Reframing social citizenship / Peter Taylor-Gooby.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Taylor-Gooby, Peter.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Political culture--Europe.

Political culture.

Citizenship--Social aspects--Europe.

Citizenship.

Social change--Europe.

Social change.

Public welfare--Europe.

Public welfare.

Citizenship--Social aspects.

Europe.

Welfare state--Europe.

Welfare state.

Physical Description:

xii, 218 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2009.

Summary:

Governments throughout world are restructuring social and welfare provision to emphasize opportunity, aspiration and individual responsibility and to give a stronger role to competition, markets and consumer choice. The new approach rests on a logoic of individual rational action: people's choices are driven primarily by self-regarding considerations. Policy-makers increasingly direct their attention to structuring incentives so that service-providers maximise cost-efficiency and service-users actively seek solutions to the problems they face. The UK has gone further than any other major European country in these reforms and offers a useful object lesson.

This book analyses the impact of the new policies on social citizenship. Rapid changes in labour markets, patterns of family life, the balance of older and younger generations, cultural diversity and the rebalancing of political forces enhance the pressures on policy-makers. All these factors operate within a relentless international process of globalisation that renders the demand for competitiveness ever more insistent and constrains the range of options open to governments. The argument stresses the importance of trust in government and in social provision for the continued sustainability of welfare states. A wide-ranging theoretical analysis and review of work across psychology, political science, sociology and behavioural economics, reinforced by new research on policy outcomes, indicates that the reforms generally lead to particular results. They are successful in delivering mass services efficiently but much weaker in redistributing to more vulnerable low-income groups and in maintaining public trust in the structure of provision.

The risk is that mistrustful and disquieted voters may be unwilling to support high spending on reformed provision in health care, pensions and other benefits, just as the pressures on social citizenship intensify demand for these services. In short, current reforms are being undertaken for excellent reasons in a difficult international context, but risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater, by damaging public support for and trust in the new competitive, opportunity-centred welfare state.

Contents:

Part I Sustaining Social Citizenship in Difficult Times

1 Social Citizenship Under Pressure 3

2 Globalization: New Constraints on Policymaking 20

3 The Response of Government 33

Part II Intellectual Foundations of Reform

4 The Assumptive World of Welfare State Reform 55

5 Individual Choice and Social Order 67

6 Rational Actors and Social Citizenship 89

Part III A Case-study: The UK as Object Lesson

7 Putting the Theory into Practice: The UK Experience 111

8 The NHS Reforms as a Response to First-Order Challenges 130

9 Second-Order Challenges: Disenchantment, Disquiet, and Mistrust 146

Part IV Conclusions: Strengths and Limitations of Rational Actor Approaches

10 Globalization, Inequality, and Diversity 163

11 Welfare Under Altered Circumstances 184.

ISBN:

9780199546701

0199546703

OCLC:

236117281