‘Eighty years ago, New Zealand’s welfare state was envied by many social reformers around the world. Today it stands in need of urgent repair and renewal.’ One of our leading public policy thinkers asks: What might the contours of a revitalised ‘social contract’ for New Zealand look like? Packed full of analysis, Jonathan Boston’s latest BWB Text directs us towards nothing less than a new political settlement. Wide-ranging reform of the welfare state is needed, Boston argues, if we are to address the challenges presented by economic, social and technological upheaval. This quest is made all the more demanding – and pressing – by alarming ecological crises and the need for ‘the good society’ to place intergenerational responsibilities at its heart.

This open access edited book investigates European social rights in practice from socio-legal perspectives. It brings together fourteen socio-legal scholars, representing Nordic and Western European countries, who analyse different aspects pertaining to European social rights, namely the regulation of social rights, encounters between welfare professionals and citizens, and citizens’ mobilisation of social rights. These three different aspects from the structure for the sections in the anthology, each analysing transformations related to regulation, encounters and rights mobilisation. The book contributes to the existing literature as it focuses on interdependent transformations on macro, meso and micro levels which are key for understanding processes and contexts related to European social rights in practice. It speaks particularly to academics in sociology of law and/or regulation.

This book analyzes how recent welfare state transformations across advanced democracies have shaped social and economic disparities. The authors observe a trend from a compensatory paradigm towards supply oriented social policy, and investigate how this phenomenon is linked to distributional outcomes. How – and how much – have changes in core social policy fields alleviated or strengthened different dimensions of inequality? The authors argue that while the market has been the major cause of increasing net inequalities, the trend towards supply orientation in most social policy fields has further contributed to social inequality. The authors work from sociological and political science perspectives, examining all of the main branches of the welfare state, from health, education and tax policy, to labour market, pension and migration policy. /div

Changing Welfare States is a major new examination of the wave of social reform that has swept across Europe over the past two decades. In a comparative fashion, it analyses reform trajectories and political destinations in an era of rapid socioeconomic restructuring, including the critical impact of the global financial crisis on welfare state futures. The book argues that the overall scope of social reform across the member states of the European Union varies widely. In some cases welfare state change has been accompanied by deep social conflicts, while in other instances unpopular social reforms received broad consent from opposition parties, trade unions and employer organizations. The analysis reveals trajectories of welfare reform in many countries that are more proactive and reconstructive than is often argued in academic research and the media. Alongside retrenchments, there have been deliberate attempts - often given impetus by intensified European (economic) integration - to rebuild social programs and institutions and thereby accommodate welfare policy repertoires to the new economic and social realities of the 21st century. Welfare state change is work in progress, leading to patchwork mixes of old and new policies and institutions, on the lookout, perhaps, for greater coherence. Unsurprisingly, that search process remains incomplete, resulting from the institutionally bounded and contingent adaptation to the challenges of economic globalization, fiscal austerity, family and gender change, adverse demography, and changing political cleavages.

Using an analytical framework based on Foucault's concept of governmentality and through unique case-studies, this volume explores the ongoing transformations taking place in the Swedish welfare state.

How can we best analyse contemporary welfare state change? And how can we explain and understand the politics of it? This book contributes to these questions both empirically and theoretically by concentrating on one of the least likely cases for welfare state transformation in Europe. It analyzes in detail how and why institutional change has taken Germany’s welfare state from a conservative towards a new work-first regime. Christof Schiller introduces a novel analytical framework to make sense of the politics of welfare state transformation by providing the missing link: the capacity of the core executive over time. Examining the policy making process in labour market policy in the period between 1980 and 2010, he identifies three different policy making episodes and analyses their interaction with developments and changes in such policy areas as pension policy, family policy, labour law, tax policy and social assistance. The book advances existing efforts aimed at conceptualizing and measuring welfare state change by proposing a clear-cut conceptualization of social policy regime change and introduces a comprehensive analysis of the transformation of the welfare-work nexus between 1980 and 2010 in Germany. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of social policy, comparative welfare state reform, welfare politics, government, governance, public policy, German politics, European politics, political economy, sociology and history.

Welfare states are the product of economic, political and social interactions, and undergo changes as these interactions transform. Existing welfare state theories mainly tend to explain the emergence and development of the welfare state in the western, industrialized and capitalist world. While the states of Central and Eastern Europe have recently been integrated in the academic discourse, the countries of the former Yugoslavia have been predominantly excluded from comparative analysis. Issues of nationalism and ethnic polarization have been prevalent there while socio-economic issues have been put on the back burner. This book explores what happened to the strong social states and relatively equal societies which existed in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia, and looks into what accounts for these diverse outcomes. By investigating the applicability of the theories on welfare state development and typologization, it fills in the gap in the welfare state literature. It offers an original typology of social citizenship that takes into account the diversity of welfare policy formations across the region. The aim of this typology is not to compete with existing ones, but rather to offer a framework for better understanding of states that do not necessarily fit into known explanatory categories. In a global context of changing economic circumstances and contending political responses, macroeconomic policy and welfare state reform become order of the day. By featuring the ways that states adjust to new pressures, this book’s arguments may come in handy to those trying to make sense of the crisis and the powers that drive the policy solutions.

This book breaks new intellectual ground in the analysis of the German welfare state. Bleses and Seeleib-Kaiser argue that we are witnessing a dual transformation of the welfare state, which is caused by the emergence of new dominating interpretative patterns. Increasingly, the state reduces its social policy commitments towards securing the achieved living standard of former wage earners, which in the past had been the key normative principle of social policy in Germany, while at the same time public support and services for families are expanded.

As the standard of living has increased, aspirations and financial constraints have required major rethinking. There is considerable disparity between European countries in how they approach the welfare system, with differing concern over aspects such

This Handbook offers a comprehensive treatment of transformations of the state, from its origins in different parts of the world and different time periods to its transformations since World War II in the advanced industrial countries, the post-Communist world, and the Global South. Leading experts in their fields, from Europe and North America, discuss conceptualizations and theories of the state and the transformations of the state in its engagement with a changing international environment as well as with changing domestic economic, social, and political challenges. The Handbook covers different types of states in the Global South (from failed to predatory, rentier and developmental), in different kinds of advanced industrial political economies (corporatist, statist, liberal, import substitution industrialization), and in various post-Communist countries (Russia, China, successor states to the USSR, and Eastern Europe). It also addresses crucial challenges in different areas of state intervention, from security to financial regulation, migration, welfare states, democratization and quality of democracy, ethno-nationalism, and human development. The volume makes a compelling case that far from losing its relevance in the face of globalization, the state remains a key actor in all areas of social and economic life, changing its areas of intervention, its modes of operation, and its structures in adaption to new international and domestic challenges.