Social Policy: Unilateral Transfer or Reciprocal Exchange

Abstract

There is absolutely no way to attack poverty through the transfer of economic resources without also profoundly affecting, for better or ill, the social bond. Definitions of social welfare generally recognize ‘…the mutually supportive obligations of people to each other’. Yet many serious and competent social thinkers apparently deny the significance of reciprocity in those social exchanges that are arranged as a matter of social policy. The predominant view is that social policies are ‘…characterized not so much by exchange by which a quid is gotten for a quo as by unilateral transfers that are justified by some kind of appeal to a status or legitimacy, identity or community’. Titmuss refers to the grant or gift as a unilateral transfer which ‘…is the distinguishing mark of the social (in policy and administration) just as exchange or bilateral transfer is the mark of the economic’. It will be argued here that this view, useful in some ways, also seriously distorts perceptions and has a deleterious effect on the design and implementation of programmes that make up the official helping enterprise in general, and programmes of income maintenance in particular. Most often social policy transactions are erroneously conceived in ideal or pure terms, bearing little or no resemblance to economic or market exchange. In reality, however, the vast majority of all transactions, economic and social, occur on a continuum between these theoretical poles.