Post-war Welfare State Research Articles

Targets and overwork: Neoliberalism and the maximisation of profitability from the workplace

Drawing on 25 qualitative interviews, this paper attends to and critiques neoliberalism to demonstrate how management’s enforcement of targets and the expectancy to overwork in various workplaces corrodes the relationship between managers and employees. First, the paper briefly charts how the shift from post-war Keynesian welfare state capitalism to neoliberalism in the global north placed renewed emphasis on maximising profitability, and what this meant for working methods and innovations that managers now use to make an organisation more efficient. This is often regarded as ‘management practices’. It then connects management practices to the political economy and therefore sheds further empirical light on how management practices under neoliberalism impact adversely on workers, generating psychological distress, instability, pressure and a negative working environment. The paper closes with a discussion of how managers potentially perform an ideological function, directing workers’ attention away from neoliberalism and cementing capitalist realism; the negative ideological belief that there is no alternative to the current political economy.

Making Regulation Robust in the Innovation Era

The next few years in regulatory history will be pivotal. On one hand, we are witnessing renewed interest in robust state action in the economy and society. Battered by a poorly managed global pandemic and the undeniable persistence of racism and discrimination; terrified about the consequences of climate change; having suffered through years of political tumult and populist anger following a disastrous financial crisis; and having recognized once again that there is more to a person’s value than their economic productivity – it seems clear that over recent decades, public policy swung too far away from the humane, collective, and dignity-affirming priorities that underpinned the postwar Welfare State. At the same time, we know that we cannot simply return to the mid-twentieth century. Innovation is too fast-moving now, and conditions too complex and heterogeneous, to imagine that a replica of the postwar Welfare State would function property. Regulation operates at the front lines of policy now. And today, some of the greatest challenges that regulation faces stem from the speed, extent, and nature of human-driven change. Workable twenty-first century regulatory models will have to contend with the destabilizing, ongoing effects of innovation. After reviewing some Welfare State and Regulatory State history, this chapter suggests that innovation raises three fundamental analytical problems for regulation: information and data problems, visibility problems, and legibility problems. It then sets out five regulatory priorities that will be essential, if a forceful contemporary state is to be resilient in the face of innovation, while maintaining credibility and agency in the service of public priorities.

“Based upon New Principles”

AbstractThis essay examines the early life and work of the Russian American social reformer Abraham Epstein, an advocate for old-age pensions and compulsory social insurance whose work as head of the American Association for Social Security helped lead to the passage of the 1935 Social Security Act. The essay traces a young Epstein’s 1921–22 journey to Russia to study the Soviet government’s radical experiments in social welfare policy. Although Epstein was disillusioned with the Soviet system on the whole, his experiences in Soviet Russia informed his later idea of “social security”: a unified system of social insurance and social assistance to protect the entire population from social risk while functioning as a powerful tool of income redistribution. Epstein’s early interest in Soviet social welfarism adds new insight into the development of the broader concept of “social security,” an important but understudied link between Progressive Era “workingmen’s insurance” and the postwar welfare state.

Beyond “Legal Equality” vs. “Difference” Feminism: Leah F. Vosko Interviews Eileen Boris on Women and the ILO

Beyond “Legal Equality” vs. “Difference” Feminism: Leah F. Vosko Interviews Eileen Boris on Women and the ILO

A British national scandal: hunger, foodbanks, and the deployment of a Dickensian trope

ABSTRACT The normalization of foodbanks in Britain has sharply polarized public debates around issues of hunger. Government supporters laud their presence as a timely revival of an earlier tradition of voluntarism able to offset an unaffordable welfare state or stigmatize foodbanks as new spaces of ‘dependency’. Government critics view foodbanks as a consequence of ministerial indifference to growing hunger and a betrayal of the core values envisaged by the founders of the welfare state. The very presence of foodbanks in one of the richest countries in the world is denounced as a national scandal that violates an intrinsic quality of Britishness and signifies a regression to an earlier, more heartless era. In mooting this argument, critics have deployed a Victorian trope that evokes familiar figures and narratives from popular culture in a circular social imaginary of ‘what we were’ in the Victorian era as distinct from ‘what we have been’ in the post-war welfare state to ‘what we are reverting to’ now. The paper critically deconstructs the trope as a device to hold the government to account while also critiquing its nostalgia rooted in a mythic notion of the welfare state which was never as inclusive as popular imagining would believe.

