Reframing Social Citizenship

Transcription

1 University Press Scholarship Online You are looking at 1-10 of 334 items for: keywords : reciprocity Reframing Social Citizenship Peter Taylor-Gooby acprof:oso/ Recent reforms in welfare states generate new challenges to social citizenship. Social citizenship depends on the readiness of voters to support reciprocity and social inclusion and their trust in welfare state institutions as services that will meet their needs. Reform programmes in most western countries combine New Public Management, linking market competition and regulation by targets to achieve greater efficiency and responsiveness to service-users, and welfare-to-work and makework-pay activation policies to manage labour market change. Both developments rest on a rational actor approach to human motivation. The UK has pursued the reform programme with more vigour than any other major European country and provides a useful object less of its strengths and limitations. The book provides a detailed analytic account of social science approaches to agency. It shows that the rational actor approach has difficulties in explaining how social inclusion and social trust arise. Policies based on it provide weak support for these aspects of citizenship. It is attractive to policy-makers seeking solutions to the problem of improving the efficiency and responsiveness of welfare systems in a more globalised world, in which citizens are more critical and the authority of national governments is in decline. Recent reform programmes were undertaken to meet real pressures on existing patterns of provision. They have been largely successful in maintaining mass services but risk undermining social inclusion and eroding trust in public welfare institutions. In the longer term, they may destroy the social citizenship essential to sustain welfare states. Reasoning: A Social Picture Anthony Simon Laden Published in print: 2012 Published Online: September 2012 ISBN: eisbn: acprof:oso/ Page 1 of 6

2 Most philosophical and social scientific work that discusses reason starts from a picture of reason that treats the activity of reasoning as a means of navigating our environment in the pursuit of various ends. This book offers an alternative, social picture of reasoning that pictures the activity of reasoning as a way of interacting with others that is reciprocal and responsive. On this picture, reasoning is to be contrasted with other forms of interaction, such as commanding or deferring. Reasoning is characterized as a social, ongoing activity that involves people inviting others to take what they say as speaking for them as well. So understood, it is a species of casual conversation, not primarily a form of calculation. Part I lays out the basic features of the social picture, and discusses the kind of authority it generates and the nature of casual conversation, of which reasoning is a form. Part II discusses the characteristic norms of three nested activities: casual conversation, reasoning and engaged reasoning. Part III discusses the principles that guide those reasoning as they respond to invitations that their reasoning partners make. These include principles that require attention to a form of self-preservation called integrity, and the connection between our ends and their means. Game Theory and Economic Modelling David M. Kreps Published in print: 1990 Published Online: November 2003 ISBN: eisbn: Beginning in the early to the mid 1970s, non cooperative game theory became an important tool of economics. This book is based on a series of lectures given at Oxford, and comments on this use of non cooperative game theory. After providing a non technical introduction to the basic ideas of non cooperative game theory, the book discusses: (1) how and why game theory has been a success because it permits economists to model and analyse situations of dynamic competition and where private information plays an important role; (2) how and why the theory has failed to provide an understanding of when it (and equilibrium analysis) applies, when not, and what to do when not; and (3) how its weaknesses might be addressed by considering individuals who are imperfectly rational and learn adaptively. Page 2 of 6

3 Welfare to Work: Conditional Rights in Social Policy Amir Paz-Fuchs ISBN: eisbn: acprof:oso/ This book examines welfare-to-work programmes in the United States and Britain, and develops a normative perspective to analyse and critique the theoretical and doctrinal justifications for welfare-towork programmes. The book sheds light on the contractual paradigm that is advanced both as a new interpretation of citizenship, and as a jurisprudential mold for the configuration of the relationship between rights and responsibilities. Viewing rights as demanding responsibilities carries the threat that rights will lose their strategic role in practical reasoning. When this conceptualization is couched in social contract rhetoric that implies a continuous contract between citizens and the state, many conditions on welfare are supposedly legitimated. These include workfare, the obligation to accept any job offer, and several moral and social preconditions, based on a vague notion of reciprocity. This phenomenon has exacerbated over the last decade in social discourse in general, and in the field of welfare unemployment in particular. Following a critique of the prominence of the contractual conceptualization, the book suggests a structure of legitimate conditions on welfare benefits. This takes account of the contemporary appeal of personal responsibility, and reconciles it with the traditional fidelity that is owed to equality in the welfare state ideal. It is shown that equality's concern for the worst-off supports a recognition of a strong legal right to welfare. It concludes by showing that rather than undermining social inclusion and labour market integration, strengthening welfare rights and relaxing preconditions on entitlement would serve the very objectives that welfare-to-work programmes are supposed to advance. Political Obligation and the US Supreme Court 1 George Klosko in Political Obligations Published in print: 2005 Published Online: April 2005 ISBN: eisbn: This and the following chapters explore the self-image of the state in regard to political obligations through analysis of judicial decisions. Examining the reasons that states themselves provide to justify political Page 3 of 6

