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ОглавлениеSocial policy and social progress: how can we explore the world?
This book builds on an approach adopted in the eight editions of Understanding Social Policy (most recently Hill and Irving, 2009) and also in the book Social Policy in the Modern World (Hill, 2006). The former was essentially an analysis of policy in the UK while the latter represented a comparative review of developed welfare states across a number of policy domains and dimensions of disadvantage, with an approach embedded in the traditions of cross-national comparison. In one sense this book represents some continuity in the analysis of social policy development and its cross-national comparison. However, it also represents a broadening shift of perspective in response to changes that have occurred in the discipline of social policy and the scope of field of study. Although since the 2010s many countries now seek to turn inwards politically, economically and socially, it remains the case that momentum for global and world regional social policy has gathered pace, and that three decades of economic globalization means that no policy now emerges or exists in national isolation. That implies a need to combine a global perspective with a comparative one, accepting that, while there are many shared influences on national policy, responses vary considerably from country to country in ways that comparative analytical frameworks can help to explain.
The title of the book deliberately has a triple meaning, explored in this and the next two sections. First, it looks at the worlds of social policy in the comparative sense established by Esping-Andersen (1990) – that there are different welfare regimes, ways of arranging and organizing welfare provision based on different welfare relations, principles and mechanics. This approach to categorizing national welfare systems has dominated comparative study for a quarter of a century, providing insight and provoking further investigation in equal measure. While the ubiquity and impact of the ‘three worlds’ approach is undoubtedly sensed in general reading of international and comparative scholarship, in metric terms the study of ‘welfare regimes’ is indicated as the ‘leading topic’ in citation classics among key social policy journals (Powell, 2016). Since the 1990s, a significant critique and elaboration of this approach has contributed to its further embedding as a valid foundation for comparative research. Recent three worlds anniversary collections in the journal Social Policy and Society (2017) and Social Policy Review 27 (Irving et al., 2015) attest to the continuing influence of welfare state typologization as an analytical mainstay in comparing national welfare states and determining the factors that produce similarity and difference between them.
The welfare regime approach has, however, two important weaknesses. First, its limitations are most apparent where it is stretched beyond advanced welfare states (see Gough and Wood, 2004). Second, as an analytical approach it is more comfortably applied within some areas of social policy, particularly income security, than others. While it indicates essential parameters for the study of social policy around the world, these are most useful where the idea of regimes is used to suggest political and cultural characteristics that cluster and seemingly suggest determinants of change, rather than as an analytical prison that reduces debate to the accuracy of the typologies produced. This is particularly the case when attention is directed beyond countries with established welfare state architectures.
The second way in which the book looks at the world of social policy, is in the geographical sense, drawing on examples and systems from across the globe. In the twenty-first century, while it is possible to evidence many claims that the world is a better place than it has ever been – that human rights are more protected, that there are fewer social and geographical divisions and that more people have more power to determine the course of their lives than ever before – this has been an uneven development, and potential setbacks are only too evident today. Where global social progress has occurred, social policy has been central to its achievement, but because analysis of social policy is often restricted to the realm of established welfare state institutions, its wider arrangements and contribution outside of formal structures are less recognized, or at least less well integrated into policy debate and discussions of social politics centred in the global North. Because social policy is associated with recognizable administrative structures, distinctions often made between national categories, such as ‘mature’ welfare states, ‘emerging economies’ and ‘low-income countries’, carry the assumption that nation states remain the most important socio-political and policy units, an assumption that is challenged in the contemporary global circumstance.
The significance of the nation state has been a matter of debate within the globalization literature since the 1990s (for example Ohmae, 1990; McGrew and Lewis, 1992; Rhodes, 1994; Mishra, 1998; Pierson, 2001). The perceived strength or weakness of national actors divides perspectives in international political economy, and contrasts perspectives on the state as a ‘zombie category’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002) in the new forms of governance, with those that see the state as an enduring locus of government. The focus on ‘methodological nationalism’ has similarly vexed some analysts of social policy where comparative analysis of worlds of welfare capitalism (Esping-Andersen, 1990) and families of nations (Castles, 1999) has been argued to neglect both the transnational character of Western welfare state development and the rising influence of global actors, organizations and collectives on contemporary welfare evolution across the world.
