Welfare Policy

11 Key excerpts on "Welfare Policy"

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  Comparative Public Policy

  • Anneliese Dodds(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  9 Welfare Policy The term ‘welfare’ has been understood in a variety of different ways. Social security and pensions have often been seen as core areas of welfare provision (Esping-Andersen, 1990 ). However, ‘Welfare Policy’ can also be defined as cov-ering all activities in which governments engage to promote the wellbeing of their populations, covering health, housing, nutrition and education, as well as income maintenance (Wilensky, 1975 : 1). This chapter concentrates on income mainte-nance policies such as transfers, but also refers to other areas of Welfare Policy (including housing and family policy) where relevant. Health and education policy are considered in subsequent chapters. Governments are often taken to be the originators of Welfare Policy, given the widespread use of the term ‘welfare state’. However, some would argue that the ‘welfare state’ includes not only the ‘public’ activities of governments and their agencies, but also the ‘private’ provision of welfare in the home (Dominelli, 1991 ). The view that population welfare can be promoted by a variety of actors informs the term ‘the social state’, which is commonly used in Germany and Italy. Although this chapter primarily focuses on governmental policies in relation to welfare, it also examines government promotion of welfare provision by the private and voluntary sectors, and by families. It is important to note that, whilst we generally view Welfare Policy as in some way stemming from a desire to improve citizens’ wellbeing, on occasion it may be motivated by different objectives. For example, one of the reasons for the introduc-tion of slum clearance and improved public hygiene in the UK was concern over the poor health of recruits for the Boer War (Williams, 2008 : 161), rather than reflecting sympathy towards the poor.

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  Social Work and Social Care Practice

  • Mark Hughes, Danielle Turney, Jill Wilson, Deborah Setterlund, Ian O′Connor(Authors)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Examples include education and labour market policies. Governments also seek to manage the tensions resulting from the current forms of social arrangements, particularly in rela-tion to those excluded from or on the margins of the economy. These economic and social arrangements form what can be conceptualized as social welfare. Graycar and Jamrozik define social welfare as: A form of political organisation comprising both the public and private sectors of the econ-omy. Its functions include the maintenance of social order and control, ensuring the physical survival of its citizens and the enhancement of their social functioning. (1993: 71) Social welfare interventions by the state take many forms, including macro-economic policy decisions such as restructuring certain industries or introducing tax incentives to influence the availability and location of employment. Though macro-economic policy SOCIAL WELFARE POLICIES AND POLITICS 17 directly and indirectly impacts on the well-being of the population, it is rarely seen as welfare-related by the public. Macro-economic policy decisions are also very difficult for an individual worker to influence directly. From the viewpoint of the individual, social welfare interventions are instead experienced directly – for example, as direct cash transfers such as JobSeeker’s Allowance – or indirectly through the provision of education, health care and personal social services. Such services are not delivered by the state only, but also by voluntary agencies, profit-making companies and by individuals within informal helping networks, such as family and friends, providing care. Government welfare interventions affect the standard of living of the advantaged as well as the disadvantaged in the community. The gradual move away from direct taxa-tion towards indirect taxation marks a shift in the redistribution of resources so that the wealthy bear less of the tax ‘burden’.

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  Privatizing the Polity

  • Holona LeAnne Ochs(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  1

  Framing the Welfare Policy Process

  Public policy is concerned with problem definition, issue construction, agenda setting, the emergence of policy options, the actions (or inactions) of governance, and the effects and impact of such action or inaction. Welfare Policy articulates values, crafts meaning, justifies political decisions, assigns or reinforces status, and may even attempt to solve social problems. The boundaries of the welfare conflict space are defined by the understandings generated through the battles over problem definition, the political negotiations over policy design and adoption, the bargaining, competition, and cooperation inherent in the implementation, and the culture and craft of enactment. The potential for learning from these conflicts is contingent upon the type of evaluation or analysis as well as the degree of opportunism.

  This chapter proceeds by outlining the research defining the nature of those boundaries and the interconnected processes of welfare provision. Then, I describe a theoretical framework for analyzing the impact of Welfare Policy that offers the potential for learning. Understanding the extent to which different policy choices provide opportunities for large numbers of people to move out of poverty by comparing how programs vary across states is a necessary but not sufficient condition for policy learning. It is essential that we also consider the nature and location of influence in order to ascertain for whom opportunities are afforded. My approach utilizes various analytical strategies to identify how opportunities can be broadly obtained and opportunism minimized. In this chapter, I also explain those analytic strategies.