The Rise of Block-Granting as a Tool of Conservative Statecraft

Abstract This article sheds new light on how conservatism has affected American state development by tracing the history of how block-granting transformed from a bipartisan tool to solve problems of public administration in the 1940s into a mechanism to roll back and decentralize the welfare state that had reached its zenith in the 1960s. By the early 1980s, conservative policymakers had coopted the previously bipartisan tool in their efforts to chip away at the increasingly centralized social welfare system that emerged out of the Great Society. In the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan successfully converted numerous categorical grants into a series of block grants, slashing funding for several social safety net programs. Block-granting allows conservative opponents of the postwar welfare state to gradually erode funding and grant more authority to state governments, thus using federalism as a more palatable political weapon to reduce social welfare spending than the full dismantlement of social programs. However, despite a flurry of successes in the early 1980s, block-granting has not proven as successful as conservatives might have hoped, and recent efforts to convert programs such as Medicaid and parts of the Affordable Care Act into block grants have failed. The failure of recent failed block grant efforts highlights the resilience of liberal reforms, even in the face of sustained conservative opposition. However, conservatives still draw upon the tool today in their efforts to erode and retrench social welfare programs. Block-granting has thus transformed from a bipartisan tool to improve bureaucratic effectiveness into a perennial weapon in conservatives’ war on the welfare state.

How Poverty Became a Violation of Human Rights: The Production of a New Political Subject, France and Belgium, 1964–88

The institutionalization of guaranteed minimum income systems in France and Belgium, carried out through the modernization of assistance schemes (Minimex in 1974, RMI in 1988), has generally been presented as the political outcome of the “rediscovery” of “hidden” poverty in the “affluent” societies of the mid-1960s. This article argues that a vision of this shift in terms of a “discovery,” however, suffers from significant limitations. To understand the historical pedigree of the reforms, this article will examine how the issue of “poverty” as such, was not simply “discovered” as a neglected social ill, but rather, “produced” to allow for new techniques of social intervention. The theoretical discovery of the “poverty” issue then, was marked by the slow constitution of a new political subject known as the “poor,” whose categorization and conceptualization would stand in stark opposition to the postwar welfare state notions of social justice and equality.

Dreams of Prosperity – Enactments of Growth

An old tractor serves as an ethnographic entry point to shifting articulations of resources in coastal Finnmark, North Norway. Idle since the 1970s, the tractor is a relic of agricultural dreams, turned to rubble as novel layers of the Varanger landscape are conjured as resourceful. Farming in Finnmark was a geopolitical strategy to secure national borders and to expand a post-war welfare state, it was also a colonial effort to cultivate farmers in the far north. This article details the back-breaking practices required to make thin Arctic topsoil collaborate in realizing modernist dreams of agricultural growth, while state interventions sought to ensure national borders and national identity. The author highlights dialectic relations between mapping and forgetting, crucial in the making of resources and colonizing practices.

The Young Medium: Regulating Television in the Name of Canadian Childhood

In the 1950s, many Canadians purchased television sets and contemplated the broader meaning of this new technology for their country, their families, and particularly their children. This article examines the opinions presented to the Royal Commission on Broadcasting in 1956 and demonstrates that many adults called for continued and/or strengthened state regulation of broadcasting in order to protect and shape an imagined vulnerable and malleable child viewer. Dozens of civic and social organizations, educational institutions, labour groups, and private individuals argued that the medium’s reorganization of space in the home, its potential as a tool to shape young lives, and its commercially sponsored programs and advertisements justified continued or heightened government control of television broadcasting. The context of the Cold War and postwar welfare state priorities shaped adults’ statements and beliefs about children’s television consumption.

Radio Broadcasting, Disability Activism, and the Remaking of the Postwar Welfare State

Through the history of the short-lived 1947 radio show La Tribune de l’Invalide, this article examines how the social and political context of the Liberation offered disability activists a unique opportunity to demand pensions, medical care, and social services hitherto denied to them by the French state. Drawing on transcripts of the broadcasts and correspondence between listeners and the show’s host Maurice Didier, the article demonstrates how disability activists played a pivotal, if little acknowledged, role in the construction of the postwar welfare state by highlighting French society’s historic neglect of disabled civilians.

Review: The Return of the Past: Postmodernism in British Architecture and Superstructures: The New Architecture, 1960–1990

The Return of the Past: Postmodernism in British Architecture Sir John Soane's Museum, London 16 May–27 August 2018 Superstructures: The New Architecture, 1960–1990 Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich 24 March–2 September 2018 Recent years have seen British architecture of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s attract growing interest. The buildings of this period are becoming old enough to be the subjects of proposals for substantial remodeling or demolition, and so some of the key debates in contemporary British architectural conservation are concerned with them. At the same time, historians are increasingly keen to look beyond the trente glorieuses of the postwar British welfare state (i.e., 1945–75), which coincided with the high-water mark of modern architecture and planning. How were the architectural and urban principles of the previous three decades challenged and refined during the second half of the 1970s and the 1980s? Two complementary exhibitions mounted in 2018 explored this question, one showcasing the postmodern revival of historic forms and urban principles, and the other examining so-called high-tech architecture, which celebrated structural engineering and the use of mechanical services, fusing modernist enthusiasm for contemporary technology and flexible planning with an interest in nineteenth- and twentieth-century engineering accomplishments. The Return of the Past: Postmodernism in British Architecture , presented at Sir John Soane's Museum in London, was curated by Owen Hopkins, who had previously curated exhibitions dealing with subjects ranging from the work of Nicholas Hawksmoor to that of Alison and Peter Smithson. The show took place principally in the museum's two temporary exhibition galleries, but it began in the adjacent Yellow Drawing Room. There, items from the permanent collection were juxtaposed with those brought in temporarily for the show. One of the giant yellow “egg cups” from the roofline of Terry Farrell's 1983 TV-am headquarters building in London echoed the color of the room, into which were brought chairs by Charles Jencks and others, while the painter Carl Laubin's dramatic depiction of Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones's reworking of the Royal Opera …