In considering countries themselves, there is debate regarding the porous borders of welfare state development in the global North, and contestation of the idea that developed welfare states were ever ‘national’ or formed and managed within national borders (Clarke, 2005). This is not only because national borders themselves are subject to change, as secession, independent statehood, annexation and state formation shape and reshape countries geographically. The movement of people also means that ‘national’ populations have always been fluid, with consequent differentials in (welfare) citizenship. Additionally, however, as Clarke (and others, for example Williams, 1995) points out, the welfare states of advanced economies have been built on the labour and contribution of migrants. In Europe in particular, its place in the history of colonialism combined with the post-war expansion of a regionalist supranational organization, the European Economic Community, to become the European Union, has created a further European context for social policy development which sometimes overrides, sometimes follows and otherwise interacts with the ‘national’.
Analyzing ‘welfare states’ rather than social policy necessarily drives attention to the ‘state’ itself, and relatedly to the focus on ‘national’ units as the subject of study. Historically, this has made sense as national political events since 1945, such as the strength of national labour movements, their capacities in formal politics and their alliances with other interest groups such as the parties representing the middle classes or farmers, have shaped what are now the formally established systems of welfare provision in the global North. In the balance of provision within these systems, the roles and responsibilities of the state emerged as most influential in the achievement of social welfare, and a focus on state intervention therefore often overshadowed the activities of other non-state actors. From the 1970s, a backlash against state intervention began to gain political and popular support, leading to much greater interest in the activities of market actors, families and non-governmental (‘third-sector’) organizations and their place in the mixed economy of welfare.
There has been a more sustained contemporary academic critique of the problem of ‘methodological nationalism’ which characterizes comparative social policy scholarship and treats states (and their welfare arrangements) as stable, easily defined units of comparison. It is argued that this approach omits the increasingly important transnational and global influences, interests, actors and activities which, in many countries, have greater significance for welfare outcomes than those which are nationally confined (see Yeates, 2002, 2007; Wimmer and Schiller, 2003; Deacon, 2005, 2007). ‘International’ social policy is equally prone to this national categorization, especially where ‘international’ simply means the discussion alongside each country’s welfare arrangements and applies international in the sense that the countries described stretch beyond Europe (for example Alcock and Craig, 2001). The development of the subfield of global social policy (Deacon, 1997) was thus an important break from a scholarly focus on national actors to shift attention to the extremely powerful but under-researched interests and influences that operate in the global and transnational sphere. In this sphere, the ideas, desires and influences of political and economic actors, including international governmental organizations (IGOs) such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and United Nations (UN) as well as transnational businesses, aid organizations and activist networks, are all significant in shaping not only the general tone of social policy debate at the world level but also the development and implementation of social policies in individual countries and across world regions. The regionalization of social policy has itself become of much more direct significance and consequently of academic concern in the 2000s (Kaasch and Stubbs, 2014).
This is not to say that the role of interests beyond formal state institutions have been neglected. Historical analyses are clear that they also have their part to play – the medical profession in the emergence of the British welfare state for example, or the role of business actors in lobbying and shaping developments to minimize their costs or maximize their power. However, the operation of these interests was somewhat less complex in the mid-twentieth century than it is today. Even though borders have always been porous to some extent, certainly ethnically and culturally but also economically and even politically, in the 2020s the influences shaping mature welfare states are supranationalized, and the economy is globalized. For those countries where welfare state development is in its early stages (emerging economies such as India and Brazil), where it has yet to gain a stable institutional and bureaucratic foundation (such as Honduras and Nigeria), where conflict has devastated social systems (El Salvador, Syria, Somalia) or where society has been subject to a significant political intermission that has halted one trajectory and left the door open to an onslaught of possibilities (such as in Central and Eastern European countries), the traditional comparative understanding of ‘how’ welfare arrangements are brought to life and subsequently sustained is challenged. In this context, hierarchical categorizations based on whether a country has more or less of something – public spending as a proportion of gross domestic product (GDP), public administrative bureaucracy or social democratic cabinet seats, for example – are not only bound to emphasize difference rather than commonality, but in focusing on state-level institutions are also unable to capture the complexity of social policy actors and interests and their interaction amid and beyond the state. An approach which attempts to view social policy from a global perspective therefore requires a recognition that not all national social policies involve the state, and that not all social policies within states are state policy. It also reflects a looser understanding of the mixed economy of social policy and directs attention to a range of often unconnected programmes and projects with welfare objectives (see Deacon, 2007) as much as the overarching policy environments in which they exist (see Seelkopf and Starke, 2019).
