Agency, ‘dependency’ and welfare: beyond issues of claim and contribution?

Alternatives to social housing: Applicants’ views of various policy options

“…This issue is also of interest in relation to the widespread popular beliefs in Slovenia that stigmatise claimants for social housing as avoiding personal responsibility and financial engagement for their own housing, and instead pass-ing the burden on to the society or state. This issue is widely discussed in the social sciences, particularly in the debate on "welfare dependency" versus "active citizenship" (see Taylor-Gooby, 1993;Dwyer, 2004;Robinson, 2013). Building on the argumentation of Peter Taylor-Gooby (2001) that welfare claimants' actions are dependent on the social and economic resources that they have at their disposal, we hypothesise that, among the applicants for housing in Ljubljana, the acceptability of diverse housing options vary and that acceptability of various options is related to applicants' means.…”

Alternatives to social housing: Applicants’ views of various policy options

“…To vprašanje je zanimivo tudi glede na v Sloveniji splošno razširjeno prepričanje, ki prosilce za socialno stanovanje stigmatizira kot tiste, ki se izmikajo odgovornosti in finančnemu bremenu za stanovanje ter to prenašajo na državo/ družbo. Ta tema je prisotna tudi v družboslovju, predvsem kot vprašanje »blaginjske odvisnosti« v razmerju do »aktivnega državljanstva« (glej Taylor-Gooby, 1993; Dwyer, 2004;Ro-binson, 2013). Izhajamo iz teze, ki jo je postavil Peter Taylor-Gooby (2001), da upravičenci do socialnih transferjev delujejo v skladu s socialnimi in ekonomskimi viri, ki jih imajo na voljo.…”

On meeting Linda: An intimate encounter with (not-)belonging in the current conjuncture

“…She has no children for the contemporary futureoriented, child-focused "social investment state" (Jenson and Saint-Martin, 2003;Jenson, 2009) to concern itself with, and she is not behaving as the ideal, responsiblised patient now so valorized by the active citizenship model of contemporary welfare governance (Newman, 2001;Dwyer, 2004;Clarke, 2005;Newman and Tonkens, 2011). 4 She is, most likely, one of the "hard", if not "impossible to help" welfare users, so dreaded by health practitioners and social workers, whom many tend to end up designating -often as their own psychic survival strategy -as self-excluding, the architects of their own misfortune, lost causes in their nonbelonging (Scanlon and Adlam, 2008).…”