The State of the Welfare State: Advice, Governance and Care in Settings of Austerity

Abstract

Contemporary attempts to govern 'the state of the welfare state' are as much about moral endeavours as they are about political and economic imperatives. Such is the argument put forward in this Introduction, which focuses on the work that advisers perform in settings of austerity across Europe. Advisers are often the last call for help for their clients/dependents who find themselves increasingly at the mercy of local authorities, immigration regimes, landlords, banks and debt collection agencies. But competing visions of moral worth and social justice continue to permeate the everyday deliberations of those who administer, support and advocate advice. Struggles and dilemmas over how best to provide assistance and balance individuals' moral judgments against the collective good frequently occur. We explore both the dovetailing of and divergence between domains and roles, in disrupting as well as reproducing dominant logics of extraction and accumulation.

The Guardians of the Welfare State: Universal Credit, Welfare Control and the Moral Economy of Frontline Work in Austerity Britain

“…Much contemporary welfare politics is focused on redefining the parameters of citizenship and generating a new moral economy for social policy (Rodger, 2000). Indeed, the 'state of the welfare state' is not just economic or political but a moral formation too (Koch and James, 2020), and it is this moral murkiness that has been at the heart of my analysis. Successive waves of so-called welfare reforms, and the partial roll-out of UC, have driven forward an ever more punitive system that makes the most vulnerable sectors of the population dependent on tighter forms of means-testing.…”

Social Polarisation at the Local Level: A Four-Town Comparative Study on the Challenges of Politicising Inequality in Britain

“…Our conclusion draws together how the lack of mediating figures or institutions, including those located in but not limited to the 'squeezed' middle, and capable of bridging strongly felt divides between social groups, thwarts the possibilities of collective action. Extending insights on brokers in both social network analysis (Burt, 2004(Burt, , 2009Stovel and Shaw, 2012) and recent anthropological work in settings of austerity (Koch, 2020;Koch and James, 2020;Koster, 2014;Tuckett, 2018), we argue for the importance of strengthening local intermediaries and their institutions that can link different constituencies around common agendas while assuming legitimacy among broad support bases. Far from assuming then a generalised crisis of disengagement (Evans and Tilley, 2017), we argue that the challenge consists in building local mechanisms concerned with networks of exchange that can cut across social groups, whether these are defined in ethnic and racial, socio-economic or any other terms.…”

Britishness Outsourced: State Conduits, Brokers and the British Citizenship Test

“…The involvement of private schools and outsourced test centres in the delivery of the Life in the UK test are characteristic of the contemporary 'managerial state' in Britain (Clarke and Newman 1997), in which public and private domains have become highly blurred. While the rolling out of the 'managerial state' began under the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and continued during the New Labour years, the hybridisation of arrangements between the market, third sector and government institutions (Koch and James 2019) has also become characteristic of recent austerity policies. Rather than view the state as fragmented through processes of outsourcing, Clarke and Newman argue that the term 'dispersal' is more apt, as it does not imply that the process is disintegrative (1997:25).…”

“…These third parties include large private companies which hold lucrative deals with the government to deliver public services, as well as charities, NGOs and the voluntary sector more generally. In addition to those who hold formal arrangements to deliver such services, also filling the gap in more informal and ad hoc ways are small businesses, activist networks (Gutierrez Garza 2019; Wilde 2019) and individual citizens who are continuously developing new and ever more innovative responses to the modern regime of austerity (Koch and James 2019).…”

“…My aim is to explore the role of these two different types of organisations which act as brokers on behalf of the British state. Situating their emergence within a neoliberal British state characterised by its 'dispersal' (Clarke and Newman 1997) through outsourcing, I show that contemporary configurations of the state, market and third sector (Koch and James 2019), mean that various and sometimes unexpected actors take on state-like roles. The ambiguous position of these different organisations means that while the reach of the neoliberal state is more diffuse and invisible than ever, clear boundaries between state and non-state realms do continue to exist.…”