Download or read book Reasons for Welfare written by Robert E. Goodin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1988-08-21 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Goodin passionately and cogently defends the welfare state from current attacks by the New Right. But he contends that the welfare state finds false friends in those on the Old Left who would justify it as a hesitant first step toward some larger, ideally just form of society. Reasons for Welfare, in contrast, offers a defense of the minimal welfare state substantially independent of any such broader commitments, and at the same time better able to withstand challenges from the New Right's moralistic political economy. This defense of the existence of the welfare state is discussed, flanked by criticism of Old Left and New Right arguments that is both acute and devastating. In the author's view, the welfare state is best justified as a device for protecting needy--and hence vulnerable--members of society against the risk of exploitation by those possessing discretionary control over resources that they require. Its task is to protect the interests of those not in a position to protect themselves. Communitarian or egalitarian ideals may lead us to move beyond the welfare state as thus conceived and justified. Moving beyond it, however, does not invalidate the arguments for constantly maintaining at least the minimal protections necessary for vulnerable members of society.
Download or read book Protecting Soldiers and Mothers written by Theda Skocpol and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a commonplace that the United States lagged behind the countries of Western Europe in developing modern social policies. But, as Theda Skocpol shows in this startlingly new historical analysis, the United States actually pioneered generous social spending for many of its elderly, disabled, and dependent citizens. During the late nineteenth century, competitive party politics in American democracy led to the rapid expansion of benefits for Union Civil War veterans and their families. Some Americans hoped to expand veterans' benefits into pensions for all of the needy elderly and social insurance for workingmen and their families. But such hopes went against the logic of political reform in the Progressive Era. Generous social spending faded along with the Civil War generation. Instead, the nation nearly became a unique maternalist welfare state as the federal government and more than forty states enacted social spending, labor regulations, and health education programs to assist American mothers and children. Remarkably, as Skocpol shows, many of these policies were enacted even before American women were granted the right to vote. Banned from electoral politics, they turned their energies to creating huge, nation-spanning federations of local women's clubs, which collaborated with reform-minded professional women to spur legislative action across the country. Blending original historical research with political analysis, Skocpol shows how governmental institutions, electoral rules, political parties, and earlier public policies combined to determine both the opportunities and the limits within which social policies were devised and changed by reformers and politically active social groups over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By examining afresh the institutional, cultural, and organizational forces that have shaped U.S. social policies in the past, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers challenges us to think in new ways about what might be possible in the American future.
Download or read book The Welfare State Revisited written by José Antonio Ocampo and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-27 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Welfare State written by David Garland and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Sympathetic State written by Michele Landis Dauber and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a variety of materials, including newspapers, legal briefs, political speeches, the art and literature of the time, and letters from thousands of ordinary Americans, Dauber shows that while this long history of government disaster relief has faded from our memory today, it was extremely well known to advocates for an expanded role for the national government in the 1930s, including the Social Security Act. Making this connection required framing the Great Depression as a disaster afflicting citizens though no fault of their own. Dauber argues that the disaster paradigm, though successful in defending the New Deal, would ultimately come back to haunt advocates for social welfare. By not making a more radical case for relief, proponents of the New Deal helped create the weak, uniquely American welfare state we have today - one torn between the desire to come to the aid of those suffering and the deeply rooted suspicion that those in need are responsible for their own deprivation.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Swedish Politics written by Jon Pierre and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 737 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook provides a broad introduction to Swedish politics, and how Sweden's political system and policies have evolved over the past few decades.
Download or read book In Defence of the Welfare State written by Paul Wilding and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book After the Welfare State written by Tom G. Palmer and published by . This book was released on 2021-09-06 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Defending the Swedish Model written by Gregg Bucken-Knapp and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2009 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across Europe the prospect of a rapidly shrinking workforce has put increased labor migration back on the political agenda However for many on the political left concerns exist that less restrictive labor migration policies threaten core features of the social democratic project. This is perhaps clearest in Sweden which in late 2008 adopted a liberal approach to third-country national labor migration allowing employers to hire freely from outside the European Union. Defending the Swedish Model explores the debate leading up to this reform focusing on the preferences of the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) and the Swedish trade union confederation (LO). While generally positive to the economic potential of increased labor migration these allies remained highly skeptical toward calls from employers and bourgeois parties for liberalization Gregg Bucken-Knapp argues that the SAP and LO develop their labor migration policy preference on the basis of whether specific reform alternatives are perceived as being consistent with or as undermining the Swedish model in the case of third-country nationals both allies considered liberalization a threat to full employment aims instead seeking to preserve an influential role for the state labor market board and organized labor. Bucken-knapp also focuses on the Swedish labor migration debate prior to the 2004 enlargement of the European union showing how SAP concerns over potential abuse of the universal welfare sate led to its support for transitional arrangements defending the Swedish model illuminates the challenges faced by social democrats and trade unions when considering the need for increased labor migration Book jacket.
Download or read book The Shadow Welfare State written by Marie Gottschalk and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why, in the recent campaigns for universal health care, did organized labor maintain its support of employer-mandated insurance? Did labor's weakened condition prevent it from endorsing national health insurance? Marie Gottschalk demonstrates here that the unions' surprising stance was a consequence of the peculiarly private nature of social policy in the United States. Her book combines a much-needed account of labor's important role in determining health care policy with a bold and incisive analysis of the American welfare state. Gottschalk stresses that, in the United States, the social welfare system is anchored in the private sector but backed by government policy. As a result, the private sector is a key political battlefield where business, labor, the state, and employees hotly contest matters such as health care. She maintains that the shadow welfare state of job-based benefits shaped the manner in which labor defined its policy interests and strategies. As evidence, Gottschalk examines the influence of the Taft-Hartley health and welfare funds, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (E.R.I.S.A.), and experience-rated health insurance, showing how they constrained labor from supporting universal health care. Labor, Gottschalk asserts, missed an important opportunity to develop a broader progressive agenda. She challenges the movement to establish a position on health care that addresses the growing ranks of Americans without insurance, the restructuring of the U.S. economy, and the political travails of the unions themselves.
