The Functions of Social Quality Indicators

Abstract

As well as considering the ontological and epistemological aspects of the social quality theory, the previous chapters also referred to discourses on the European Social Model, the European Lisbon Agenda, the European welfare state, quality of life, social capital and globalisation. Has the social quality approach something new to offer (Walker, 1999)? Also, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, an underlying problem was discussed: the dominant Western economism, which is disconnected from discourses on political and ethical standards. The original motive of designing the social quality approach, at the end of the 1990s, was to create an alternative for the handmaiden position of social to economic policies based on utilitarian assumptions resulting in the ‘neo-liberal’ trans-Atlantic consensus (Beck et al., 1997). Later, from Asia, the approach has been adopted with regard to the overall question of sustainability and, therefore, of sustainable welfare societies (Ogawa and Van der Maesen, 2006; Hiroi, 2011) as well as the conceptual connection with the Chinese social harmony approach (Wong, 2009). As a consequence of this Asian input it is also important to know how to relate this approach with the human security discourses at a global level (Gasper et al., 2008). Also, according these discourses, the Western economistic approach causes not only a commodification of important aspects of life by downgrading these aspects to one-dimensional objects of strategies for profit-making as the core value of business (Van Staveren, 2004).