The increasing presence of for-profit service providers in publicly-funded eldercare has transformed care in Nordic welfare states which have a strong tradition of public care provision. Macro-level ...research on care policies has mainly focused on public institutions, national policies, and marketization. The financialization of eldercare has not received much scholarly attention, and existing studies mostly focus on the UK. The financialization of eldercare refers to the ways in which care is both a site of profit extraction and financial engineering. The Nordic system is relatively universal, and, with rapidly ageing demographics, there is a secured demand for eldercare services. However, these services have been heavily marketized over the past two decades, opening up lucrative possibilities for financialized actors who have established a stronghold over the markets. We analyse these processes through selected empirical examples from Finland, and argue that the financialization of eldercare in the Nordic context demands attention as we are witnessing a new configuration between the constitutional order of the welfare state, public finances, and private profit which is neither transparent, nor democratic.
Ces dernières années, diverses initiatives associées à des dispositifs et formes variées de revenu de base se déploient un peu partout, y compris au Québec et au Canada, et témoignent de la prise en ...compte de ce nouveau dispositif comme hypothèse de travail en regard du renouvellement des régimes de protection sociale. Le présent article vise à examiner les résultats de quelques études récentes centrées sur l'estimation des coûts d'un dispositif de revenu minimum garanti au Canada ainsi que les enjeux que sous-tendent les paramètres pris en compte dans ces études, en regard des politiques fiscales québécoise et canadienne.
Welfare state typologies are generally based on the institutional design of welfare policies. In this paper we analyse whether such typologies also persist when they are applied to effective ...redistributive outcomes of welfare states’ tax and transfer policies. In contrast to the widespread use of macro indicators, our empirical analysis relies on internationally comparable microdata in order to account for the distribution of resources across households. We perform a hierarchical cluster analysis and check whether the classical typology for Western European welfare states reproduces the typical patterns when it comes to effective economic outcomes. We find that the established welfare regimes not only differ in their welfare state institutions as is known, but also in their economic outcomes. In particular, we identify the social-democratic, conservative, liberal and southern welfare regimes. Belgium and the Netherlands emerge as hybrid cases lying between the social-democratic and conservative model.
In past decades, hybrid organizations and institutional complexity have received growing attention, yet questions remain about how hybrids manage institutional complexity in the Nordic welfare ...states. This article investigates how Norwegian social enterprises (SEs), a subset of hybrid organizations, internally manage contradictory demands when externally engaging with multiple logics. The data consists of interviews of leaders and staff members from five SEs, and the findings show that most institutional referents hold a public-sector logic which may crowd out the hybrid nature of SEs. Depending on the conflicting demands, SEs mix decoupling and selective coupling when responding to them. Some were also found to rely on the structural responses of organizational compartmentalization. Compared to the blended hybrids, the structural hybrids experience less internal tension when managing institutional complexity since logic compartmentalization allows the organizations to attend both to their
in-use
logic and
at-play
demands. The data yield compelling insights into how the Nordic welfare state may incite a specific configuration of SE where logic compartmentalization appears as a pragmatic choice.
Sweden is well known for the success of its welfare state. Many believe that success was made possible in part by the country's ethnic homogeneity and that the increased diversity of Sweden's ...population is putting its welfare state at risk. Few, however, have suggested convincing mechanisms for explaining the precise relationship between relative ethnic homogeneity/heterogeneity and the welfare state. In this book Carly Elizabeth Schall acknowledges the important role of ethnic homogeneity in Sweden's thriving welfare state, but she argues that it mattered primarily because political elites-especially social democrats-made it matter.
Schall shows that diversity and the welfare state are related but that diversity does not undermine the welfare state in a straightforward way. Tracing the development of the Swedish welfare state from the late 1920s until the present day, she focuses on five historical periods of crisis. She argues that the story of Swedish national identity is a story of elite-driven hegemony-building and that the linking of social democracy and national identity colored the integration of immigrants in important ways. Social democracy could have withstood the challenge posed by immigration, but the faltering of social democratic hegemony opened a door for anti-immigrant sentiment. In her deft analysis of the relationship between immigration and the welfare state in Sweden, Schall makes a compelling argument that has relevance for immigration policy in the United States and elsewhere.