One of the difficulties in mapping a world of social policy in this way, however, is the availability of data and, where data are available, the scope and scale of its detail. The picture provided by international comparative data is very mixed, and biased towards the richer nations. Data on ‘welfare states’ relating to levels of spending, participation in markets such as labour and housing, and indicators of outcomes, inequalities and diswelfare are accessible through international organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the European Union statistical service (Eurostat). The databases managed by these organizations provide important sources of information for comparative research among countries in the global North, that is, Europe (Eurostat) and the OECD – high- and middle-income countries which have passed the membership tests relating to economic and political values. OECD data routinely cover the current thirty-six member countries, although not all data are available for all countries because the databases rely on national statistical office submissions (Coicaud and Zhang, 2011). Outside of the richest states, Mexico and Chile are OECD members and both Colombia and Costa Rica are progressing with membership applications. While the scope of OECD data is considerable, and the organization is a prolific publisher of working papers and annual reviews of economic and social issues, OECD data clearly also have a geographical disadvantage in attempts to present a global perspective.
To answer questions about the worldwide state of welfare, ‘global’ social policy-related data are therefore generally drawn from the key IGOs: the World Bank; the agencies of the UN; the International Labour Organization; and sometimes the IMF. This ‘official’ data can be supplemented by so-called grey literature such as survey reports from international non-governmental organizations and private organizations that undertake mainly economic research. As a result, analysis that aims to produce global comparisons is limited in two key ways. Firstly, in databases that hold data for all nation states, depth is traded for breadth. Many countries with limited resources for data collection are only able to meet the collection of headline data targets and missing data are prevalent at the more granular level and across time. More importantly, in terms of robust analysis, international organizations such as the World Bank do not operate in a political vacuum and are themselves policy makers. As scholars of global policy making have shown, data collection is itself a political process, as issues are constructed and defined and the ways in which they are subsequently measured are determined by these organizations and their results feed into the wider policy agendas of both the IGOs and their member countries. In this way the IGOs have ‘social construction power’ (Barnett and Finnemore, 2004) and are able to assert ‘cognitive authority’ (Broome and Seabrooke, 2012) in relation to the social problems faced around the world, how they should be understood and what kind of responses are required.
Reflecting on the capacity for assessing the world of social policy, therefore, it is necessary to accept that due to limitations of data, depth of knowledge, sources of evidence and breadth of coverage, in practice scholars tend to work towards a global-comparative perspective rather than achieving like for like comparison wherever analysis goes beyond headline counts of key socio-economic indicators. To some extent, due to space constraints, qualitative depth is traded for quantitative breadth in this book too, and the balance of evidence in the chapters to follow also tends towards the use of statistical data rather than evaluation of the rich and significant qualitative research that informs social policy study.
The world of academic social policy study
In a third meaning, this book draws upon the world of social policy scholarship in the sense of exploring the parameters of the discipline (or field of study, as some scholars prefer). This is not to claim that the book is comprehensive in its range of analysis, or that it offers a definitive approach to social policy as an academic subject. The aim here is not to provide an encyclopaedia of international social policy (see Fitzpatrick et al., 2010 for such a publication) or a reference work (see Castles et al., 2010 and Greve, 2013). Instead the chapter contents aim to present an international analysis of the essential concerns of social policy, an examination of the policy domains generated to address these concerns and discussion of the contemporary challenges to policy makers in the twenty-first century brought by social and economic change.
