Towards a Schumpeterian Workfare Regime in Britain? Reflections on Regulation, Governance, and Welfare State

Abstract

In this paper I offer various comments on the contributions on economic and social policy in this special issue of Environment and Planning A. The contributions range from general theoretical reflections on regulation, governance, the politics of identity, and the welfare state to rich, detailed case studies of restructuring and reorientation in specific policy areas. Taken together these papers not only provide telling empirical material on recent dramatic changes in the British welfare state, but they also have important implications for a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues concerning the regulation approach. My own comments are also wide ranging but far less detailed. They focus on some key issues which arise in several of the papers and/or which pose more general questions regarding regulation-theoretic and state-theoretic analyses of contemporary Britain. Thus I first consider some methodological issues posed by the contributors' use of the regulation approach to contextualize and/or explain recent changes in the British welfare state. I then address some theoretical issues posed by their relative neglect of the distinctive political dynamic of the postwar British polity and/or the relevance of its distinctive crisis to the recent restructuring of the welfare state. This enables me to address some of the perverse effects of neoliberalism and the extent to which it represents a novel continuation of the crisis of Britain's ‘flawed’ Fordism rather than its resolution. I conclude with some general remarks on the regulation approach.