Download or read book Family Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State written by Susan Pedersen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comparative analysis of social policies in Britain and France between 1914 and 1945.
Download or read book Social Work and Research in Advanced Welfare States written by Kjeld Hogsbro and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-06-14 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The aim of this book is to exemplify the ways in which social work and research develop in ‘advanced’ welfare states – countries where public spending is relatively high as a proportion of GNP. While such countries have traditionally been associated with Scandinavian countries in particular, and North-Western Europe more generally, there are other countries where the public spend on welfare is relatively high. The various contributors in this book explore and exemplify ways in which social work and research are distinctive for advanced welfare states. This involves exploring their connection to professional identities, histories and welfare systems; their associations with academic, theoretical and cultural traditions of collaboration between academic and social work practice, and the distinctive links with community, national policy, governmentality and agency, with respect to forms of knowledge, discourses and conception of social problems. Written by contributors who have experience of living and working in Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Singapore and the UK, this book speaks throughout about problems, methods, systems and ideas in language that is readily transferable and transcends national boundaries of thought and social work practice. It will be read and understood by social work students across Europe.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State written by Francis G. Castles and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-09-06 with total page 908 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Welfare State is the authoritative and definitive guide to the contemporary welfare state. In a volume consisting of nearly fifty newly-written chapters, a broad range of the world's leading scholars offer a comprehensive account of everything one needs to know about the modern welfare state. The book is divided into eight sections. It opens with three chapters that evaluate the philosophical case for (and against) the welfare state. Surveys of the welfare state 's history and of the approaches taken to its study are followed by four extended sections, running to some thirty-five chapters in all, which offer a comprehensive and in-depth survey of our current state of knowledge across the whole range of issues that the welfare state embraces. The first of these sections looks at inputs and actors (including the roles of parties, unions, and employers), the impact of gender and religion, patterns of migration and a changing public opinion, the role of international organisations and the impact of globalisation. The next two sections cover policy inputs (in areas such as pensions, health care, disability, care of the elderly, unemployment, and labour market activation) and their outcomes (in terms of inequality and poverty, macroeconomic performance, and retrenchment). The seventh section consists of seven chapters which survey welfare state experience around the globe (and not just within the OECD). Two final chapters consider questions about the global future of the welfare state. The individual chapters of the Handbook are written in an informed but accessible way by leading researchers in their respective fields giving the reader an excellent and truly up-to-date knowledge of the area under discussion. Taken together, they constitute a comprehensive compendium of all that is best in contemporary welfare state research and a unique guide to what is happening now in this most crucial and contested area of social and political development.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Social Movements written by Donatella Della Porta and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 865 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook presents a most updated and comprehensive exploration of social movement research. It not only maps, but also expands the field of social movement studies, taking stock of recent developments in cognate areas of studies, within and beyond sociology and political science. While structured around traditional social movement concepts, each section combines the mapping of the state of the art with attempts to broaden our knowledge of social movements beyond classic theoretical agendas, and to identify the contribution that social movement studies can give to other fields of knowledge.
Download or read book Towards a Right libertarian Welfare State written by Joachim Wündisch and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book derives the welfare state from right-libertarian principles and, therefore, arrives at policy prescriptions of the political left based on the philosophical principles of the political right. For that purpose the book offers a detailed analysis of right-libertarianism with a particular focus on the work of Robert Nozick. Further, it engages economic and sociological theory and addresses questions of transgenerational compensation, causation, historical wrongs, and collective responsibility. The discussion of transgenerational compensation includes an in-depth treatment of the non-iden.
Download or read book Defending the Free Market written by Robert Sirico and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-05-21 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty years ago, the economic system of the Soviet empire—socialism—seemed definitively discredited. Today, the most popular figures in the Democratic Party embrace it, while the shapers of public opinion treat capitalism as morally indefensible. Is there a moral case for capitalism? Consumerism is an appalling spectacle. Free markets may be efficient, but are they fair? Aren’t there some things that we can’t afford to leave to the vicissitudes of the market? Robert Sirico, a onetime leftist, shows how a free economy—including private property, legally enforceable contracts, and prices and interest rates freely agreed to by the parties to a transaction—is the best way to meet society’s material needs. In fact, the free market has lifted millions out of dire poverty—far more people than state welfare or private charity has ever rescued from want. But efficiency isn’t its only virtue. Economic freedom is indispensable for the other freedoms we prize. And it’s not true that it makes things more important than people—just the reverse. Only if we have economic rights can we protect ourselves from government encroachment into the most private areas of our lives—including our consciences. Defending the Free Market is a powerful vindication of capitalism and a timely warning for a generation flirting with disaster.
Download or read book State of Insecurity written by Isabell Lorey and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-02-03 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Years of remodelling the welfare state, the rise of technology, and the growing power of neoliberal government apparatuses have established a society of the precarious. In this new reality, productivity is no longer just a matter of labour, but affects the formation of the self, blurring the division between personal and professional lives. Encouraged to believe ourselves flexible and autonomous, we experience a creeping isolation that has both social and political impacts, and serves the purposes of capital accumulation and social control. In State of Insecurity, Isabell Lorey explores the possibilities for organization and resistance under the contemporary status quo, and anticipates the emergence of a new and disobedient self-government of the precarious.