The book is thus a contribution to the expansion of study in social policy and its understanding as an international and global endeavour. As noted earlier, the shape of social policies beyond established welfare states is often subject to influences that are neither ‘national’ nor ‘state’. This is highlighted in many of the chapter discussions, but in focusing on particular themes and challenges in areas of policy it is not possible to also do justice to the depth of insight drawn from analyses in global social policy that provide a more forensic examination of the politics and practices of international actors and organizations. This can be found both in more generalized accounts of social policy at the global level (for example Deacon, 1997; Deacon and Stubbs, 2013; Kaasch and Martens, 2015) and in work which is focused on specific policy areas in a global context (for example Kaasch, 2015; Verger et al., 2018). Similarly, while the policy domain chapters, in particular, aim to consider the subject matter beyond the concerns of advanced economies, space restricts detailed integration of the full breadth of perspectives from development studies on these concerns. Such integration of traditional social policy approaches with those from social development studies is emerging, both in academic research and in the work of organizations such as the UN (for example Mkandawire, 2016). The work of James Midgley has been particularly influential in establishing these disciplinary connections (Midgley, 1995; Hall and Midgley, 2004), which are further elaborated by others (Surender and Walker, 2013; Copestake, 2015), and they extend to more recent work on world regionalism and its emergent forms of social policy making (Deacon et al., 2010).
All these literatures help to inform the overarching analytical approach of this book, which recognizes the ways in which history, politics and economics matter, not just in terms of how institutions develop, but also in how national and global historical processes affect the way that people treat each other in bounded locations and across boundaries, the variety of ways in which policy operates vertically and horizontally and the kinds of material concerns that shape collective responses. The analysis also recognizes questions about whether and how all these dimensions are comparable, and which theoretical frameworks enable us to understand them better. Thus, although the comparative dimensions are important in all of the chapter analyses presented, an open understanding of social policy underpins the book, which recognizes that comparative frameworks developed in the context of advanced welfare states in the global North can do no more than assist in constructing better ways to explore social policy elsewhere in the world.
In view of this, social policy here concerns purposeful collective actions that influence the distribution of resources. Its analysis is very often, as in this book, driven by concerns about disadvantages and the structures of inequality, and therefore aims to improve welfare conditions and to contribute to social progress. This implies a particular focus on policies with self-evident welfare goals (such as those with respect to income support, health and social care) but also has regard (as for example in the discussions of employment, education and environment issues in this book) to the wide range of policies which have an impact on human welfare.
Social policy and social change
Examining the relationship between social policy and social change assists in delineating some key concepts used to analyze social policy in a way that detaches them from the specific concerns of mature welfare states. The purpose of this approach is to demonstrate the human commonalities that drive social policy development, and to emphasize that the answers to questions of when, how and why people seek to meet their needs collectively take us beyond the concern of ‘policy’ in any formal sense. The discussion will show that welfare is thus dependent upon a mixed economy and a combination of personal and collective efforts, describable in terms of the activities of households and families, localities and communities, and the economy and the state. Concerns about the extension of welfare, its desirability and the means by which it is achieved are matters of philosophical and ideological debate and political action. Social progress occurs as human needs are increasingly met, and human welfare is expanded. Social policy is not entirely responsible for delivering these kinds of improvements to the quality of people’s lives, their health and well-being, but without social policy improvements they are unlikely to occur, and where they do occur they are unlikely to be patterned in a way that promotes social justice.
It is tempting to look back through decades or centuries and make claims that, compared to the world of the early twentieth century for example, contemporary conditions of life such as those in work, habitat, prosperity and security are far removed from the privation experienced before the 1940s and the arrival of the ‘golden age’ of welfare capitalism (although see Wincott, 2013). The 1940s are generally regarded as the decade that propelled the instruments of rapid progress: welfare states, decolonization, international cooperation and economic growth on a continuous upward trajectory which has raised standards of all human life. This is argued to apply, even despite the intervening economic crises, civil and international conflicts and political upheavals. There is evidence to support this claim. In 2010 the UN Human Development Report (UNDP, 2010) included an assessment of changes in the indicators of the Human Development Index (HDI) (using measures of life expectancy, years of schooling and per capita income) from 1970, to show that taken together, all countries showed ‘impressive’ improvements and that the gap between developed and developing countries had narrowed by approximately 25 per cent in forty years.
