From a Welfare State to a Welfare Society: The Changing Context of Social Policy in a Postmodern Era

ISBN-13: 9780333730386 / Angielski / Miękka / 2000 / 224 str.

John J. Rodger

Opis

The welfare state is being subjected to fundamental re-appraisal. It is now commonly argued that modern Western societies require a new 'moral economy' in which responsibility for welfare and social care is shifted from the state to the family and community. This text critically assesses the range of academic and political debates around the questions such a shift raises, exploring how far social solidarity is possible when social inequality has become so in evidence in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

Spis treści

Introduction: From the Beveridge Welfare State to the Welfare Society.- Social Inequality, Civic Integration and Welfare.- The Welfare State in Decline?.- Society in Decline?.- In Search of Community: Communitarianism and Stakeholder Welfare.- Social Exclusion and the Poor: When Community Breaks Down.- Family Responsibilities and Collective Obligations: Amoral Familism and the Stakeholder Society.- Global Economies, Europe and the Future for Family and Community Policy.

O autorze

JOHN J RODGER is Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at Paisley University, Scotland. He is the author of Family Life and Social Control: A Sociological Perspective.

Blurb

The welfare state is being subjected to fundamental reappraisal. It is now
commonly argued that modern Western societies require a new 'moral economy', whether one of rediscovered charity and family values and increased welfare pluralism, or of rebuilt communities and a welfare system which provides a 'hand up' rather than a 'hand out'.

But do contemporary societies have the social solidarity and infrastructure
of caring networks to replace the overarching capacity of the state to
deliver social welfare? This text critically assesses the range of academic
and political argument and analysis that surround the much debated shift in
responsibility for welfare from the state to civil society. It both charts the changing economic and political context of social policy at the beginning of the twenty-first century in an era of post-Fordism, post-emotionalism, globalisation and rising social exclusion, and it links its discussion of practical welfare policies wtih increasingly salient theoretical debates around, for instance, changing conceptions of citizenship, social solidarity and community.

From a Welfare State to a Welfare Society situates its analysis in the
conflict between ideas from the present and past about the future. The
clash between modernism, anti-modernism and post-modernism as ways of seeing and approaching social policy is a recurrent theme in the text, which
centres on questions and debates of interest and value to a range of
students of social policy, sociology and politics.