History Of Welfare State Research Articles

Educational knowledge and politics of receiving migrant pupils. A contribution to Danish welfare state history during the late twentieth century

ABSTRACT The arrival of guest workers in Denmark from the late 1960s meant new political questions of how to receive their children in school. During the 1970s, the heyday of welfare state reforms, a new area of welfare state politics and policy emerged concerning these children: an education politics of migrant pupils accompanied by knowledge being produced in the intersection between the pedagogical professional field, the academic field and the political field. This politics, policy and knowledge area soon became contested among politicians, professionals and academics. The article explores a core discussion still taking place at present, namely how approaches for receiving newly arrived pupils in the Folkeskole (the primary and lower secondary school. Based on source material consisting of parliamentary debates from the official political field and the professional and research-based literature that developed in the period, the article sheds light on how educational knowledge on different approaches to reception was circulated between fields. Executing an analysis that combines concepts from sociology and history of education and knowledge and from theory on policy processes, the article shows how knowledge and politics interacted to make or reject policy junctures in the formative decades when the politics of migrant pupils in the Danish welfare state was established, namely from the early 1970s and up until the mid-1990s. We conclude that local developments and debates in the knowledge production field shaped early school integration policies in the Danish welfare state during the 1970s and 1980s, but had limited influence in the 1990.

Foregrounding the Freedmen’s Bureau: A Heterodox Welfare State History

ABSTRACT The Freedmen’s Bureau was the first national U.S. welfare institution. This fact has not, however, motivated scholars to draw duly substantive connections between the Bureau and the welfare state. This article traces empirical patterns of labor, gender, and race from their first nationalization under the Bureau to their formative influence on the evolution of what is considered to be the welfare state. The article goes on to show the Bureau to mark the first instance of an actual U.S. welfare state. More importantly, the resulting reconceptualization suggests the Bureau to represent the only historical instance of an actual U.S. welfare state, all subsequent formations comprising merely a performative welfare state for lack of their attempt, or even intention, to fully rectify the enduring racial injustice inherited from chattel slavery. The performative welfare state, as it were, has thereby only ever prescribed systemically inequitable normativity antithetical to the notion of welfare.

Housing Violence in the Post-welfare Context

ABSTRACT Housing transformation creates conditions or situations that may be experienced as “everyday violence”, which is present in mundane life but may not necessarily be recognized as violence. This article argues that post-welfare housing violence differs from other housing violence while being affected by the society’s welfare state ideologies. Violence may develop slowly or manifest itself in subtle ways when the rights to own, use, and develop housing estates are debated. By analysing activists’ struggle against the privatization of a Swedish suburb, the article elaborates on the forms of post-welfare housing violence, and the ways in which violence is made visible and contested. The analysis reveals how post-welfare housing violence is normalized and slow violence, and how the by-product of the welfare state history is the effort to invisibilise violence in situations that were earlier public responsibility.

The Danish ‘ghetto initiatives’ and the changing nature of social citizenship, 2004–2018

This article critically examines the Danish ‘ghetto initiatives’ of 2004, 2010, 2013 and 2018, with a particular focus on their implications for ‘social citizenship’. Its approach is twofold: firstly, it explores how each of the four major ghetto initiatives constructed ghettos and their residents as a problem for the welfare state, and what policy measures were proposed to address the problems identified. Secondly, it examines the legislative changes that resulted from each of the ghetto initiatives and assesses their implications for social citizenship. In doing so, it relates its findings to the different developmental stages of social citizenship in Danish welfare state history. The article argues that the ghetto initiatives have led to an unprecedented spatialization and ethnicization of social citizenship which mark a radical departure from the guiding principles of post-1945 Danish welfare thought and practice.

Sustainable Welfare beyond Growth

The history of welfare states is tightly linked to industrial capitalism and a mode of regulation where production and consumption patterns increased in parallel [...]

