and technologies and the social suffering that is generated in everyday lives.

By rigorously examining social security restructuring with the turn to austerity governance and its daily practices of managing, regulating and subordinating individuals, peoples and communities, this collection delineates the machinery of state power and logics designed to manage, contain and control the lives of some of the most poorest and marginalised citizens who are reliant on social welfare income payments. A core strength of the book is, first, its unpacking of austerity governance across diverse communities and, second, the elevation of community resistance and mobilisation against the very measures of austerity. Combined, the work maps out the logics of state power and everyday practices of embedded contestation and confrontation.

Using the case study of Australia to discuss sociolegal recategorisations, automation of welfare governance, technologies of policy design and delivery, conditionality and systems of penalisation, this book will be of interest to all scholars and students of sociology, critical theory, social policy, social work and disability studies, Indigenous studies and settler-colonialism.

Part I Structure, power and social suffering

1 ‘Problem family’ representations The construction of intergenerational disadvantage in policy

Kathleen Flanagan

DOI: 10.4324/9781003131779-3

In this chapter, I explore the problem of ‘intergenerational disadvantage’. This problem is not new (see Rutter & Madge 1976), but in Australian policy it has new salience. Empirically, I examine the Australian Government’s Priority Investment Approach, which detects and responds to ‘intergenerational welfare dependency’ in ‘new’ and ‘innovative’ ways. My tentative argument is that, despite its cloak of innovation, this approach echoes earlier constructions of intergenerational disadvantage, and that being aware of the resonances sensitises us to the potential for harm. I build this argument out of earlier research (Flanagan 2018) while working towards further, more detailed analysis.

I use a specific term for intergenerational disadvantage: the ‘problem family’. This does not mean an actually existing reality but captures the long-standing focus given by the state to a small number of families understood to disrupt social order, troubling governments, services, neighbours and themselves. ‘Problem family’ is interchangeable with other terms but, as I establish elsewhere (Flanagan 2018), the differences in labels do not mark substantive change: whatever it is called, the ‘problem family’ is a remarkably consistent discursive object, propagated through discursive commentary, through repetition, tropes and anecdote. It is consistent even though there is no agreed definition: researchers have long preferred, as Philp and Timms (1962: 7) put it, ‘inverted commas and a statement that the problem family is hard to define but easy to recognise’. Four broad themes characterise this easy recognition.

First, it is agreed that ‘problem families’ have a dysfunctional habitus. ‘Problem families’ differ from normal, working-class households by their failure to express working-class ‘respectability’ (Macnicol 2017), a respectability exemplified in a clean, regulated, orderly home. Secondly, the ‘problem family’ is an intergenerational problem. In the Anglophone world, ‘family’ still normatively implies the co-presence of at least two generations and today’s children are ‘the next generation of parents’ (Davidson, Bunting & Webb 2012: 56). Thirdly, each ‘problem family’ is known to and supported by multiple services, at significant public cost. In the 1950s, analysis of administrative records in St Paul in the United States famously found just 6 per cent of recipients consumed over half of all welfare expenditure (Buell & Associates 1952: 9); this research not only spawned the very term ‘multi-problem family’ (Wallace & Smith 1968: 107) but also a proliferation of studies examining the same phenomenon in different places (diligently compiled by Schlesinger 1970). Finally, ‘problem families’ produce nothing. Their costs are not balanced by reciprocal contributions or even effort: they ‘do not yield to the civilizing blessings of the Welfare State’ (Wright 1958: 36).

These characteristics – chaotic habitus, intergenerational transmission, reliance on services and lack of productivity – are interdependent qualities. They are rarely measured but instead saturate largely anecdotal descriptions (e.g. Williams 1917; Wofinden 1946; Jones 1950; Lewis 1955; Williams 1955; Wright 1958; Scott 1959; Tierney 1959, 1978; Warren 1960; Schlesinger 1970; Commission of Inquiry into Poverty 1975). They matter to my analysis. Elsewhere, I describe a ‘problem family’ schedule found in the Tasmanian archive, compiled by Tasmanian government agencies and listing specific ‘multi-problem families’, accompanied by brief descriptions of the records held by each agency about each of the families (Flanagan 2018: 693). The premise for this schedule of ‘no-hopers’ was that ‘problem families’ were identifiable from profligate service involvement. Furthermore, although families were captured on the schedule at a point in time, they were intergenerationally constituted by the records themselves, which referred to parents, children and grandchildren. The schedule is a variant of another kind of record which compiles ‘problem family’ data: the pedigree diagram, used extensively in ‘problem family’ literature (see Flanagan 2018: 694–695). In his pedigrees, Goddard (1911: 47) used a ‘heavy line’ to show ‘that the person is in some institution at the expense of society’. The Tasmanian ‘problem family’ research of Davies and Dax (1974) used pedigrees to map social problems detected from administrative records.¹ This defines contact with services itself as a marker of abnormality.