Business, labour and the costs of welfare state development

This article presents a novel explanation for instances of business support for welfare state expansion. It emphasizes the importance of cost considerations in shaping business preferences and argues that their willingness to support and ability to oppose demands for increases in the generosity of social insurance programmes depends primarily on the extent to which labour unions accept that these increases are to be financed by workers themselves. Based on a comparative-historical analysis of postwar welfare state development in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, the article shows that this willingness among others depended on the type of labour market risk, the margin for pay increases, and the extent to which social welfare initiatives were perceived as actual improvements to the social wage by labour unions.

Conceptualizing Activation Policies Targeted at Single Mothers: A Case Study of Australia and the United Kingdom

AbstractSingle parents are increasingly a target group for “activation” through new obligations to seek paid work or engage in education or training. Researchers commonly characterize new activation policies in terms of epochal shifts or unidirectional movements away from understanding single parents as “carers” or “mothers”. This characterization downplays the degree to which the postwar welfare state viewed single parents as potential workers and the degree to which contemporary reforms view them as carers. Based on historical research and drawing on Foucault’s concept of problematization and research on neoliberal governmentalities, pre-emptive politics and anticipatory modes of power, this article seeks to extend existing characterizations of activation policies for single parents.

Pathways to the 1946 Curtis Report and the post-war reconstruction of children’s out-of-home care

ABSTRACTThe publication of the Report of the Care of Children Committee in 1946 was a pivotal moment for the out-of-home care of children in Britain. With its key recommendations implemented in the 1948 Children Act and the creation of bodies such as the Central Training Council in Child Care and the Home Office’s Advisory Council on Child Care, the report also had wider public significance in associating progressive approaches to child-care with the emerging post-war welfare state. This article argues that the creation of the Curtis Committee was far from inevitable and resulted from the inter-play of the growing recognition of the problems associated with a fragmented legislative and administrative framework for children’s care and a successful public campaign to reform standards in residential child-care which created the political conditions in which the Labour Government felt obliged to establish a formal Committee of Inquiry. The degree of interest that these processes generated in the Committee’s work led to its final report receiving substantial public attention. Although its effects as a mechanism of policy change were uneven, the context through which the report was produced meant that it became a significant benchmark for child-care standards in the emerging post-war welfare state.

A new materiality in praise of the ordinary, in Palestine-Israel c. 1940–66

This article examines the emergence of a new materiality in Israeli architecture in the 1950s. I refer here to two distinct but interrelated senses of the word materiality. The first is predicated on the socioeconomic and geopolitical conditions in which architecture, like all fields of artistic production, takes shape; the second reflects the use, handling, and finishing of materials in construction. I show how several key figures in architectural circles in the recently founded State of Israel expressed this new materiality by developing a new style, characterised by restrained formal gestures, abstention from material extravagance, the use and exposure of local materials, an emphasis on the legibility of structure, and an appeal to rational building procedures. This style was a product of both pressing objective material constraints, which were acute in the postwar welfare state and its austerity regime, and ideological frameworks from the interwar period, the foundations of which were cultural as well as disciplinary.

Feeling Poor: D.W. Winnicott and Daniel Blake

This article draws on Donald Winnicott's understanding of human dependence and Ken Loach's film I, Daniel Blake (2015) to open up a new space between 'psychoanalysis' and 'politics'. Its starting-point is what Stuart Hall has described as the 'ferocious onslaught' on the post-war social-democratic settlement and its initial commitments to the idea of the 'full life' and 'social security for all'. Putting dependence at the heart of human experience, Winnicott's psychoanalysis is especially attuned to the individual and collective harms imposed by this new 'age of austerity'. 'Feeling Poor' explores the structures of material and psychic dispossession at work in contemporary regimes of austerity – in particular, the neoliberal denial of human dependence and vulnerability. What does the neoliberal world, its reformations of the social state, make of the primal situation of dependence – its terrors and dreads as well as its impulses towards culture and community? How might we reconceive vulnerability in solidarity rather than stigma? What might a psychoanalysis attuned to 'dependence as a living fact' contribute to the cultures of protest mobilized through the aesthetics of British social realism? Part of a wider exploration of the question of psychoanalysis and class, this article attempts to think about the symbolic functions of care embedded in the post-war welfare state and engages the potential of Winnicott's psychoanalysis as a means to social critique.