Despite these claims of human progress, and the real benefits that this has brought to millions of people, the world remains a highly unequal place, and particularly since the global financial crisis in 2008, this inequality has increased along many dimensions. The UNDP report (2010) also presents many examples of failures and reversals in progress which ‘remind us that progress is not linear’ (2010, p. 30). Not only is this the case, but the world regional differentials have not changed either, with sub-Saharan Africa disproportionately represented in countries with reversals in progress, and in the lowest-ranking countries using the HDI measure. As economists (including two previously leading officials of the World Bank) have shown, inequalities of wealth and income began to rise in the decade before 2008 (Piketty, 2014; Atkinson, 2015; Milanovic, 2016; Stiglitz, 2016), but in the post-crisis world many of the equalizing welfare gains made in previous years have been reversed (Ortiz et al., 2015). The evaluation of social progress therefore clearly becomes less certain when further questions are asked regarding who has progressed and what the nature of that progress might be. It is also important to recognize that historical comparisons seeking to remind us how far we have come, especially those based on generalized quantitative measures, also require more context-heavy comparative, qualitative reflection as a counter-balance to the drawing of simple conclusions that progress necessarily accompanies the passing of time.
Where the analysis of social policy is concerned, there is much to consider in terms of social change that can be considered ‘progress’. The example of life expectancy (which is often used as a measure of social development) illustrates well the competing conceptions of ‘progress’, ‘welfare’ and ‘need’ that characterize the analysis and evaluation of social policy. Broadly speaking, it is clear that outside the effects of generalized military conflict in the early and middle periods of the twentieth century, people’s expectations of years of life have increased considerably. However, as research continues to highlight, the level of differentiation in the social distribution of these expectations is striking. Some of these differences are presented in Table 1.1.
Thus, while general trends for longer life, even in the poorest countries, do indicate, as the UNDP (2010) has suggested, that progress has occurred, the beneficiaries of this progress can easily be contrasted with those whose life expectations, both in years lived and the possibilities during those years, remain little different to those of a century ago. What is also apparent is that differences in expectations are shared transnationally, stratified across groups and geographies and not simply the problem of particular countries or regions. A second important theme emerges from the example of life expectancy, which is that progress may not necessarily be a good in itself. Living longer presents its own challenges for maintaining health, income and social participation. Thus the extension of life, both a desire and an outcome associated with development (in human and economic terms), is accompanied by the emergence of related needs. A substantial body of literature exists on the subject of ‘need’ (see Dean, 2010, for a summary of the debates), and what the basis should be for the provision of guarantees that needs are met. From the psycho-social hierarchy developed by Abraham Maslow and conditions of social citizenship outlined by T.H. Marshall in the mid-twentieth century, to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreed by the UN in 2016, the answer to the question of what is needed for a decent human existence centres on the development of social policy.
Table 1.1: Differentiated life expectancy at birth
| Black or African American women in the US (2016) | 77.9 | White women in the US (2016) | 81.0 |
| Women and men born in Central African Republic (2017) | 52.9 | Women and men born in Hong Kong (2017) | 84.1 |
| Women in Sierra Leone (2017) | 52.8 | Women in Australia (2017) | 85.0 |
| Boys born in the north-east of England (2012–14) | 78.0 | Boys born in the south-east of England (2012–14) | 80.5 |
| Increase between 1970 and 2010 in Norway | 7 years | Increase between 1970 and 2010 in the Gambia | 16 years |
Sources: UNDP (2010); US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/contents2017.htm#Figure_001; UNHDP, http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/HDI and http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/GDI; Office for National Statistics, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/bulletins/lifeexpectancyatbirthandatage65bylocalareasinenglandandwales/2015-11-04#regional-life-expectancy-at-birth.
