Searching for New Welfare Models

Citizens' Opinions on the Past, Present and Future of the Welfare State

Rolf Solli, Barbara Czarniawska, Peter Demediuk, Dennis Anderson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030582272
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030582289
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política comparada

This book explores the ways in which different generations think about how the welfare state is organised at present, and how it will be organised in future. Using the results of a study from Canada, Australia and Sweden, the book's findings complement more traditional studies of the welfare sector, capturing the anxieties of citizens about the present and future of their countries' welfare models, and presenting their thoughts on how the system can be re-organised in future. Positioning their three-country study within the history of the welfare state around the world, the authors seek to re-assess the role of the welfare state in governments around the world. Their findings will be of interest to those studying welfare policy as well as innovations such as basic income, e-health and policy responses to automisation. 

© The Author(s) 2021

R. Solli et al.Searching for New Welfare Modelshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58228-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Searching for Welfare North and South

Rolf Solli¹ , Barbara Czarniawska² , Peter Demediuk³ and Dennis Anderson⁴

(1)

School of Public Administration, University of Gothenburg, Göteborg, Sweden

(2)

Gothenburg Research Institute, University of Gothenburg, Göteborg, Sweden

(3)

Victoria University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

(4)

Brandon University, Brandon, MB, Canada

Rolf Solli (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Barbara Czarniawska

Email: [email protected]

Peter Demediuk

Email: [email protected]

Dennis Anderson

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

In our opening chapter, we briefly present the history of the welfare state. While it is common to attribute its beginnings to the Beveridge Report from 1942, it is obvious that this important institution has much changed during the more than 89 years of its existence. Therefore, we decided that it would be both intriguing and useful to learn what citizens of three welfare states think of that institution at present, and how they imagine its future. The chapter then presents details of our three-country, interview-based study and a description of the methods and questions we used.

Keywords

welfare stateinstitutionNew Public Management

End Abstract

“Public relief is a sacred debt.

Society owes maintenance to unfortunate citizens.”

Paragraph 21 of the 1793

Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen

A Brief History of the Welfare State

The honor of creating the notion of a welfare state is commonly attributed to Sir William Beveridge, the Liberal economist who, in the 1940s, chaired the UK government’s inter-departmental Committee. The Committee carried out a survey of Britain’s social insurance and allied services, including worker’s compensation, and in 1942 produced the so-called Beveridge Report (Dahrendorf 1995: 154). The best proof that such an attribution is honorary lies in the fact that it took the UK 20 years to implement the report’s recommendations. Nothing peculiar about it: just a clash between the verbs “to institute” and “to institutionalize”. It may take a day to institute something new, but institutionalizing it may require 50, or even 200 years for the innovation to become a collective practice that is justified and taken for granted (Czarniawska 2009).

Although the institution of the welfare state is now 80 years old, it cannot be expected to look identical to that proposed in the Beveridge Report. Originally called Social Insurance and Allied Services, the 300-page long Report announced a fight against “Giant Evils” of the then UK society: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease. Arbitrary help given by charities was not enough to cope with these evils; therefore, an idea was formed of an all-encompassing system (Abel-Smith 1992). Again, as observed by a Canadian historian Susan Pedersen, “‘The welfare state’ was neither a British invention nor a British product. All advanced industrial societies became welfare states in the twentieth century, even the anti-collectivist United States” (2018: 5). There were many variations of welfare state and, although born from the best of intentions, all shared an in-built paradox, so well discerned by the Frankfurt School:

The welfare state, as Offe and Habermas have pointed out, cannot guarantee that the individual citizen will be protected from social or economic hardship. It holds out the promise of securing the welfare of individuals within the framework of a capitalist economy, but over that economy it has but nominal control. (…) This state (…) is more or less excluded from the economic system in terms of central decision making, and even its most potent weapon, taxation, is dependent upon the overall dynamic of the economy. The capacity of the welfare state to “deliver” welfare remains ultimately dependent upon the capacity of capitalism itself to avoid crises which endanger human welfare. (Watts 1980: 177)

Although the paradox remains (and indeed can be seen as a partial explanation of the triumphant entry of the New Public Management; Hood 1991), so do giant evils, old and new, though the ways of dealing with them have changed.