4 obligations provides an empirical test of normative theories. Although judicial decisions have no claim to moral truth, the fact that justices regularly argue from certain principles rather than others adds to the plausibility of a theory based on the former and increases the burden of justification for proponents of other principles. Supreme Court justices usually defend their opinions on the basis of statutory or constitutional interpretation and seldom appeal directly to moral principles. However, on occasion they do invoke moral principles to support their opinions, especially in difficult cases. Justices of the US Supreme Court consistently ground obligations on protection that individuals receive from society. The most likely basis of these reciprocal obligations is a principle of fairness, as expressed most notably in Arver v. U.S., the most important of the 'Selective Draft Law Cases'. The Civic Minimum: On the Rights and Obligations of Economic Citizenship Stuart White Published in print: 2003 Published Online: November 2003 ISBN: eisbn: This book explores an alternative philosophy of economic citizenship justice as fair reciprocity. It is divided into two parts. Part I outlines and defends the conception of justice as fair reciprocity. Part II discusses the policy and institutional implications of this theory of justice. Globalization, Inequality, and Diversity acprof:oso/ This chapter considers the challenges to social citizenship resulting from greater diversity and inequality in a more globalized world. Migration has led to tensions in social provision in many western countries. Globalization and labour market change have generated greater inequality, and opportunities for social mobility seem to be declining. These changes generate substantial and growing challenges to the stability of welfare states. Evidence from recent studies, however, indicates that the problems can be addressed, provided that governments are willing to show political leadership and pursue policies Page 4 of 6

5 that redistribute resources on a citizenship basis to mitigate inequalities and offer equal access to opportunities across all social groups. Social Citizenship Under Pressure acprof:oso/ This chapter discusses social citizenship and identifies three main components: reciprocity (necessary to support horizontal redistribution), social inclusion (supporting vertical redistribution), and trust in institutions (vital to the political legitimacy of the enterprise). It reviews current challenges to the welfare state from population ageing, changes in family and household patterns and in the labour market, the growing assertiveness of citizens, and other factors, and briefly examines government responses in Europe. Individual Choice and Social Order acprof:oso/ This chapter relates the social science traditions discussed in Chapter 4 to the assumptions of social citizenship identified in Chapter 1. It reviews evidence from the study of games, evolutionary psychology, negotiation over public goods, behaviour in markets, and other areas of research, to show that individual rational actor approaches can provide strong accounts of reciprocity and of some aspects of social inclusion. However they are much weaker in explaining the development of the kind of citizenship trust that is essential to the stability of welfare states, and unable to offer it more than a limited role in social interactions. More sociological accounts resting on norms, symbolic communication and expressive approaches to action provide good accounts of the development of welfare state citizenship (understood as embedded norms). In more recent work, structural approaches to social norms have been integrated with accounts of the experience of independent individual agency. This approach offers an explanation Page 5 of 6

6 of the development of the values essential to social citizenship and of how they can contribute in welfare states. However, it is of declining importance in the logic that directs policy-making. Rational Actors and Social Citizenship acprof:oso/ This chapter examines the arguments about whether social citizenship can be based on an individual rational actor logic or requires a framework of normative principles, embedded in the institutions of social provision and in policy-making. The arguments of Titmuss, Le Grand, and others about blood donorship, social care, and other areas where altruistic and humane rather than self-regarding values appear to be central are considered. Individual rational actor approaches can explain how reciprocity and a limited social inclusion may be sustained, as Chapter 4 showed. Analysis of social psychological, sociological, and economic evidence shows that a full understanding of trust rests on both the alignment of interest that a rational actor logic can explain and also the recognition of values of commitment and care in the trusted person. These are contradicted when action is driven by externally imposed incentives. The trust deficit is a central issue in rational actor reform of social provision. Page 6 of 6