In its tracking of trends in human development, the UNDP (2010) identified improvements in health and education as being the key drivers of progress.1 On a practical level, the notion that health and education are essential propellants for human development has underpinned the emergence of social provision throughout history, driving household strategies, the actions of social collectives and public intervention in state development. In theory and research, the significance of health and education is at the core of generalized theories of ‘need’ (for example Doyal and Gough, 1991) and in expanded debates on basic/human needs and capabilities (for example Sen, 1985), as well as measures of need satisfaction developed to improve and expand on the HDI (see Klugman et al., 2011, for a discussion of these). Education and health represent the core of the earliest welfare measures in the longest-established welfare states (i.e. those whose welfare arrangements have become determined by formal national politics and institutionalized bureaucratic structures). In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, public sanitation and compulsory schooling, alongside health insurance to meet needs related to illness and incapacity, laid the foundations of modern Western welfare states. In countries such as Brazil, South Korea and South Africa, publicly funded provision for health and education is similarly significant. These two needs represent an obvious intersection between conditions (‘health’ and ‘understanding’) that are essential for human flourishing, and potential (‘capacity’ and ‘ability’) that are essential to economic growth (and where national interests are concerned, competitiveness). What this intersection highlights, is the way in which social progress is coupled with both economic development and the role of the state.
There is an additional element of need that is directly associated with the interests of states: that of security. Security as a condition is usually conceptualized as concerning the absence of harm or the threat of harm. In broad terms, security incorporates physical, psychological and social dimensions of harm and extends beyond the personal security of individuals to the collective interests in security that pertain to states and, at their most universal, global security. For social policy, the significance of civil rights in guarantees of ‘security’ are essential (although they still remain only partially realized from a global perspective), but guarantees of security of livelihood are far more political. In essence, this difference has its roots in philosophical beliefs around the nature of human rights and freedoms, and while freedom from harm has gradually been recognized formally as something that sovereigns have the duty to protect over many centuries, the freedom to participate fully in society is much more contested. As industrialization – and, in the advanced economies, deindustrialization – takes place, pre-existing systems of householding and exchange are supplanted or reshaped, and this socio-economic change generates new needs, new demands for meeting those needs and the expectation, if not the reality of new responses to those demands.
The emergence of citizenship in the global North has rendered states important guarantors of both the rights and the freedoms associated with autonomy, health and security, the last of which Doyal and Gough (1991) argue is a prerequisite for the first two. However, even in countries that are regarded as well-established democracies in the global North, these rights and freedoms are fragile, and currently in both Europe and North America they are threatened by retrograde political forces (Szikra, 2014; Buzogány and Varga, 2018). Looking back less than a century, it is clear that even in established democracies, states also have the capacity to oppress people, limit freedoms and rights and control populations. Historically social policy has been an important tool by which social harm has been inflicted as well as a means to achieve social progress (King, 1999). There are instances where social policy has been used to deliberately disadvantage certain groups, but it is also the case that even where social policy is intended to guarantee rights, it operates in a world structured by many forms of social division, and while policies may seek to redistribute resources and opportunities, there are always risks that policy will effect no change, displace advantage or aggravate existing inequalities.
The many international declarations which now exist to commit states to guaranteeing rights in the realms of health, labour standards, gender equality and the treatment of citizens, refugees and children for example, act as both the political acceptance of need, and the basis for legitimate claims on collective resources. Nevertheless, while the world’s welfare is better served by having them than not, being a signatory of an international declaration is a relatively soft option for national governments, which weigh the political costs of meeting obligations against other competing interests. States can therefore be unreliable actors, irrelevant in practice and, at worst, destructive powers that produce greater diswelfare than welfare.
Given that states have a relatively short history as purveyors of welfare progressivity, and one that is also, globally, relatively limited in terms of geographical expanse and depth of intervention, it is not surprising that the provision of welfare is largely undertaken by non-state actors, even in countries with the longest-established formal institutions. The mixed economy of welfare characterizes all provision in all countries; what differs is the balance of activity, responsibility and obligation attributed to informal, state and market actors.
