Nizu Chushin no Fukushi Shakai e--Tojisha Shuken no Jisedai Fukushi Senryaku (Towards a Needs-Based Welfare Society--Next Generation Individual Autonomy Welfare Strategies)

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, Japan's social welfare systems, including those for children, the elderly and the disabled, have shifted from institutional to contractual systems across the board. Institutional systems are those in which the government assesses needs and provides services, while contractual systems refer to those in which users select services through a quasi-market. This shift has been both positively and negatively evaluated, but the issue that is becoming increasingly important is the extent to which the particular needs of individuals are reflected in the social welfare system. This book is ‘a joint product born from a constructive process of mutual sharing and critical examination of the authors' ideas over the course of several intensive research meetings’ (p. 4) and is clearly not just a collection of articles. It integrates research employing several different approaches based on the common objective of creating a ‘needs-based welfare society’. These approaches include micro- and meso-level research on family care, care work and welfare institutions; macro-level research on social policy and welfare state theory and research conducted on different eligible groups such as the disabled and the elderly. The authors also integrate experiential and theoretical approaches in their analysis. A unique feature of this book is the care the authors took as they developed their argument to contrast the needs of welfare service recipients with those of their families and/or the ‘experts’, as well as to analyze the disparities between the needs of service recipients and the systems and policies in place, focusing primarily on the particular needs of recipients. The problem of family members and ‘experts’ controlling the needs of recipients has been stressed in disabled activist movements and in the field of disability studies in Japan. The same type of problem also exists in welfare for the elderly, and this book shows that this is a problem that Japan's entire social welfare system faces.