On weekday afternoons, dismissal bells signal not just the end of the school day but also the beginning of another important activity: the federally funded after-school programs that offer tutoring, ...homework help, and basic supervision to millions of American children. Nearly one in four low-income families enroll a child in an after-school program. Beyond sharpening students’ math and reading skills, these programs also have a profound impact on parents. In a surprising turn—especially given the long history of social policies that leave recipients feeling policed, distrusted, and alienated—government-funded after-school programs have quietly become powerful forces for political and civic engagement by shifting power away from bureaucrats and putting it back into the hands of parents. In State of Empowerment Carolyn Barnes uses ethnographic accounts of three organizations to reveal how interacting with government-funded after-school programs can enhance the civic and political lives of low-income citizens.
This article responds to increasing public and academic discourses on social innovation, which often rest on the assumption that social innovation can drive societal change and empower actors to deal ...with societal challenges and a retreating welfare state. In order to scrutinise this assumption, this article proposes a set of concepts to study the dynamics of transformative social innovation and underlying processes of multi-actor (dis)empowerment. First, the concept of transformative social innovation is unpacked by proposing four foundational concepts to help distinguish between different pertinent ‘shades’ of change and innovation: 1) social innovation, (2) system innovation, (3) game-changers, and (4) narratives of change. These concepts, invoking insights from transitions studies and social innovations literature, are used to construct a conceptual account of how transformative social innovation emerges as a co-evolutionary interaction between diverse shades of change and innovation. Second, the paper critically discusses the dialectic nature of multi-actor (dis)empowerment that underlies such processes of change and innovation. The paper then demonstrates how the conceptualisations are applied to three empirical case-studies of transformative social innovation: Impact Hub, Time Banks and Credit Unions. In the conclusion we synthesise how the concepts and the empirical examples help to understand contemporary shifts in societal power relations and the changing role of the welfare state.
•Public and academic discourses on social innovation require transformative dimensions.•A conceptualization of transformative social innovation (TSI) is proposed.•TSI is related to system innovation, game-changers and narratives of change.•The dialectic nature of multi-actor (dis)empowerment in TSI-processes is discussed.•Three empirical case-studies are offered: Impact Hub, Time Banks and Credit Unions.
To what extent has the process of European integration re-drawn the boundaries of national welfare states? What are the effects of such re-drawing? Boundaries count: they are essential in bringing ...together individuals, groups, and territorial units, and for activating or strengthening shared ties between them. If the profile of boundaries changes over time, we might expect significant consequences on bonding dynamics, i.e. on the way solidarity is structured in a given political community. The book addresses these two questions in a broad historical and comparative perspective. The first chapter sets out a novel theoretical framework which re-conceptualizes the welfare state as a 'bounded space' characterized by a distinct spatial politics. This reconceptualization takes as a starting point the 'state-building tradition' in political science and in particular the work of Stein Rokkan. The second chapter briefly outlines the early emergence and expansion of European welfare states till World War II. Chapters 3 and 4 analyse the relationship between domestic welfare state developments and the formation of a supranational European Community between the 1960s and the 2000s, illustrating how the process of European integration has increasingly eroded the social sovereignty of the nation-state. Chapter 5 focuses on new emerging forms of sub-national and trans-national social protection, while Chapter 6 discusses current trends and future perspectives for a re-structuring of social protection at the EU level. While there is no doubt that European integration has significantly altered the boundaries of national welfare, de-stabilizing delicate political and institutional equilibria, the book concludes by offering some suggestions on how a viable system of multi-level social protection could possibly emerge within the new EU wide boundary configuration. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/politicalscience/0199284660/toc.html
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