Adam Whitworth

Lone Parents and Welfare-to-work Conditionality: Necessary, Just, Effective?

Since the 1990s OECD nations have witnessed a rapid expansion in the use of conditionality within welfare to work programmes in the shift towards ‘activating’ welfare regimes. This trend raises a number of interrelated normative and empirical questions which we crystallise in the dimensions of necessity, justice and effectiveness. Lone parents in the UK make an instructive case study within which to assess these issues given that they have experienced wholesale change in the work expectations and demands placed upon them since the late 1990s. This article traces the evolution and justificatory ‘policy stories’ behind these reforms as well as evidence around their employment, income and well-being outcomes for lone parents. It concludes that it is extremely difficult to reconcile the research evidence with the persistent and strengthening policy claims of both New Labour and Coalition governments that current welfare to work conditionality for lone parents is necessary, just or effective.

Underemployment and well-being in the UK before and after the Great Recession

Since the start of the economic crisis in 2008 there has been widespread concern with changes in the level and composition of unemployment. The phenomenon of underemployment has, however, received markedly less attention, although it too increased in extent following the start of the crisis. This article considers the consequences of underemployment for the subjective well-being of UK employees. Drawing on data from the 2006 and 2012 Employment and Skills Surveys, the article assesses how the Great Recession affected relationships between different dimensions of underemployment and well-being. The findings demonstrate that the negative well-being consequences of workers’ dissatisfaction with opportunities to make use of their abilities became more substantial, as did the consequences of being ‘hours constrained’ and having an unsatisfactory workload. The article also shows that the economic crisis had a negative impact on the well-being of employees who work very long hours.

Neoliberal paternalism and paradoxical subjects: Confusion and contradiction in UK activation policy

The twin thrusts of neoliberal paternalism have in recent decades become fused elements of diverse reform agendas across the advanced economies, yet neoliberalism and paternalism present radically divergent and even contradictory views of the subject across the four key spaces of ontology, teleology, deontology and ascetics. These internal fractures in the conceptual and resulting policy framework of neoliberal paternalism present considerable risks around unintended policy mismatch across these four spaces or, alternatively, offer significant flexibility for deliberate mismatch and ‘storying’ by policy makers. This article traces these tensions in the context of the UK Coalition government’s approach to the unemployed and outlines a current policy approach to employment activation that is filled with ambiguity, inconsistency and contradiction in its understanding of the subject, the ‘problem’ and the policy ‘solution’.

A Safety Net without Holes: An Argument for a Comprehensive Income Security System for South Africa

Calls for a comprehensive income security policy are common in South Africa, frequently in the form of a basic income grant. These arguments tend to draw on two broad sets of literature that, although arguing to the same ends, are not usually combined or interrelated. First, there are analyses setting out the social and economic benefits of such a policy, focusing particularly on arguments of economic efficiency and affordability. Second, there has been much theoretical and normative work arguing (particularly) in favour of a basic income grant or other form of citizens income. In this paper we aim to connect these literatures and to identify the most appropriate theoretical and normative justification for a comprehensive income security ‘safety net’ for South Africa.

Local Inequality and Crime: Exploring how Variation in the Scale of Inequality Measures Affects Relationships between Inequality and Crime

There is considerable interest in the role of inequality in affecting social outcomes yet there is also uncertainty and disagreement about the appropriate scale at which to measure inequality within such analyses. Whilst some have argued for larger-area inequality measures to be used there are good theoretical, empirical and intuitive grounds to think that local inequality may have relevance as a driver of social ills. This paper explores whether differing understandings of ‘local’ inequality does—or can—matter and, if so, within which contexts this is the case. Contrasting findings across the two areas support the notion that local inequality does have relevance to social outcomes but that the socio-spatial context matters.

Welfare-to-Work Reform, Power and Inequality: From Governance to Governmentalities

The past 15 years have seen considerable change in how welfare-to-work provision (WTW) is organised and delivered across the advanced economies with a consistent trend towards new public management (NPM) principles of contractualism, managerialism and marketisation. The financial crisis of 2008, and ensuing economic downturn, has done nothing to move European policies leftwards and the drift towards these neoliberal inspired WTW arrangements is as strong as ever. The aim of this article is to focus on the governmentalities of these new WTW regimes and to raise provocations for WTW analysts around underlying discourses, framings and power relations within these reforms. Taking the UK Coalition governments WTW programme as its empirical focus, the article emphasises the analytical relevance and leverage of the recent US-focused literature on neoliberal paternalism as well as Foucaults governmentalities framework. In doing so the discussion highlights the need to recognise the discursive and symbolic project of truth (re)creation as a (perhaps the) core part of the Coalitions policy programme with significant and enduring impacts both on the unemployed and social inequality more broadly.

