Since the late 1990s, new strategies concerning the role and shape of welfare states have been formulated, many of which are guided by a logic of social investment. This book maps out this new perspective and assesses both its achievements and shortcomings. In doing so, it provides a critical analysis of social investment ideas and policies and opens up for discussion many of Europe's most pressing concerns--such as an aging population, the current economic crisis, and environmental issues-- and whether social investment can provide adequate responses to these challenges.
This volume explores how digitalization--in different forms--affects the welfare state. Digitalization is likely to have a lasting impact on work, welfare, and the distribution of income. It will radically transform not only social risks in health, education and the labour market, but also the means by which these risks are addressed. The volume studies how digitalization affects policies as well as the underlying power relationship between actors, i.e. the politics of the welfare state. The volume brings together internationally renowned welfare-state scholars to identify - the socio-economic challenges that result from rapid technological change; - the ensuing political conflicts and struggles in the domain of welfare state reform broadly defined; - how these changes challenge and shape existing labour market and welfare state arrangements. Overall, the volume explains the potential and real political and policy responses to these challenges, grasps the contours of future developments, and reflects on whether the current wave of technological change might promote the emergence of a new paradigm of welfare state policy-making. The rapid and accelerating pace of technological change has potentially radical ramifications for the welfare state that demand an engagement with possible future scenarios. The authors therefore adopt a forward-looking perspective. Based on this approach, the volume uniquely offers a theoretically informed empirical basis for social science and public debates about the long-term implications of the digital revolution for the welfare state, covering a broad range of policy areas such as education, pensions, labour market policies, tax policy, and health care.
This insightful book provides a systematic analysis of the development of affluent Western welfare states in this turbulent era. It explores the consequences for welfare states of modern crises such as climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. Most importantly, it investigates how to prioritize scarce resources in the face of many competing demands and argues that there is an urgent need to improve crisis funding whilst at the same time maintaining provision for vulnerable groups. This title contains one or more Open Access chapters.
'Globalization', institutions and welfare regimes -- The challenge of globalization -- Globalization and welfare regime change -- Towards workfare? : changing labour market policies -- Labour market policies in social democratic and continental regimes -- Population ageing, GEPs and changing pensions systems -- Pensions policies in continental and social regimes -- Conclusion : welfare regimes in a liberalizing world.
Through a series of studies, the overarching aim of this book is to investigate if and how the digitalization/digital transformation process causes (or may cause) the autonomy of various labor functions, and its impact in creating (or stymieing) various job opportunities on the labor market. This book also seeks to illuminate what actors/groups are mostly benefited by the digitalization/digital transformation and which actors/groups that are put at risk by it. This book takes its point of departure from a 2016 OECD report that contends that the impact digitalization has on the future of labor is ambiguous, as on the one hand it is suggested that technological change is labor-saving, but on the other hand, it is suggested that digital technologies have not created new jobs on a scale that it replaces old jobs. Another 2018 OECD report indicated that digitalization and automation as such does not pose a real risk of destroying any significant number of jobs for the foreseeable future, although tasks would by and large change significantly. This would affects welfare, as most of its revenue stems from taxation, and particularly so from the taxation on labor (directly or indirectly). For this reason, this book will set out to explore how the future technological and societal advancements impact labor conditions. The book seeks to provide an innovative, enriching and controversial take on how various aspects of the labor market can be (and are) affected the ongoing digitalization trend in a way that is not covered by extant literature. As such, this book intends to cater to a wider readership, from a general audience and students, to specialized professionals and academics wanting to gain a deeper understanding of the possible future developments of the labor market in light of an accelerating digitalization/digital transformation of society at large.
This Very Short Introduction discusses the necessity of welfare states in modern capitalist societies. Situating social policy in an historical, sociological, and comparative perspective, David Garland brings a new understanding to familiar debates, policies, and institutions.
Few discussions in modern social science have occupied as much attention as the changing nature of welfare states in western societies. Gosta Esping-Andersen, one of the most distinguished contributors to current debates on this issue, here provides a new analysis of the character and role of welfare states in the functioning of contemporary advanced western societies. Esping-Andersen distinguishes several major types of welfare state, connecting these with variations in the historical development of different western countries. Current economic processes, the author argues, such as those moving towards a post-industrial order, are not shaped by autonomous market forces but by the nature of states and state differences. Fully informed by comparative materials, this book will have great appeal to everyone working on issues of economic development and post-industrialism. Its audience will include students and academics in sociology, economics and politics.
Changing Welfare States is 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.
The Media Welfare State: Nordic Media in the Digital Era comprehensively addresses the central dynamics of the digitalization of the media industry in the Nordic countries—Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland—and the ways media organizations there are transforming to address the new digital environment. Taking a comparative approach, the authors provide an overview of media institutions, content, use, and policy throughout the region, focusing on the impact of information and communication technology/internet and digitalization on the Nordic media sector. Illustrating the shifting media landscape the authors draw on a wide range of cases, including developments in the press, television, the public service media institutions, and telecommunication.
Welfare states around the globe are changing, challenged by the development of knowledge economies. In many countries, policy-makers' main response has been to modernize welfare states by focusing on future-oriented social investment policies that focus on creating, mobilizing, and preserving human skills and capabilities. Yet, there is massive variance in the development of social investment strategies. The World Politics of Social Investment: Welfare States in the 21st Century is the first of two volumes of the World Politics of Social Investment (WOPSI) project, which systematically maps and explains different welfare reform strategies in democratic countries around the world. This volume develops a theory on the political and socio-economic conditions for the development of social investment policies around the globe, and studies the impact of the main explanatory factors on the empirical variety of social investment reforms (and non-social investment reforms). It also proposes a new typology of different welfare reform strategies, distinguishing nine types of social investment strategies depending on their functions (creating, mobilizing and preserving human skill and capabilities) and their distributive profiles (inclusive, stratified or targeted), and three types of non-social investment welfare strategies (market liberalism, social protectionism and basic income). The chapters of this volume are written by leading social policy scholars from different disciplines and countries, who apply the WOPSI global theoretical framework in a range of contexts and policy fields, shedding light on the scope conditions of social investment, as well as political demand- and supply-side drivers of social investment reforms. This volume on its own or in conjunction with the second volume is an invaluable resource on the state of modern welfare and social investment policies from around the globe.
