Social rights in the shadow of poor relief – social assistance in the universal Swedish welfare state

Gendered debt – a scoping study review of research on debt acquisition and management in single and couple households

“…Loke & Hageman, 2013). That this paradigm permeates policy and social work practice towards impoverished in general has been shown in Portugal (Rodrigues, Sousa, & Alarcão, 2016), the US (Despard, Chowa, & Hart, 2012) and Sweden (Panican & Ulmestig, 2016), providing social services with moralising tendencies that emphasise control and behavioural change (cf. Handler & Hasenfeld, 2007).…”

Peeling an onion: the “refugee crisis” from a historical perspective

“…Since the 1990s, attention has shifted to the unskilled native working class, strongly emphasizing the recommodification of labour through tightening eligibility, diminishing duration of social benefits and regulations compelling the able-bodied to work (King 1995;Karimi 2017, 148). This stress on the economic value of individual claimants (requiring recipients to work) increasingly determines social citizenship (Langford 2017, see also Panican and Ulmestig 2016). In other words, we note a transition from the traditional social model rooted in industrialization and based on collective social risks (social insurances, collective bargaining, labour market regulation, etc.)…”

Coping with tensions between standardization and individualization in social assistance

“…Individualization and standardization are two opposing trends within means-test systems, which create tensions for human service organizations. These systems are the last-safety-net of financial support and based on individual means-testing, although human needs in practice often are adapted to what the social services can offer (Panican and Ulmestig, 2016). Individualization is a basic characteristic of a society leaving the early stages of modernity (Bauman 2013;Beck 1992).…”