There is a substantial body of literature which explores ‘the family’ within the welfare mix, how families interact with wider informal means of welfare support and, related to this, the gendered operation of these activities in households, communities and the third sector. In the context of advanced economies, these studies necessarily account for the interaction between citizens and states, while in a development context the state is far less present and therefore the role of informal actors in care and welfare support is bound up with a focus on wider ‘household strategies’. Non-governmental welfare actors, agencies and organizations also have far greater involvement in modelling the welfare arrangements in the global South than the North, and the private sector too has a different shape depending on the extent to which states have the capacity to engage in regulatory and enabling policy making. It is well established that the boundaries between the state/market and third-sector actors are often blurred in practice, and in the contemporary global policy context these distinctions are becoming less and less clear. The CEOs of corporate giants such as Microsoft and Amazon, for example, are able to channel billions of dollars to charitable ventures which directly influence the nature of welfare provision and the ‘informal’ formation of policy goals in areas of health and security.
Discussion in this chapter has considered some of the universal themes which bind human commonalities in relation to welfare needs. It is clear that, as Titmuss (1974, p. 22) proposed when social policy study was in its academic infancy, social needs and problems are common, but they are approached differently in different times and places. The remaining chapters in this book seek to explore these commonalities and differences and to offer explanations for differentiation drawing on theoretical insight from a range of disciplines.
The chapters to follow are divided into two parts. The first part sets out three key frameworks of analysis used to understand and explain the shape (that is the design, development and outcomes) of social policy within the global context. These chapters draw on social scientific theories, concepts and themes developed across sociology, political science, political economy and economics that apply to the concerns of social policy and welfare states. Chapter 2 focuses specifically on the key historical problematic of social policy: inequality. This is because it is the existence and impact of inequalities and the political approach to these that shape the variety of policy responses to welfare needs. Chapter 3 considers ways of assessing difference and similarity in welfare arrangements in order to understand better their heritage, principles and survival. The final chapter in this section explores the mechanics of policy making in order to explain how things have been, and can be, done in the world of policy design and development.
The concerns of these chapters are also reflected in Part II. Here, not all chapters follow the same structure and they do not provide a systematic assessment across policy domains. This is because each chapter attempts to highlight key themes and issues that are most salient to the area, and most illustrative of the ways in which particular ideas, problems and processes affect policy development.
Part II focuses on a series of policy domains. These policy domains include what are sometimes referred to as the ‘five giants’ of post-war reconstruction, as identified by William Beveridge when he was tasked with assessing the provisions of the British welfare state in the early 1940s. This includes chapters on income security, work and employment, education, housing, and health. In addition to these domains of policy and service provision, we include two other areas of policy which are crucial to human welfare and social progress, but for various reasons are not always considered ‘core’ to the welfare state. There is a chapter on social care, which although not considered by British policy makers as a key element of societal rebuilding after the Second World War, is viewed through a very different lens in the twenty-first century. The term ‘social care’ is adopted for this chapter to distinguish the discussion of policy and provision from a wider consideration of the myriad dimensions of obligation and reciprocity in human relations that are inherent to the wider concept of ‘care’. Of course, these elements are also central to the operation of social care, but our distinction is one of perspective – the chapter is concerned with the mixed economy of care, that is, the ways in which the state, the market and people interact in the provision of care services. The final chapter in this section concerns environmental policy. Again, this is a policy domain which has been more generally associated with ‘public’ rather than ‘social’ policy, but again, the convergence of environmental concerns and social policy concerns in the modern world is such that the two areas are now inseparable.
The final chapter in this book has two purposes. Within a framework which foregrounds consideration of social change and continuity, the discussion draws together conclusions from the preceding chapters to identify the dominant themes. In addition to this, however, the chapter also reflects on the universal and particularistic dimensions of social policy and how these can shape a global understanding that assists in better exploring the world. It considers the general challenges and opportunities in the contemporary policy-making context and what they imply for the future development of social policy. There is much to be pessimistic about where the survival of state-supported welfare arrangements are concerned: the seeming triumph of markets over political processes; worsening inequalities within and between nations; a lack of welfare commitment on the part of governments; and the deterioration in public services through lack of funding and investment. What is clear from all the chapters is that the contemporary global ‘state of welfare’ is unsustainable for political, economic and moral reasons. However, even in ostensibly negative circumstances there is always possibility, and glimpses of this can also be discerned in many of the policy developments explored in the discussions to follow.
