Martin Rein

There is more to receiving than needing: theoretical arguments and empirical explorations of crowding in and crowding out

Recent literature on intergenerational relations – although giving different explanations – suggests that the giving of money and services to children reinforces the receiving of money and services by elderly people. To explore the flow of support between the generations we present evidence about the type and intensity of the help that elderly people receive from their adult children and their families. By comparing five developed countries we examine whether the amount of family help transferred to older people is shaped by a ‘crowding out’ process, in which more generous welfare systems displace family solidarity. Taking co-residence into account the international comparison does not support the crowding out hypothesis. We then show that the giving of services by older people to their adult children increases the probability that they receive help from them. This indirectly supports the reverse hypothesis, namely that the relationship between the state and the family may be described as a process of ‘crowding in’: generous welfare systems which give resources to elderly people help to increase rather than undermine family solidarity.

Time for Retirement: Comparative Studies of Early Exit from the Labor Force.

1. The changing balance of work and retirement Martin Kohli and Martin Rein 2. The evolution of early exit: a comparative analysis of labor force participation patterns Klaus Jacobs, Martin Kohli and Martin Rein 3. Testing the industry-mix hypothesis of early exit Klaus Jacobs, Martin Kohli and Martin Rein 4. The Netherlands: an extreme case Bert de Vroom and Martin Blomsma 5. France: massive exit through unemployment compensation Anne-Marie Guillemard 6. Germany: The diversity of pathways Klaus Jacobs, Martin Kohli and Martin Rein 7. Great Britain: The contradictions of early exit Frank Laczko and Chris Phillipson 8. The United States: The privatization of exit Harold L. Sheppard 9. Sweden: partial exit Eskil Wadensjo 10. Hungary: exit from the state economy Julia Szalai 11. Pathways and their prospects: a comparative interpretation of the meaning of early exit Anne-Marie Guillemard and Herman van Gunsteren Index.

Dilemmas of Social Reform : Poverty and Community Action in the United States

This title is a classic work on social reform. It is an account of the origins and development of community action from its beginnings in the Ford Foundation Gray Area Programs and the Presidents Committee on Juvenile Delinquency, through the rise and decline of the War on Poverty and the Model Cities program. In the ruthlessly impartial examination of various poverty programs, two social scientists one British, one American-explain why programs of such size and complexity have only a minimal chance of success. They describe the realities of reform and point up how the conservatism of bureaucracy, the rivalries among political and administrative jurisdictions, and the apathy of the poor have often hindered national and local efforts. On the other hand, they show how these obstacles can be overcome by an imaginative combination of leadership, democratic participation, and scientific analysis.

Knowledge for Practice

The rhetoric of social work often seeks its legitimacy and authority on the idea that knowledge can be translated into skills. Knowledge is made in universities in the form of timeless, objective, context-free truths about people and social institutions. Such knowledge rationalizes and justifies the professional practices of social work. It is not clear, however, that the knowledge-into-skills story fully explains social work practices. Practice is often ineffective and tends to throw social workers into moral quandaries, leaving them to practice in a context of faith and doubt. In addition to skills, social workers share values, purposes, the wielding of and submission to power, and mythic stories. Timely, value-expressive, contextual knowledge helps social work to create and maintain social solidarity and to shift its dispositions of skills, purposes, power, and myth to keep up with the pace of social change.

Value-Critical Policy Analysis

The task of policy analysis is to bring evidence and interpretation to bear on decision making and social practice. This task involves not only the presentation of evidence about the consequences of pursuing alternative actions but also an interpretation of what it is we are doing in society, why we are doing what we do, and what we might do differently given our puzzlement and worry about what we do.

Regimes on Pillars: Alternative Welfare State Logics and Dynamics

Social welfare arrangements represent the conjunction of the twin logics of regimes and pillars. Regimes describe who receives the benefits and on what conditions; pillars describe who pays for and who provides the benefits. There are historical associations and ‘“natural” affinities’ between certain regimes and certain pillars. But there is also scope for novel combinations and recombinations. Many contemporary welfare state reforms are best conceptualized in terms of shifting the mix of pillars and blurring regimes.

The Dialectic of Public and Private Pensions

Complex images of the differences between public and private activities are endemic in modern capitalist societies. Numerous examples can be found in the field of social policy, but this paper focuses on the historical dialectic between public and private pension arrangements. It compares the interaction over time in a number of countries of the central principles of solidarity and equivalence which have shaped the development of pension provision. Then it illustrates how an understanding of contemporary pressures for the privatization of pension arrangements as a response to the fiscal crisis of welfare states cannot be divorced from their historical and institutional contexts. The paper concludes that pluralistic pension systems offer the best prospect for rational policy analysis and debate provided that a continuing critique of, and dialogue between, the different sectors is encouraged to flourish.

The social policy of the firm

The “welfare state” concept hides an important aspect of modern industrial societies. In capitalist countries welfare is provided through a mixture of public and private initiatives. The author suggests that the concept “welfare economy” more fully captures the economic interpenetration of public and private sectors. The growth of fringe benefits illustrates the extent to which private enterprise performs the welfare function.Government increasingly intervenes through processes of mandating, stimulating, regulating, and supporting, using private enterprise as the vehicle for delivery of welfare services. Governments traditionally conceived role as welfare service provider is also changed through recognition that it is both an employer and purchaser, significantly impacting societys original income distribution.

Knowledge for Policy

Policy research, as currently practiced, rests on a set of intellectual conventions which assume that there is a linear relationship from research to problem analysis to policy advice to action, and that societal institutions may be conceived of as comprising three linked but essentially separate realms-the political, the economic, and the social. These conventions arise from existing programmatic and disciplinary interests, and, in turn, serve to render the interests served invisible. We propose an alternative framework for thinking about social policy which we call a claims perspective, which makes the actors and their interests explicit.

Development Planning as the Only Game in Town

Why is development planning a central activity of city government? This paper confronts this question through the study of a small city in the Boston SMSA Development planning in this city turns out to be a contentious business. Not everyone supports it, and it is difficult to do Yet despite a number of competing planning agendas and, in particular, popular demand for human services, development planning — i e., planning for business — consistently remains the central concern of city government While there are a number of ways to account for this, the centrality of development planning seems not to be simply the result of scheming special interests, funding availability, or professional imperatives. These explanations may be correct, but each alone appears to be inadequate An examination of a variety of development projects and of the competition among alternative planning agendas suggests, rather, that development planning is the logical outcome of the particular ways in which diverse constituencies and interests within the city are linked to each other Furthermore, planning for business seems to be the only way to get certain things done Consequently, for nearly everyone, development planning becomes the only game in town