Tackling child poverty in South Africa: Implications of ubuntu for the system of social grants

In South Africa both liberal and more communitarian and relational discourses of citizenship can be seen – the latter in the form of the southern African idea of ubuntu. Policy for assisting children, however, is dominated by the framework of liberal citizenship, most clearly through the Bill of Rights and in particular the Child Support Grant. Using analyses from a purpose-built microsimulation model we show how a neglect of childrens broader relationships in the current liberal citizenship inspired policy context limits the effectiveness of the child poverty strategy. The empirical analyses demonstrate how a greater recognition by policymakers of the relational principles of ubuntu could be expected to have more effect on reducing child poverty.

Inequality and Crime across England: A Multilevel Modelling Approach

The link between inequality and negative social outcomes has been the subject of much debate recently, brought into focus by the publication of The Spirit Level. This article uses multilevel modelling to explore the relationship between inequality and five crime types at sub-national level across England. Controlling for other factors, inequality is positively associated with higher levels of all five crime types and findings are robust to alternative inequality specifications. Findings support the sociological – but not economic – theories and highlight the importance of policies to tackle broader social and economic inequalities.

Adult participation in higher education and the ‘knowledge economy’: a cross-national analysis of patterns of delayed participation in higher education across 15 European countries

Abstract ‘Delayed participation’ in higher education (HE) is an increasingly important feature of modern HE systems in many countries. Despite this, surprisingly little empirical research has been undertaken seeking to better understand levels of delayed adult participation in HE across Europe. The present article responds to this gap by analysing country-level data on delayed adult participation in HE across 15 European countries and by modelling associations between participation levels and a range of theoretically derived economic, social, demographic and systemic factors. The findings suggest that there is considerably more cross-national variation in levels of adult delayed participation and that prevalent typologies of HE, such as Trow’s, fail to give recognition to the importance of delayed participation. The modelling work finds that social and demographic factors exhibit relatively strong associations with delayed participation in HE. This questions the pre-eminence of economic factors within much of the academic literature, policy discourse and policy activity.

Social Welfare and the Ethics of Austerity in Europe: Justice, Ideology and Equality

Even before 2008, social welfare systems across Europe were facing a considerable number and range of challenges: shifts in production and employment patterns; increasing global competition and outsourcing; new labour market risks; structural long-term unemployment and labour market inactivity; changing household formations; and an ageing population with fiscal implications for pensions and healthcare costs in particular (Clasen and Siegel 2007). Laid on top of these ongoing challenges, the financial meltdown of 2008 and the ensuing bank bailouts, sovereign debt crises, economic contractions and fiscal crises affecting many countries have sharpened focus around these issues and on the stated need for reform. The post-crash era has seen governments responding to this chain of events as they have sought—in differing ways, with differing objectives and with differing effects—to reduce the public debt through changes to tax regimes, to welfare expenditure and more broadly to the nature of welfare provision. At the same time, however, and as Farnsworth and Irving (2011) suggest, the extent to which economic crisis will impact on welfare states in the short, medium and long term depends not only on the objective facts of the extent of economic collapse but also on the more ideological dimensions of crisis management which concern the ways in which the crisis has been defined, understood and responded to. Six years after the onset of the financial crisis it is now possible to begin to see how its longer-term effects on welfare are playing out across different European welfare regimes. It is therefore an appropriate time to reflect on the ethics of the different welfare policy choices that have manifested themselves across European countries. This special issue brings together analyses of post-crash reform across a diverse set of contexts and policy areas to address the shared questions of how the ideas and realities of ‘welfare crisis’ and ‘welfare solutions’ have been informed by particular framings of socio-economic problems and particular constructions—whether explicitly or implicitly—of fairness and justice. Collectively, the articles explore how policy discourses have sought to frame and justify desired reform strategies in particular ways, how the relationship between evidence and ideology has evolved and been crafted in differing contexts and what appears to be taking shape in terms of the impacts of the reforms on patterns of power, inequality and injustice in different European nations. Hence, whilst the economic turbulence of 2008 onwards has created enormous challenges for economic, political and policy regimes, it is also the case that this turbulence has opened up a window of opportunity through which desired reform agendas might be framed, justified and pursued. Yet response strategies inevitably emerge from the ideological, historical and political contexts in which they sit and several of the contributions included in this special issue pose the question of the extent to which