Stuck! Welfare state dependency as lived experience

ABSTRACT The concern that public support may spur dependency has been voiced throughout the history of welfare states. Nevertheless, little research examines the experience of welfare state dependency in the context of recipients’ everyday lives. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of a case involving Anna, who depends on the Danish welfare system for financial benefits and other forms of support. The study spans five years from age 19 to 24, and includes some of the significant others in Anna’s everyday life – her mother, who also depends on welfare, and her caseworkers. By situating Anna’s experiences in a temporal and social context, the case study advances a nuanced understanding of welfare state dependency and identifies three driving forces of the experience: (1) the concern about intergenerational transmission of dependency that spurs a shared sense of hopelessness among Anna and her significant others; (2) the recurrent changes of diagnoses that adds to the feeling of dependency by repeatedly generating waiting time, e.g. for new psychiatric assessments; (3) the system’s requirement to produce numerous but sketchy future plans that lack real-world plausibility. The case study clarifies the importance that respectable exits out of welfare state dependency are not only imaginable but also believable.

Influence and Adaptation: The Schumpeterian Perspective on Business-Politics Relations

This paper introduces Schumpeter’s views on the relationship between business and politics and argues that we can discern a distinct Schumpeterian perspective of business-politics relations. Schumpeter’s views about the pivotal role of entrepreneurs in economic development attracted substantial interest in economic sociology and in political economy. His views about the role of entrepreneurs in politics have so far however hardly been studied. The paper identifies the following four aspects as central to Schumpeter’s perspective of business-politics relations: (a) entrepreneurs and corporations drive economic change, (b) entrepreneurs and corporations are ineffective in defending their political interests and vulnerable to hostile movements, (c) the resulting divergence of the economic and the political impact of entrepreneurs and corporations makes capitalism socio-politically instable, and (d) the relationship of entrepreneurs and corporations to political institutions and public policies is primarily adaptive, rather than causative. The paper proposes a two-dimensional typology of business-politics relations that combines the Schumpeterian focus on adaptation with the Marxian focus on influence. These two dimensions - adaptation and influence - result in four ideal types: business-dominated social compromise, imposed social compromise, business dominance, and political confrontation. Examples from German welfare state history illustrate these four types. The paper suggests that the Schumpeterian and the Marxian perspective, while in contrast to each other, may be complementary and each perspective valid under different socio-political conditions.

La Gerusalemme celeste in terra. Radici ed evoluzione del "welfare socialdemocratico"

The chapter aims to introduce some considerations with a historical approach related to the evolution of the cultural stances adopted by the leading forces of the worker and socialist movement - particularly those of reformist orientation - towards the policies of social protection. Moreover, it outlines a general scheme of a time period, which allows to view the evolution of social welfare systems into the welfare-state model. The first result of this research program is that the ongoing exchance of views that led to the Welfare State did not follow a straight line. Moreover, even the definition of socialism and social-democracy requires to be dealt with in a more pluralistic view, taking into account the variety and the differences in both doctrines and practices to be found in the European countries, even if inside a common political family. Examining the cultural ideas of the social-democracies which grow towards social protection policies it helps scholars to debunk several generalizations and see gaps and recurring features if a "path dependence" approach is followed. The idea that history of welfare state can be described as a sort of continuous and mechanical process of enlightened conceptions and reform projects which little by little become modern and advanced, is problematic. Since that it appears to be more as the result of a series, sometimes casual, of choices motivated by necessity and contingent situations.

A History of Welfare State and Family/Kin Support

volumes, based on the research project Kin ship and Social Security (KASS). The project is financed by the European Union's Sixth Framework Programme and led by Hannes Grandits (Humboldt University, Berlin) and Patrick Heady (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany). It involves researchers, mainly historians and anthropologists, from eight countries: Italy, Sweden, Germany, France, Austria, Croatia, Poland, and Russia (in the order they appear in the book). One overall aim of the project is to study when, where, and why, during the twentieth century, families/kin were the most important institutions to provide for people, and when and where the welfare state took precedence. The authors would also like to establish a causal link between families/kin and the welfare state. Are wel fare states built in response to some average degree of family and kinship support, or does a strong welfare state lead to reduced family/kinship support? The authors set their ambitions high and at the end of the volume they—as we might have expected—conclude that it is impossi ble to determine the causal direction.

