Beyond social policy? ‘patchwork’ livelihoods

Abstract

Social policy has had a chequered career over the last half-century. Initially developed in Northern European and North American metropoles, with its roll-out intentionally restricted to those contexts and denied to people living in the more peripheral settings, including those which Northern countries had colonized (Cooper, 1997), it has since significantly shrunk or mutated in its original heartland while simultaneously diffusing and proliferating in formerly colonized and/or more 'peripheral' countries (albeit in emaciated form). The new shapes it takes, especially in these latter settings since the 'neoliberal turn', is what this Special Issue explores.According to economic historians and other social scientists, the three items necessary for economic growth are workers, capitalists and the state (see Freund, 2010). If workers and capitalists have had an uneasy and often adversarial relationship, the state has both acted on behalf of capitalists/the market, and intervened to ensure that workers are compensated for those disadvantages for which capitalists and the market have been responsible (Elster, 1991: 273). That is, redistributive social policy in its classic form has been seen as a process set in motion by non-market initiatives (often the state) to counteract the iniquities produced by the market, especially by exploitative labour relations. But recently, for reasons laid out in this volume, even as 'global social policy' has unfolded, workers have been increasingly excluded from formal, state-run redistributive schemes or have found themselves pushed towards those in which the market has primacy. Alternatively, they have had to seek refuge in the informal economy (Raphael, this volume), or forms of solidarity provided by family, kinship or community.Social policy, like the first instantiation of a welfare state, was an invention of the Bismarck government in late 19th-century Germany (Chang, 2022). Centred on workers' rights and employment-based contributory social insurance programmes (Leisering, 2021), it was designed less to enshrine radical-style worker politics than to contain these and to undermine support for socialism. A later model was developed by Beveridge, British designer of the UK's post-World War II welfare state. Like Roosevelt's New