Hartley Dean

Re-conceptualising Welfare-To-Work for People with Multiple Problems and Needs

One of the acknowledged limitations of British welfare-to-work policies has been that they do not necessarily succeed in assisting people with multiple problems and needs. This article will first examine conflicting aspects of welfare-to-work policies and the conflict between welfare-to-work and the concept of work–life balance, particularly as this may apply to people whose lives are especially difficult. Secondly, the article reports on the general findings of a small scale qualitative study of the labour market experiences of people with multiple problems and needs and, more particularly, an analysis of the discursive strategies used by participants in the study. The article concludes with some observations about how welfare-to-work might be re-conceptualised to accommodate ontological as well as practical life needs.

Muslim Perspectives on Welfare

This article is concerned in part to inform the quest for an understanding of the perceptions which Muslim minorities have of Western welfare state provision, but its wider purpose is to explore the essence and the potential of the Islamic welfare state. Heuristic models constructed by social policy academics have provided insights into the influences of religion upon different kinds of welfare state, but no model exists by which specifically to understand Islamic welfare traditions. The article explains the Islamic tradition of Zakat ; its significance as one of the central pillars of Muslim faith, and the principles through which it addresses the relief of poverty and the redistribution of wealth. Islamic conceptions of state and community are then explored and the ways in which Muslim faith and culture are adapting at both the global and community level. The article concludes with some speculative remarks about the scope for rapprochement between Western debates about the moral basis for welfare and Muslim perspectives on social justice.

Social Policy and Human Rights: Re-thinking the Engagement

It is argued that the encompassing concept of welfare rights that is contained within the Social Policy literature – and which has developed from TH Marshalls distinction between civil and political rights on the one hand and social or welfare rights on the other – provides a clearer and more explicit basis for an international call for the progressive development of social policies than, for example, the human rights approach to poverty reduction currently espoused by the UNDP and OHCHR. Social rights continue to be a relatively marginalised or qualified element of the human rights agenda and may be more effectively harnessed by way of a welfare rights approach based on a politics of needs interpretation.

Unravelling citizenship The significance of social security benefit fraud

This article discusses the possibility that social security benefit fraud is intelligible as an unravelling of the rights and responsibilities of welfare citizenship. It recounts the findings of a study of the attitudes and moti vations of people engaged in individual benefit fraud, including the dominant discourses engaged in by respondents, their approach to work and their conceptions of citizenship. These are analysed in relation to age, gender and ethnicity and, in so doing, the authors call upon secondary analysis of data from the British Social Attitudes survey. It is concluded that benefit fraud does not signify any erosion of the work ethic or peoples desire to participate in conventional life-styles, but that it is consistent with—if it is not nourished by—an impoverished conception of citizenship.

Insecure families and low-paying labour markets: comments on the British experience

There has been a raft of policy changes in the UK that are intended to help low-income families engage with the labour market. Drawing in part upon the findings of a small-scale qualitative study of the experiences of low-income working families, this article infers that the secular trend to working parenthood may, as matters stand, be experienced rather differently by secure middle-class families than by poor families. It may be that the former will benefit from policies to improve access to formal childcare, career breaks and time off when needed. The latter are more likely to remain dependent on informal childcare from other family members or friends and receive minimal concessions granted by reluctant employers. While benefits such as working families tax credit will help to secure the material needs of low-income working families, low-paid employment will remain no less precarious and it is possible that the insecurity experienced by low-income working families will increase.

Popular discourse and the ethical deficiency of ‘Third Way’ conceptions of citizenship

The article is in three parts. The first explores the connections and commonalities between different empirical investigations relating to popular discourses of citizenship and argues that these are constituted through the complex combination of overlapping discursive moral repertoires. The second part considers the discursive moral repertoires that constitute discourses of citizenship within the politics of the ‘Third Way’ project—as it is espoused in the British context—and argues that while such discourses accommodate notions of civic duty, moral obligation and enforced obedience, they seldom embrace a solidaristic ethic of responsibility. The third part discusses key findings from a more recent study of popular discourses of dependency, responsibility and rights. The findings suggest that what inhibits the translation of popular understandings of human interdependency into wider support for a form of citizenship based on collective responsibility and universal social rights is the hegemonic prevalence of a peculiarly individualistic conception of responsibility that seems to be consistent with Third Way thinking.

Poverty discourse and the disempowerment of the poor

This short article/commentary is not about the definition of poverty as an objective phenomenon, but about the construction of definitions. It concerns ‘poverty’ as a discursive phenomenon, as a part of that system of ideas and meanings that derives from the everyday use of language. A recent day conference, entitled Working Together Against Poverty, brought together people with experience of poverty and anti-poverty professionals and sought to discuss how to involve poor people in action against poverty. The question was raised should we use the word ’poverty’? (Lister and Beresford, 1991 p9). ’Poverty’ has joined that league of emotive words with slippery meanings like ’freedom’, ’liberty’, ’justice’, ’democracy’ and ’dependency’; words which refer to powerful concepts, yet which are capable of being used or received in fundamentally different ways; words which convey diverse and complex associations, yet which can become so valorised or debased in ordinary discourse as to become meaningless or misleading. Academic and popular discourse alike are underpinned by an essential conflict between affirmative and pejorative notions of ’poverty’ and yet evidence from a recent study of the discourse of social security claimants suggests that both senses of the word may be equally disempowering for ’the poor’. Action against poverty must perhaps begin by deconstructing ’poverty’ and ’the poor’

Business versus Families: Whose Side is New Labour on?

In its proposals for achieving a better ‘work–life balance’ for Britains working families, the New Labour government is also seeking to balance the interests of business against the needs of families. This article argues that the economic policy ‘trilemma’ resulting from economic globalisation is mirrored in a parallel family policy trilemma, with particular consequences for the poorest families. Drawing upon this argument and, partly, upon illustrative evidence from a small-scale qualitative study of low-income working families, it is suggested that promoting family friendly employment alongside a policy of welfare-to-work cannot reasonably be achieved without significant additional regulation of low-paying employers.

The Ethics of Migrant Welfare

International migration poses a dilemma for capitalist welfare states. This paper considers the ethical dimensions of that dilemma. It begins by addressing two questions associated with the provision of social rights for migrants: first, the extent to which differential forms of social citizenship may be associated with processes of civic stratification; second, the ambiguous nature of the economic, social and cultural rights components of the international human rights framework. It then proceeds to discuss, on the one hand, existing attempts to classify or taxonomise different kinds of immigration/incorporation and welfare regime and, on the other, the different ways in which migrants may be socially constructed. Building on this analysis the paper develops an alternative taxonomy that is concerned with the different ethical premises from which the social rights of migrants may be constructed or justified. The paper concludes by applying the ideal of ‘Migration without Borders’ as a means to critique existing constructions of social rights.

Bodily Metaphors and Welfare Regimes

Discussions of welfare policy and social justice lend themselves to the use of bodily metaphors. There is a compelling ‘organic analogy’ (Turner, 1991: 9) that is often drawn between the human body as an organic system and a society which sustains itself through systematic welfare provision. Social policy has in the past been defined as the manifestation ‘of society’s will to survive as an organic whole’ (Titmuss, 1963: 39) or, with a slightly different emphasis, as ‘that which is centred on institutions that create integration and discourage alienation’ (Boulding, 1967: 7). The contemporary concern of European social policy with combating ‘social exclusion’ (e.g. Commission of the European Communities, 1993) represents in many ways a new Durkheimian preoccupation with functionalist notions of integration and solidarity (Levitas, 1996) which are implicitly predicated on notions of social wholeness and the body social.