5 Personal Advisers, personal lives What is clear from a wide range of New Deal evaluations (Dawson et al., 2000; O'Connor et al., 2001; Lewis et al., 2000) is that PAs provide a critical interface between the programme and its clients. The prominence of ‘personal’ in their title carries several meanings. Clients are allocated to PAs on a one-to-one basis, with the implication of a relationship, and of continuity. It also implies personal advice, which crosses the boundary of the informational into the distinctive needs of
4.2 Neo-liberal interpretations of welfare to work Neo-liberalism begins from an emphasis on the free market, individual freedom and responsibility. Neo-liberal approaches use the ‘less eligibility’ principle. Welfare is thought to distort ‘free’ markets, because it either removes incentives to work, or drives up entry-level pay to rates that are not economical for employers. Neo-liberals tend to advocate what Peck (2001) terms the ‘hard’ Labour Force Attachment model of working for welfare, which places claimants directly
3 Personal agency, participation and refusal: gathering evidence While it is difficult to exaggerate the impact of this construction of ‘welfare dependency’, particularly in the USA, this construction does not go unchallenged. A very wide range of groups of people who are poor or who are subject to discrimination succeed in shaping welfare arrangements by evading, refusing or resisting policies. Historically, there are numerous examples of collective agency in resisting and reshaping welfare policies. In the USA, Fox Piven and Cloward (1977) trace the
2.2 Rationales for conditional entitlement to welfare The contingent relation between work and welfare has moved – unevenly over time and place – between extremes of conditionality and separation, with long periods of more complex relations that varied for different social groups and between localities. Early in the twenty-first century, in the UK and the USA, there is a powerful trend towards a return to the conditional nature of welfare with which state involvement began. What underlies this pattern of the rise and fall of unconditional en
Learning outcomes After studying this course, you should be able to: outline the ways in which the relations between work and welfare are made and remade in different places and at different times explain how these changing relations contribute to constituting welfare subjects describe how welfare provision that is connected to work affects the lives of different welfare subjects in different and unequal ways assess the relative influences and effects
Acknowledgements This free course is an adapted extract from the course DD305 Personal lives and social policy, which is currently out of presentation. The following material is contained in Work: Personal Lives and Social Policy (ed. Gerry Mooney) 2004, published in association with The Policy Press © The Open University, 2004. This publication forms part of the Open University course DD305, Personal Lives and Social Policy. Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (se
References 5 Conclusion As we have seen, pensions are both inherently personal and political. Pensions and other social policies are heavily implicated in shaping the way older people experience their personal lives, and the way in which these personal lives have become constructed as ‘other’. Providing a means by which older lives could be ‘divided up’ and divided out of the domain of paid employment, and reconstituted through the arena of public and private welfare, this process is also informed by differe 4.1 Introduction The 1970s marked a period in which the cessation of the ‘normal’ period of full-time employment at 60 or 65 years had become the accepted orthodoxy. The personal lives of older people had thus become constituted outside the domain of paid employment and within the arena of public and private welfare. As we illustrated in the preceding section, pensions, organised around fixed ages of retirement based on chronological measurements of age, played a crucial role in this process. Further, as 3.3 Beveridge and the move towards a ‘species of universalism’ The 1942 Beveridge Report laid the foundations for the 1946 National Insurance Act and the creation of the welfare state. This represented a central plank of the post Second World War reconstruction. State pensions were viewed as offering a basic minimum income to old people, thereby constituting them as part of the nation's social citizenry. However, cultural and economic imperatives privileging the needs of the young over those of the old meant older people's citizenship rights were in real References Keep on learning   There are more than 800 courses on OpenLearn for you to 3.6 Population policy The period of fertility decline in Britain coincided with a time when anxieties about population control came to dominate a wide range of debates about social policy. These debates originated in two different theories of population: Malthusian ideas about overpopulation and eugenics – the ‘science’ of selective breeding. An Essay on the Principle of Population by Reverend Thomas Malthus, published in 1798, argued that populations would inevitably increase more rapidl 3.4 Sexuality Just as ‘normal’ parenthood was seen as outside the realm of social policy (although framed and supported by it), sexual practices within marriage were widely seen as an essentially private matter. Foucault (1984) argued that while sexualities were very actively shaped by the Victorians through a range of discourses, particularly those of professional, medical and scientific interests, within marriage it was increasingly an area of silence. Up to the eighteenth century matrimonial relatio 3.3 Parenthood The deeply embedded inequalities of marriage were also prevalent in parenthood, reflecting the key role of gender in structuring the inequalities found in both. Under common law fathers were given complete control over their children, while mothers had no rights of custody, care or access if the marriage broke down, or even if the husband died. A man could be adulterous or fail to provide for his family without depriving him of his rights. The Poor Laws provided the only legal requirement on 2 Explaining fertility decline from a feminist perspective Feminist theory underpins one of the most influential historiographies of fertility decline and it allows us to foreground gender as a dominant feature in questions of heterosexuality and parenthood. This is not to suggest that divisions of class, ‘race’, (dis)ability and generation are unimportant in this historical phenomenon, and any full understanding of fertility decline would be incomplete without including them. But in this course the main focus will be on gender and these other so 1.5 The personal The close relationship between parenthood and sexuality illustrates the importance of the personal in social policy in a number of ways. First, it shows that the growing interest in procreation, sexuality and parenthood by policy makers was never a one-way process whereby policy was simply imposed on people. Rather, individuals who set new terms for their experience of parenthood through changes in procreative sexuality were also helping to shape the policy formations within which they found 1.4 Sexuality, parenthood and social policy Just as procreative sexuality within marriage has rarely been the focus of historical research, as a social phenomenon it has also been viewed as inherently unproblematic in terms of social policy. Unlike today, there was very little explicit legislation or public policy that directly addressed the ‘private’ sphere of marriage and family during the fertility decline. However, there were a number of broad social policy formations that made assumptions and reinforced dominant messages about 1.1 Declining fertility In Britain, fertility decline occurred roughly between 1860 and 1930 – a span which includes the middle and end of the Victorian period (1860–1900), the Edwardian period (1900–1914), the First World War (1914–1918) and the 1920s. We will focus on the British experience, although a similar phenomenon has been noted in many other parts of the world. Fertility decline, also known as the demographic transition, is characterised by a shift from a ‘traditional’ norm of large families an Introduction Sexuality and parenthood encompass some of the most ordinary and yet most profound experiences that life has to offer. Until recently these two domains were intricately linked, and the idea that it is possible and desirable to have sex solely for pleasure without risk of pregnancy or having children is a relatively new one. This split between sexuality and parenthood has come about through a myriad of interlinking social changes, including shifting social relations and attitudes to sexuality,
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