Pedigrees were first developed by eugenicists to demonstrate the heredity of physical and social traits (Nukaga 2002: 41). Not all ‘problem family’ researchers identified as eugenicists but many nonetheless chose to map dysfunction onto pedigrees. This is significant and cannot be overlooked because a pedigree is a genetic diagram. It shows who is related to who. There is space in any pedigree diagram for eugenic discourse to manifest. This context is important as it describes the wider constellation (Flanagan 2018: 690) of the discourse I examine in this chapter. And it shows us what is at stake. The word ‘eugenics’ may be out of favour but discourse, in its Foucauldian sense, has never meant what is said (Foucault 1991 [1968]: 63). Discourse organises what is available to subjects; it is a framework of relations and rules enabling the production of ‘true’ knowledge.² However unpalatable the idea, to subjects thinking, speaking or acting on the ‘problem family’ or ‘intergenerational disadvantage’, eugenics is available – so too is the harm enabled by eugenics.

The consistency of ‘problem family’ discourse extends to remedies. Even though ‘problem family’ research emphasises innovation (Flanagan 2018: 697), persisting in the search for the ‘right’ model (Brown 1964), what takes place is profoundly familiar. Across time, responses have commonly featured intrusive data collection – the ‘problem family’ schedule described earlier included names, addresses and sometimes case numbers – to specify individuals and family groups as among the ‘type’, and attempts to impose proper budgeting, systematise housework and reform parenting (Flanagan 2018). Home visits, with their in-built opportunities for inspection and scrutiny, remain central to ‘problem family’ intervention today (see Asen 2007; Kirkpatrick et al. 2007; van Lawick & Bom 2008; Flint 2012; Sawyer et al. 2013; Casey 2013, 2014; Daly & Bray 2015; Crossley 2018; van Assen et al. 2020). Similarly, there are contemporary calls for greater access to and exploitation of government data (Productivity Commission 2017). There may be advantages to this (see, for example, Metraux & Tseng 2017; Duszynski et al. 2019) but, even with ‘privacy’ protections, a population can be as identifiable and targeted for surveillance by the clustering of descriptive variables as by names (Eubanks 2017).

Approach

My focus in this chapter is the Try, Test and Learn Fund, an Australian government initiative modelling ‘new and innovative’ responses to intergenerational disadvantage, introduced as part of the Priority Investment Approach. I chose it because its existence, and presumed success, was presented to me as evidence intergenerational disadvantage is no longer an urgent research problem.³ However, a close reading of the Try, Test and Learn documents revealed yet another version of the ‘problem family’ commentary I had identified elsewhere (Flanagan 2018). To me, this warranted closer examination.

The ‘problem family’ schedule described earlier required consultation of paper files and dispatch of lists of names and copies of records to the typing pool. Today, service interactions are captured electronically; data is linked, modelled and churned by algorithms. Modern governments have increasingly sophisticated, instantaneous ability to manipulate and mine the data they have always collected. The ‘digital poorhouse’ (Eubanks 2017) evolves before us. But what is the discursive practice, the simultaneous thinking and acting (Florence 1998 [c. 1980]: 463; see also Flanagan 2020: 8–9), enabled by this growing capability?

In Australia, at least nationally, the exemplar exploitation of data is the Priority Investment Approach. According to a factsheet prepared by the Department of Social Services (DSS c. 2016a), the ‘Priority Investment Approach is a new way of looking at the welfare system. It uses data analysis to provide insights into how the system is working and uses those insights to find innovative ways of helping more Australians live independently of welfare’. It was announced in a September 2016 speech by then minister Christian Porter, who presented it as using sophisticated actuarial analysis to ‘predict the likely movements for target groups on, off and in between welfare payments, and calculate welfare expenditure for groups over the lifetime of the system’. From these data-driven capabilities arise new welfare policy goals: to identify those at high risk of ‘dependency’ and help them find work, to reduce the risk of intergenerational welfare dependency, and to ensure that the system is financially sustainable (Porter 2016).