  Organizing the Welfare Literature throughout the Policy Process

  Welfare Policy as a field of study began with the definition of poverty as a social problem. Stories of welfare practices in the United States cannot be easily untangled from the Judeo-Christian traditions that defined the worldviews of the colonists and shaped the approach that the colonies took toward the welfare of the native populations. In many respects, those stories emphasize compassion, but the practices reveal patterns of compassion for those deemed worthy. In the European Christian worldview, God’s will was invoked to enrich and empower Christian followers. Consequently, Native Americans represented an opportunity to convert more souls and justify the taking of native lands in the name of God and the monarchy. Alternatively, the concepts of reciprocity and the practice of gift exchange were the central tenets of building relationships, forming alliances, addressing disparate needs, and established the welfare customs of the North American Indians. Reciprocity and gift exchange are based on the behavior of the “other” and maintain an emphasis on long-term objectives. These practices represent fundamental differences in the worldviews of the colonists and the indigenous population regarding human welfare. Attempts to enslave Native North Americans were unsuccessful, so contracts for indentured servitude, primarily performed by African slaves, convicts, paupers, and servants from the British Isles and throughout the continent of Europe, were sanctioned by colonial authorities. The contracts often provided the prospect of land ownership as an incentive at the end of the period of service, but the condition of servitude also often required conversion to Christianity and was justified as a charitable act by Christians.1

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  The Body

  Social Process and Cultural Theory

  • Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, Bryan S Turner, Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, Bryan S Turner(Authors)
  • 1991(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  BIO-POLITICS AND SOCIAL POLICY 239 unfulfilled needs, or of those not yet invented* (Procacci 1978, p. 58). The ever present threat of poverty to labour is posed in nineteenth-century thought in one sense negatively, in diverting resources from the accumulation of capital and in breaching the limits of state action, and yet in another sense positively, in acting as an incentive to produce wealth. Policing and welfare played a necessary role in effecting this fine balance without which capital and state could not exist - a balance that involved not a choice between welfare and capital, care and control, life and death, etc., but a modulation of these exigencies via the technologies of bio-power. With the advent of welfare, new normalising agents from doctors to social workers emerged with these technologies to modulate degrees of compliance between the state and its dependants. This development obviated the necessity for absolute choices and permitted adjustments around the norm. The emergence of the human sciences at the end of the eigh-teenth century made problematic norms of conduct and promoted new technologies for adjusting both behaviour and its norms. The human sciences and the disciplines are two facets of the wider transformation in western thought which Foucault refers to as 'an epistemological thaw* in the bedrock of certainty surrounding earlier sciences that took for granted the order of (physical and human) nature and its representation in discourse and thought (Foucault 1970; 1979a, p. 191 and p. 224). The Domain of Social Policy Social policy is conventionally concerned with the mainly govern-mental institutions and arrangements for promoting social welfare through the amelioration of individual and collective needs as socially defined. The institutional and normative specificity, however problematic, ascribed by British writers to welfare has contributed towards regularising and demarcating the subject matter.

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  Welfare and wellbeing

  Richard Titmuss's contribution to social policy

  • Alcock, Pete, Glennerster, Howard(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Policy Press

    (Publisher)

  But here I wish to concentrate the debate around the past, present and future role of social welfare. In doing so I would, however, point out that social welfare programmes and social policies (however defined and determined) perform functionally and operate differently (and often under quite different labels and principles) in different types of societies and diverse cultural, economic and value systems. Nevertheless, however their roles may differ, the ends as well as the means of social welfare must be discussed, for social policy is all about conflicting choices in political goals as well as means. We may thus have to consider in different cultural contexts concepts of justice as fairness; the definition of goodness as rationality; the justification of disobedience and compliance; the rule of law and toleration of the intolerant; rights based on needs, capacity, productivity or deserts; duty and obligation; envy and equality; distributive justice, and other fundamental political and philosophical issues without which the discussion of social policy can deteriorate into sterility. To know one’s chains or one’s limitations is often the first step to freedom, but, as the grand inquisitor said in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, what people dreaded most was freedom of choice and to be left alone to grope their way in the dark. Social welfare and social and community work, as I understand the situation in Britain and may other countries, is based on different principles: that people should be helped to perceive and to make choices; and that it is one of the goals of social policy to provide alternatives to poverty and darkness. All these issues of cultural diversity and conflicting choices make it 189 much more difficult to generalise theoretically on an international or comparative basis about social policy than about economic policy.

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  Welfare

  • Mary Daly(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  The model of citizenship that prevails in a country or is argued for is closely related to the type of welfare state that exists or is sought. The term ‘welfare state’, which is the subject of chapter 4, connotes a particular form of the state, one oriented to meeting needs and addressing a range of welfare-related exigencies. In this state form, government takes responsibility for those unable to provide for their own welfare and, depending on how widely the notion of public welfare (or social citizenship) extends, guarantees not just support but security in a range of eventualities. The welfare state constitutes, therefore, a very different approach to the Poor Law, with its focus on meeting the worst cases of need only and its tests of deservingness. Marshall’s (1950) threefold classification of citizenship captures much about the welfare state and its variations: the more expansive are social rights the more developed is the welfare state. Political science treats the welfare state as a structure of power especially, both an outcome of political processes and in turn effecting political intervention. It does not just happen therefore but, as we shall see, is fought for and remains contested.