Internationale Expertennetzwerke und nationale Sozialstaatsgeschichte: Versicherung der Silikose in Deutschland und der Schweiz (1900–1945)

International Networks of Expertise and National History of the Welfare State: The Insurance of Silicosis in Germany and Switzerland (1900–1945) The article examines the role of international expert networks for the history of national welfare states. It focuses, as an exemplary case, on the insurance of silicosis, a severe industrial disease most common among miners and metal workers, comparing Switzerland and Germany. Both countries accepted silicosis as an industrial disease, to be insured as an occupational illness by the national institutions for accident insurance, only comparably late in the 1920s, long after countries like Britain and South Africa. The article argues that the process of recognising silicosis as a case to be insured under national accident insurance schemes was not triggered through bilateral learning processes (for example contacts between Swiss and British institutions) but rather by an alliance of national, international and transnational actors. In particular, international organisations like the International Labour Office (ILO) and transnational networks like the International trade union of stone workers were crucial for the recognition process. The article highlights the main factors for granting silicosis the status of an occupational illness; it also examines the early years of the insurance regime in which the influence of the ILO and international trade unions gradually vanished.

Cultural Categories and the American Welfare State: The Case of Guaranteed Income Policy

There is considerable evidence that cultural categories of worth are central to the ideological foundation of the American welfare state. However, existing perspectives on U.S. welfare policy development grant little explanatory power to the role of culture. For this reason, they cannot adequately explain the dynamics of an important, but frequently overlooked, episode in American welfare state history: the rise and fall of guaranteed annual income proposals in the 1960s and 1970s. The author outlines three mechanisms—schematic, discursive, and institutional—through which culture can influence policy outcomes. He then argues that cultural categories of worthiness affected welfare policy development through their constitutive contribution to cultural schemas, their deployment by actors as resources in expert deliberation and public discourse, and their institutionalization in social programs that reinforced the symbolic and programmatic boundaries between categories of the poor. The author discusses how th...

International Class Conflict and Social Policy

The history of welfare states is marked by divisions between capital and labour and these divisions are replicated at the international level. At the heart of these divisions is enduring class interests which accord different priorities to social and economic factors. That these divisions exist is neither surprising, nor necessarily a problem; the problem, this paper argues, is the increasingly high priority given to business interests by ever more powerful international governmental organisations. This paper presents an analysis of power in the global economy before investigating the social policy preferences of key international capital and labour organisations. It argues that international class mobilisation has failed to produce very much of a compromise on the part of capital, and that, if anything, international social policy discourse is today even closer to business than it has ever been.

Health Policy and the History of Welfare States: A Reinterpretation

This article assesses recent studies of the history of welfare states and proposes an alternative interpretation of the history of policy for health services. Health policy, like policy for retirement income, job security and unemployment, social services and housing, has been profoundly influenced by the politics of economic productivity, social justice, and demographic change in each country. However, health policy has also been guided by perceptions of the nature and course of disease and opinions about the probability that particular medical interventions, organized and distributed in particular ways, would ameliorate its effects.

Welfare State History: The Limits of the New

Welfare State History: The Limits of the New

Family allowances in Canada and Australia 1940–1945: A comparative critical case study

ABSTRACTWhilst quantitive and ‘positivist’ modes of comparative social policy can reveal significant structural factors involved in the making of welfare states, they too often ignore the role of human agency, intention and political processes. A critical-historical comparative case study of the introduction of ‘child endowment’ and of ‘family allowances’ respectively in Australia (1941) and in Canada (1944) reminds us of the interplay between structural constraints and human agency in the history of welfare states. Detailed analysis suggests that institutionalised arrangements in Australia after 1905 to resolve capital-labour conflict via arbitral and wage fixation mechanisms put the question of the adequacy of wages in meeting family needs and with it proposals for child endowment onto the public agenda as early as 1920. In Canada the absence of such mechanisms, and alternative welfare arrangements to deal with family welfare, combined to keep such proposals off the public agenda. After 1939 the development of ‘war economies’ in Australia and Canada created common contradictions for governments, trying to maintain both industrial peace and anti-inflation policies, which the introduction of family allowances in both countries were attempts to resolve. Consideration is also given to a range of political problems and contexts in both countries which this particular policy measure attempted to deal with.