Making Markets In The Welfare State

Over the past three decades, market reforms have transformed public services such as education, health, and care of the elderly. Whereas previous studies present markets as having similar and largely non-political effects, this book shows that political parties structure markets in diverse ways to achieve distinct political aims. Left-wing attempts to sustain the legitimacy of the welfare state are compared with right-wing wishes to limit the state and empower the private sector. Examining a broad range of countries, time periods, and policy areas, Jane R. Gingrich helps readers make sense of the complexity of market reforms in the industrialized world. The use of innovative multi-case studies and in-depth interviews with senior European policymakers enriches the debate and brings clarity to this multifaceted topic. Scholars and students working on the policymaking process in this central area will be interested in this new conceptualization of market reform.

Peter Swenson's study implies that contrary to popular wisdom the welfare state builders in the USA and Sweden during the 1930s were motivated by a pragmatism founded in capitalist interests and preferences.

Conventional wisdom argues that welfare state builders in the US and Sweden in the 1930s took their cues from labor and labor movements. Swenson makes the startling argument that pragmatic social reformers looked for support not only from below but also from above, taking into account capitalist interests and preferences. Juxtaposing two widely recognized extremes of welfare, the US and Sweden, Swenson shows that employer interests played a role in welfare state development in both countries.

This 'Very Short Introduction' discusses the necessity of welfare states in modern capitalist societies. Situating social policy in an historical, sociological, and comparative perspective, David Garland brings a new understanding to familiar debates, policies, and institutions.

This volume represents the beginning of a 'cross pollination' of different social scientific disciplines, bridging the boundaries between national and disciplinary epistemic communities in the worlds of European welfare markets. It maps the common ground and uncovers new research directions for the future study of actors, policies and institutions shaping the growth and dynamics of European welfare markets. The book defines welfare markets as politically shaped, regulated and state supported markets that provide social goods and services through the competitive activities of non-state actors. The chapters focus on what happens after states have initiated welfare markets, with equal weight given to the analysis of the agency of state actors and non-state actors in the contraction, stabilisation, and disruption of welfare markets. By focusing the analysis on two cases of welfare markets, private pensions and home-based domestic/care work, the contributions explore and compare the dynamics of different types of markets. The research will be of use to sociologists and scholars of social policy interested in the social dimension of welfare markets, political scientists and political economists, as well as diverse epistemic communities across the social sciences. Chapter 1 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The welfare state has been under attack for decades, but now more than ever there is a need for strong social protection systems—the best tools we have to combat inequality, support social justice, and even improve economic performance. In this book, José Antonio Ocampo and Joseph E. Stiglitz bring together distinguished contributors to examine the global variations of social programs and make the case for a redesigned twenty-first-century welfare state. The Welfare State Revisited takes on major debates about social well-being, considering the merits of universal versus targeted policies; responses to market failures; integrating welfare and economic development; and how welfare states around the world have changed since the neoliberal turn. Contributors offer prescriptions for how to respond to the demands generated by demographic changes, the changing role of the family, new features of labor markets, the challenges of aging societies, and technological change. They consider how strengthening or weakening social protection programs affects inequality, suggesting ways to facilitate the spread of effective welfare states throughout the world, especially in developing countries. Presenting new insights into the functions the welfare state can fulfill and how to design a more efficient and more equitable system, The Welfare State Revisited is essential reading on the most discussed issues in social welfare today.

Quasi-markets and managerial steering techniques have spread in the provision of welfare state services and are now a salient feature. This innovative book explores the introduction and impact of marketization and managerialism in social policy by adopting a dual perspective - one on regulation and governance, the other on human resources - covering five fields of social service delivery. Welfare governance (for example, welfare mix, regulation, employment conditions and customer involvement) has changed significantly in the past decade. In particular, the new governance models not only clash with traditional ideas of bureaucratic regulation but also with the norms and standards of professional service delivery. The fact that the labor force in welfare organizations is made up of 'professionals' implies that the introduction of new modes of welfare governance often results in organizational conflicts. The editors and contributors collectively assesses these processes not only by comparing different policy fields and countries, but also by taking a close look inside organizations, examining the coping strategies of professionals, and how they adapt to new models of governing welfare organizations.An ideal compliment to undergraduate and postgraduate study, Restructuring Welfare Governance is essential reading for scholars in the fields of social policy, public administration and comparative welfare state analysis.

Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens offer the most systematic examination to date of the origins, character, effects, and prospects of generous welfare states in advanced industrial democracies in the post—World War II era. They demonstrate that prolonged government by different parties results in markedly different welfare states, with strong differences in levels of poverty and inequality. Combining quantitative studies with historical qualitative research, the authors look closely at nine countries that achieved high degrees of social protection through different types of welfare regimes: social democratic states, Christian democratic states, and "wage earner" states. In their analysis, the authors emphasize the distribution of influence between political parties and labor movements, and also focus on the underestimated importance of gender as a basis for mobilization. Building on their previous research, Huber and Stephens show how high wages and generous welfare states are still possible in an age of globalization and trade competition.