  The Social Meanings of Welfare

  The idea of social welfare provides a further counterpoint again to those depictions of welfare discussed to date. As developed in the disciplines of Social Policy2 and social work, and sociology to a lesser extent, considerations of social welfare are more complex than could be imagined from a neo-classical economics perspective. If economists work with preferences as a proxy for welfare, social scientists tend to focus on needs and social problems and responses to both. The concept of need is seen to describe something about human nature that is more essential than the economists’ ‘preferences’ (Fitzpatrick 2001: 7). It is also a less individualistic concept. Welfare in a social vein is intimately connected, then, with societal ends and functioning, especially in terms of the measures to be taken to address such phenomena as poverty, unemployment, ill-health, social inequality. The social disciplines share considerable common ground with philosophy and political science. Indeed, many of the debates in political philosophy were also rehearsed from a social perspective. But they tended to be fractured through three lenses:

  • views about the nature of the human condition and how it can be improved;
  • investigations of the nature and origins of social problems and how they are connected to social organisation and the (mal)distribution of resources;
  • convictions about the implications and effectiveness of different approaches to social intervention and reform and how they sit with prevailing norms and ideologies.

  In the early days especially, social criticism – of prevailing conditions and the functioning of different forms of policy and collective response in light of need – was central. This early work ‘fixed’ welfare in a particular frame: social problem solving.3

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  Welfare of the Poor

  • Mary Bryna Sanger(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Other questions re-main unresolved due to the weakness of the state of the art or the limitations of the research questions asked and the data available. Clearly, based on the review of the literature in all the previous chap-ters, substantial gaps in knowledge remain, even while areas with sub-stantial grounding in research knowledge continue to be debated on the basis of values. Disagreement about the nature of dependency and the policies nec-essary to address it in many respects reflects the different biases of the income maintenance establishment/' The shifts in the character of both research and policy initiatives reflect the changing nature of this establishment. Until recently, the dominant force in poverty policy included the social welfare community. Representing largely service providers, organized social work had considerable impact on problem definition and policy prescription. The clinical orientation of the social welfare community provided a framework which situated the problems of the welfare poor in the casework paradigm. Thus, an emphasis on the need for services dictated to a large degree the character of poverty policy. The welfare poor were seen to be in need of counseling, training, and more generally, help to increase their human capital. Emphasis on social services follows logically from the treatment model that the social work community holds; causality lies firmly within the individual. The 1962 and 1967 legislative amendments to the Social Security Act revealed the dominance of this paradigm through the liberalization of federal financing arrangements for the provision of social services for the former, current, and potential welfare recipient. Requirements for re-gistration for work training, job counseling, and job placement through the WIN program further supported this approach to the welfare poor. Throughout the research community, emphasis was on the personal characteristics of welfare recipients as an explanation of their status.

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  Empowerment Series: Introduction to Social Work & Social Welfare

  Critical Thinking Perspectives

  • Karen Kirst-Ashman(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. attention, identification of public opinion about an identified problem and people’s related needs, for- mulation of a policy by legislators, implementation of the policy through a social welfare program, and delivery of social services by social workers and other staff in the context of social service agencies. LO3 Identify how social welfare programs are structured. The five broad components to explore in order to understand any policy are (1) what people’s needs and the program’s goals are; (2) what kinds of ben- efits are provided; (3) what the eligibility criteria are to receive benefits; (4) how the program is financed; and (5) how the program is administered and run. LO4 Engage in critical thinking about policy formulation. Critical thinking questions were posed concerning whether cash or in-kind benefits are most beneficial to people living in poverty, and the value of univer- sal versus selective service provision. LO5 Explore values and how they affect policy development. Conservatism is the philosophy that individuals are responsible for themselves, that government should provide minimal interference in people’s lives, and that change does not necessarily mean improvement. Liberalism, in contrast, is the philosophy that sup- ports government involvement in the social, poli- tical, and economic structure so that all people’s rights and privileges are protected in the name of social justice. Radicalism is the philosophy that the social and political system as it stands is not struc- turally capable of truly pursuing social justice.

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  Social and Labour Market Policy

  The Basics

  • Bent Greve(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Countries have different policies with regard to both income transfers and services to people with disabilities. Compared to other areas, benefits and services to people with disabilities are often without means-testing, as the services and benefits are aimed at making it possible for people with disabilities to live a life as close as possible to people without disabilities. Disability policy is also an example of an area where what is not classical social policy can have an impact on daily life, for example, by making it possible to enter buildings and make infrastructure accessible.