First Aid and Voluntarism in England, 1945-85.

First aid was the focus of growing voluntary activity in the post-war decades. Despite the advent of the National Health Service in 1948, increased numbers of people volunteered to learn, teach, and administer first aid as concern about health and safety infiltrated new activities and arenas. In this article we use the example of the Voluntary Aid Societies (VAS, focusing in particular on St John Ambulance) to highlight continuities and change in the relationship between state and voluntary sector in health and welfare provision during the four decades after 1945. Though the state assumed vastly expanded health and welfare responsibilities after the war, the continuing vitality of the VAS suggests cultural continuities that the post-war welfare state did not eradicate. The article therefore builds on the insights of historians who argue that volunteering remained a vital component of British society across the later twentieth century, and that the state and voluntary sector were not mutually exclusive.

FROM BREXIT TO HEGEL

ABSTRACTBritish idealism has led an ambiguous existence in any overview of British historical and political thought in the twentieth century. Seen partly as an alien Continental intrusion into presumably typical British priorities of empiricism, positivism, and utilitarianism, it was badly damaged by its putative associations with the military enemy of two world wars. Admir Skodo's meticulous study of British “idealist revisionists” during the postwar period 1945–1980 repairs this damage by showing the extended influence of that idealism as funneled through the “new idealism” of the interwar period represented mainly by the philosophers R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott. Skodo demonstrates how these idealist revisionists deeply influenced postwar British historiography by underscoring qualities of humanism, pluralism, and variety not characteristically associated with idealism, reinterpreted a range of important topics in British history from the Tudors through the English civil wars to the Victorian period, and came up with political theorizing that celebrated the postwar welfare state while indicating its vulnerabilities to an increasingly technologized society. Just as Skodo's protagonists negotiated the 1970s transition in Britain's turn to Europe, so his account proves stimulating for contemporary concerns regarding a post‐Brexit Britain. The final part of the essay therefore looks at some suggested models, such as the “Anglosphere” or a “Singapore in the Atlantic” for Britain, before concluding with reflections on the importance according to a Hegelian reading of the modern “rational state” of the continued influence of Oxbridge intellectuals on the evolution of British directions and goals since the Victorian age.

‘Uneasy bedfellows’ conceiving urban megastructures: precarious public–private partnerships in post-war British New Towns

ABSTRACTFrom its inception, the European welfare state was a contract between the state, civic society, and the private sector. And yet, studies on the architecture and urbanism of the European welfare state frequently overlook the role played by the private sector, as the emphasis is commonly placed on governmental action. However, apart from governments also private actors played an important role in shaping the post-war welfare state. New towns in particular were sites of experiment. Here, public–private partnerships forged novel collective spaces, which challenged and redefined what constituted the civic realm. This paper focuses on one such novel type of collective space: the megastructural ‘heart’ of second-wave British New Towns. Combining mass consumption with administrative and civic functions, thereby blending the concepts of ‘shopping centre’ and ‘city centre’, these structures embodied the welfare state’s belief that capitalism could neither live with nor without the existence of a pervasive welfare system (and vice versa). Through the analysis of three megastructures, this paper highlights the important role that private actors played in the formation of the post-war British welfare state; it explicates the lofty societal ambitions that these New Town schemes expressed; and it pinpoints the precariousness of public–private partnerships in the development of urban megastructures.

Decolonizing the New Town: Roy Gazzard and the Making of Killingworth Township

AbstractWhat better laboratory for an experiment in racial integration could there be than the nascent community of a new town? The architect Roy Gazzard posed this question in 1969, as he embarked on designing the new town of Killingworth in northern England. A self-proclaimed “social engineer,” Gazzard applied his experience as a town planner in colonial Uganda to shaping a new community in the postimperial metropole. Historians have long recognized the way that built forms were translated from metropole to colony, but the reverberations of colonial planning in the postwar European welfare states have received little attention. In this article I use intellectual biography to chart the trajectory of notions of community, spirituality, space, and place as they migrated from colonial Uganda to postimperial Britain. I focus on the career of Roy Gazzard, an outspoken social engineer and devout Christian, who hoped to use his colonial urban planning experience to counter what he saw as the increasingly secular and centrifugal forces in modern British society. An examination of letters, private paper, lectures, planning documents, and diagrams held in the newly opened archive of Gazzard's work illuminates the course of colonial expertise as it was refracted back into the postcolonial metropole.