The approach was recommended by a report into Australia’s welfare system which profiled New Zealand’s ‘social investment’ model, arguing an Australian version would ensure government ‘targets resources up front to build capability and pathways to jobs for disadvantaged groups’, thus ‘preventing social problems, breaking the cycle of intergenerational disadvantage, & making long term savings to public spending’ and limiting ‘the future liability associated with group members becoming long term income support dependent’ (Reference Group on Welfare Reform 2015: 121). The strategy is based on actuarial analysis of risk and liability: which payments to which groups risk costing the most and how is this risk best mitigated? The baseline analysis, produced by PricewaterhouseCoopers, presented the method as

[a]t the macro level & a governance tool – to measure and monitor long term costs of the system and evaluate the effectiveness of new policies in improving financial and social outcomes. At the micro level it can provide information on the past experience and expected future cost of specific groups, to help inform targeted policy for people in these groups.

(PwC 2016: ii)

This positions priority investment as a surveillance mechanism and research tool, with both situated in an economic grid of specification (Foucault 2002 [1972]: 46–47).

Despite its name, priority investment ‘thinks’ in costs – in the baseline report (PwC 2016), welfare itself is treated as a cost, not an investment. Time on welfare is made of movements across a range of payments and underpinning circumstances, of benefits for recipients – tenancies sustained, schoolbooks paid for, prescriptions purchased – and of consequences arising from the policy choice to maintain many payments below the poverty line. All this is invisible in the report’s conceptual logic (see PwC 2016: iii). Taken to the extreme, priority investment is not about reducing welfare ‘dependency’, whatever that might be, but ending the receipt of welfare.

The Try, Test and Learn Fund is an integral component of the Priority Investment Approach (see Reference Group on Welfare Reform 2015: 131–132) because it operationalises the identification and assessment of ‘new and innovative’ methods of reducing welfare dependency among target cohorts (DSS 2019b). The cohort focus reflects the methodology of the actuarial analysis: the breakdown of the mass of ‘welfare recipients’ into classes presenting greater or lesser lifetime costs to the government (PwC 2016). In the first tranche of Try, Test and Learn funding, three cohorts were selected for intervention: young students, young carers and young parents (DSS 2019b). The minister explicitly linked this final cohort group, young parents, to intergenerational welfare dependency (Porter 2016). Within the limits of a book chapter, this has served to narrow my empirical focus. However, I am not looking at the objectives or outcomes of Try, Test and Learn. I am instead looking at how the policy of Try, Test and Learn constructs the problem it purports to address. In other words: if priority investment in general and Try, Test and Learn in particular are the solutions, what is the problem represented to be?

‘What is the problem represented to be?’ is both a question and a methodology developed by Carol Bacchi (1999, 2009). The latter proceeds by interrelated questions designed to draw analytical attention to the problematisations within policy. As Bacchi describes it, the purpose is not to determine what policy-makers, as individuals or collectively, assume or believe or are biased against or towards, but to examine ‘the assumptions and/or presuppositions that lodge within problem representations’, going

beyond what is in people’s heads to consider the shape of arguments, the forms of ‘knowledge’ that arguments rely upon, the forms of ‘knowledge’ that are necessary for statements to be accorded intelligibility & not why something happens but how it is possible for something to happen.

(Bacchi 2009: 4, original emphasis)

In her 2009 guide to the method, Bacchi enumerated her six key analytical questions as follows:

1. What’s the ‘problem’ represented to be in a specific policy?
2. What presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of the ‘problem’?
3. How has this representation of the ‘problem’ come about?
4. What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? What are the silences? Can the ‘problem’ be thought about differently?
5. What effects (discursive, subjective, lived) are produced by this representation of the ‘problem’?
6. How/where has this representation of the ‘problem’ been produced, disseminated and defended? How could it be questioned, disrupted or replaced?

(Bacchi 2009: 2)

The remainder of this chapter sets out to answer these questions with regard to the Priority Investment Approach, Try, Test and Learn and young parents. The documents I use as ‘data’ are the minister’s speech announcing the approach (Porter 2016), the ‘factsheets’ and other information on the department’s website outlining k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: social suffering and resistance in the social protection system
• Part I Structure, power and social suffering
• Part II Practices of resistance and hope
• Concluding remarks: making suffering legible
• Index