  Care for the frail elderly, including long-term care, has moved higher on the agenda in recent years due to demographic changes and the increasing number of elderly. Countries provide long-term care in very different ways, with some mainly relying on the family, some having a focus on marketisation and some with more state involvement; see Greve (2017). Furthermore, this is a service where the boundaries between care at hospitals and long-term care might be blurred, and therefore data on spending and activities within the area are not always precise.

  Social integration, for example reducing loneliness among the elderly, but also integration in the wider context of migrants and refugees, has also moved higher on the agenda in many countries. For migrants, this often revolves around integration on the labour market; see more in Chapters 6 and 7 .

  Naturally, there are also policies outside the classical social policy area that can be important (health, environment, etc.), but this is outside the scope of this book.

  Overall, this points to the fact that when and if wanting to do something for people’s well-being, social policy has a role, especially in relation to everyday life, including to alleviate poverty. In order to alleviate poverty, one needs to know how this can be defined and measured, and this is discussed in Section 3.5.

  3.5. Poverty and inequality

  Poverty and inequality are seen as central issues in relation to well-being. This is because when living in poverty, an individual might not be able to get his/her basic needs fulfilled, whereas a high level of inequality also reduces the option for the achievement of well-being for some.

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  Management in the Social and Safety Services

  • Norman C. Hunt, W. D. Reekie(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Policy Analysis and the Welfare State

  R. G. S. BROWN SUMMARY

  The purpose of this paper is to examine some of the key issues affecting policy development in contemporary British welfare services in the light of recent studies of policy-making. The focus is on the processes through which policy options are taken up and evaluated rather than on the substantive content of the policies themselves. Drawing illustrations from the personal social services, the paper touches on the relevance of institutional arrangements, professional structures, information systems and quantitative techniques for the identification of problems, their exploration, and the implementation of solutions.

  INTRODUCTION One can distinguish three main aspects of current developments in British social services.

  First is the recognition and acceptance of community responsibility for meeting additional categories of need. The complacent assumption that the welfare state had relieved all major forms of social need has been swept aside by an accumulation of research, pressure-group activity (often associated with the research) and public concern about social conditions reflected in the mass media. To some extent this disillusionment with the welfare state and its mechanisms followed from the discovery that the institutions established in the 1940s were less effective than had been supposed in reaching out to meet various vulnerable groups – the educationally under-privileged, the disabled, families with low incomes, the inmates of long-stay institutions. Another factor was that conditions such as isolation and sickness in old age, which had been regarded as tolerable and inevitable by an earlier generation, were not so regarded by their successors. In an affluent society, the threshold below which social conditions were categorized as social needs was constantly rising. Moreover, the affluent society itself was creating conditions that seemed to require social action – overcrowding in cities, family breakdowns and stresses caused by greater social mobility, aggravated by the inability of the new neighbourhood communities to cope with deviants and misfits. The cumulative effect has been a demand that the community as an organized whole should accept responsibility for meeting a greater volume of need, at a more adequate standard, in respect of a more widely defined spread of contingencies.

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  Richard Titmuss; Welfare and Society

  Welfare and Society

  • D. Reisman(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  72 The Status of Social Policy (b) The origins of welfare Titmuss always emphasised that welfare is by definition in flux. Speaking in Denmark on policy, it was the crux of his message that no agenda can ever be permanent, unalterable, sacrosanct, once- for-all: ‘Asked to talk about “The Welfare State”. Personal dislike of the term . . . Implies a static approach to society. A state of com- pletion. A kind of welfare conservatism and welfare Marxism. Insufficiently dynamic. Contradicts “society in process”.’ 65 Things change, perceptions change, and open-mindedness is all. Continuously, pragmatically, ‘we need to revise existing concepts of what constitutes a social service’. 66 New challenges (atomic en- ergy, insecticides, ‘the effects on water-supplies and sanitation of the scientific development of detergents’) must perpetually give rise to new services: ‘In a multitude of devious and indirect ways, the social services are assuming a host of new responsibilities and costs as a result of advances in knowledge which benefit the whole of society.’ 67 Extinct volcanoes, although Titmuss does not say so, must presumably be made subject to an analogous process of review in order that resources might be transferred into areas of sunrise deficiency. The precise, named services will – and must – come and go. There is, however, one thing which is not open to renegotiation. That irreducible constant is necessarily the selective standard by means of which the social sector is properly to be singled out: Whatever our ‘angle of vision’ may be we shall eventually have to take account of two elements in any definition of ‘social policy’, the ‘welfare state’, and so on. The first is the extent to which any society identifies and recognises ‘needs’ – needs for food, housing, education, income maintenance, medical care and so forth.

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