In Sweden, claimed Beata Agrell (2014), the “people’s home” (an endearing synonym of the welfare state) started crashing in the 1960s. But it was in the late 1970s that the media started talking of “the demise of the Swedish model” (Czarniawska-Joerges 1993). In Australia, according to Rob Watts (1980), collapse of its welfare state was visible by 1975. In Canada, the fate of the welfare state and its forms fluctuated as governments changed; some writers see the 1960s as the period of establishment of a “proper” welfare state in Canada. Still, Allan Moskovitch (2015) spoke of an “erosion of welfare state” in Canada over the past 40 years.

These changes were a starting point of a transdisciplinary research program “Searching for new welfare models”, undertaken by a group of researchers from Sweden, Australia, and Canada. These three countries are considered to be good examples of an institutionalized welfare state, and they exhibit both similarities and differences that may prove illuminating. Canada and Australia share the same origins and the same language; Canada and Sweden, although on two different hemispheres, are both Northern countries. All three countries have an Indigenous population, which may present larger or smaller problems in organizing welfare.

A reader may notice absence of New Zealand in this research focus. After all, New Zealand was, for several decades, considered “the Mecca” of welfare solutions. It earned this moniker because of its enthusiasm for imitating the UK in the introduction of the New Public Management (NPM). At present, however, the NPM is mostly under critique (see next section for more details) and the research program described here belongs with several others attempts to reach beyond NPM (see e.g., a special issue of Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 2015, 19/2).

The More Specific Motives Behind Our Search

Over the past 40 years, the welfare organization has undergone major transformations in most countries. Today welfare can be organized by public, private, and non-profit organizations, as well as by informal actors (social entrepreneurs are on the increase). This change from a mainly state-run welfare system of the past creates particular challenges for governance and collaboration. The organization of welfare has acquired a great variety of forms, which is accompanied by a variety of ownership models.

For a long time, it seemed that NPM would indeed be the best way to deal with this complex situation. After all, it contains control mechanisms, such as key performance indicators, process management, management-by-objectives, management accounting—to mention just the best-known of a growing number of managerial technologies (Hood 1991; Nilsson 2014). Yet the evaluation of the consequences of these technologies almost invariably shows that they are doing more harm than good. For example, the introduction of many new control mechanisms grew from the assumption that competitive businesses operating on a market are more efficient and effective than service organizations of the public sector (Czarniawska and Solli 2014a). In contrast, several studies show that higher efficiency and productivity are achieved when organizations collaborate, not when they compete with each other (see e.g. Lindberg and Blomgren 2009).

There is no doubt that both the present and the future organizing and managing of the welfare sector represents quite a few serious challenges. To quote but one example: In 1971, a government commission was set up in Sweden to investigate what form futures studies should take. It was led by cabinet minister Alva Myrdal and its final report had the title “Choosing One’s Future”. The Government followed its recommendation and in 1973 the Secretariat for Futures Studies was established, which was originally accountable to the Prime Minister’s Office¹. In 1982, the Secretariat presented a report called “Time for Care”. The project suggested, among other things, an expansion of outpatient care, as the in-patient care was found to be excessively resource consuming. It has been pointed out that effective care requires time; time given by some people (the staff) to other people (the patients). Careful calculations showed that it would be impossible to recruit sufficient staff to ensure that there will be enough caretakers to offer the proper level and duration of care. If the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Searching for Welfare North and South
• 2. Welfare in Canada: Now and in 20 Years
• 3. Welfare in the South: In 20 Years and Now
• 4. The Future Welfare in Sweden
• 5. The Welfare State: Will It Stay or Will It Go?
• Correction to: The Welfare State: Will It Stay or Will It Go?
• Back Matter