Social Policy

Оглавление

Fiona Williams. Social Policy

CONTENTS

Guide

List of Illustrations

List of Tables

Pages

Social Policy. A Critical and Intersectional Analysis

Acknowledgements

A Note on Terminology

1 Introduction

Continuities and changes

Structure of the book

Notes

2 A Critical and Intersectional Approach to Social Policy. Introduction

Remarginalization of the social

An intersectional approach for social policy

A critical approach to social policy

Conclusion

Notes

3 Intersecting Global Crises and Dynamics of Family, Nation, Work and Nature: A Framework for Analysis. Introduction

Neoliberalism, welfare and austerity

Frame 1: Intersecting global crises ‘Crisis’ – a note

The global financial crisis

The crisis of social reproduction and care

The crisis of climate change and ecology

The racialized crisis of borders

Intersections of colliding crises

Frame 2: The intersections of family, nation, work and nature

Conclusion

Notes

4 Unsettling/Settling Family–Nation–Work–Nature: From Austerity to Pandemic. Introduction

1: Work, family and nation: the depletion and devaluation of care

Parenting: responsibilization and blame

Binaries of blame

Troubling families

Responsible choices

The depletion and devaluation of care

Subordinating care to paid work

Diminishing children’s rights to wellbeing

Markets and the depletion and devaluation of care

Women and austerity: intersecting inequalities of ‘race’, gender and poverty

Diversity, inequalities and nation

2: Bordering practices in the post-racial

Post-racial settling

Bordering practices

Two sides of the same coin

Social abjection and necropolitics

The Windrush betrayal

3: Necropolitics, nation and nature

Grenfell Tower

Brexit nation

Nature and nation: the pandemic crisis

Not all risks are equal

Health and social care infrastructure

Challenges to the style and substance of governance

4: Not all of a piece

Conclusion

Notes

5 The Social Relations of Welfare: Subjects, Agents, Activists. Introduction

The turn to agency

The dynamics of agency

Agency as relational

The psychosocial dynamics of agency

Relating agency to action

Agency in the social relations of welfare

Logics of contestation and resistance

Spaces of power

Campaigning through spaces of power

Structures of feeling

Subjects of value

Conclusion

Notes

6 Intersections in the Transnational, Social and Political Economy of Care. Introduction

A story of changes and continuities

Micro-intersections layered in close encounters

Institutional intersections at the meso-scale

The transnational political and social economy of care

The transnational movement of care labour

The transnational dynamics of care commitments

The transnational expansion of care capital

Transnational political actors

Conclusion: towards care-ethical global justice

Notes

7 Towards an Eco-Welfare Commons: Intersections of Political Ethics and Prefigurative Practices. Introduction

Ethics grounded in the struggles of care, the environment and decoloniality

Political ethics of care

Environmental ethics

Being human as praxis: political ethics and decoloniality

Translating ethics into practical eco-social politics

Relationality 1: Care and connection

Relationality 2: Scales of possibility

Relationality 3: Intersectional dialogues and alliances

Towards the eco-welfare commons

Conclusion

Notes

8 Conclusion: Multidimensional Thinking for Social Policy. Introduction

Reconstituting the knowledge base of social policy

Relational knowledge and practices

Reconstruction and reimagination in post-Covid-19 futures

Notes

Appendix I: Elaborating Family–Nation–Work–Nature and Welfare

Appendix II: Situating the Author in Social Policy

Notes

References

Index. A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

POLITY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

Отрывок из книги

FIONA WILLIAMS

A source of intellectual stimulation was my association as advisor with Ito Peng’s international project Gender, Migration and the World of Care and Jenny Phillimore’s cross-national Welfare Bricolage project. I thank the Compass zoom discussion groups for rich debate on political strategies and activism.

.....

Political economy approaches which are relevant to social policy have themselves been refined over time. For example a ‘cultural political economy’ approach (Jessop 2013, 2015; Jensen and Tyler 2015) takes neoliberal austerity as a governmental project and looks at the changing realities and imaginaries of the ways the political and economic intersect in both capitalist social relations and capitalist accumulation processes. In other words, analysis of political economy is informed by an understanding of social and cultural relations. This is not just about social expenditure cuts but also about the means by which governments extend the very meaning of capital accumulation into the commodification and financialization of everyday life (Jessop 2015: 98). Similarly, John Clarke and Janet Newman’s (Clarke and Newman 2012, 2017; Clarke 2019a) understanding of austerity is informed by a ‘conjunctural’ approach developed from the analysis by Stuart Hall and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies of Margaret Thatcher’s ‘authoritarian populism’ in the 1980s (Hall et al. 1978). Importantly, too, Ian Gough develops a political economy of climate change and welfare which situates the environment centrally in the future of social policy (Gough 2017).

A critical approach questions the taken for granted in mainstream thinking – in this case, mainstream social policy. By ‘mainstream’ I refer to those bodies of work that establish theoretical or methodological ‘cores’ for the discipline and shape its subsequent research. Like disciplines, cores vary over time and place, but social policy literature reviews (e.g. Starke 2006), journal content analysis (e.g. Powell 2006) and disciplinary texts demonstrate the development of ‘cores’. While I use the heuristic device of distinguishing between ‘critical’ and ‘mainstream’ social policy, it will also be clear that the boundaries between the two have shifted over time and have been quite porous. In some countries, social policy exists not as a discipline but as a subsection of sociology, political science, political economy or economics which studies state and non-state welfare policies. Historically, at least in the UK, social policy has been associated with its social reforming origins and the development of European modernity. This means that, as the first section of the chapter showed, the hierarchies, exclusions and otherness associated with European modernity underpin the discipline’s theoretical development, even though, by its very subject matter, issues of equality and social justice run through its veins. Here, the crucial and central question becomes what and who is included in the ‘social’ of social policy and social justice, and this is one of the questions that the book explores.

.....