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Authors:Michael Reisch Pages: 352 - 354 Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Volume 42, Issue 2, Page 352-354, May 2022.
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Authors:Lorraine Grimes Pages: 354 - 356 Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Volume 42, Issue 2, Page 354-356, May 2022.
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Authors:Linda Briskman Pages: 356 - 358 Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Volume 42, Issue 2, Page 356-358, May 2022.
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Authors:Washington Marovatsanga Pages: 358 - 360 Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Volume 42, Issue 2, Page 358-360, May 2022.
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Authors:Shona Hunter Pages: 360 - 362 Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Volume 42, Issue 2, Page 360-362, May 2022.
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Authors:Michael Orton, Sudipa Sarkar Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. The Covid-19 pandemic has seen emerging debate about a possible shift in ‘anti-welfare commonsense’ i.e. the orthodoxy previously described in this journal as solidifying negative public attitudes towards ‘welfare’. While a shift in attitudes might be ascribed to the circumstances of the crisis it would still be remarkable for such a strongly established orthodoxy to have changed quite so rapidly. It is appropriate, therefore, to reflect on whether the ‘anti-welfare’ orthodoxy was in fact as unequivocal as claimed' To address this question, challenges to the established orthodoxy that were emerging pre-pandemic are examined along with the most recently available survey data. This leads to discussion of broader issues relating to understanding attitudes: methodology; ‘messiness’ and ambivalence of attitudes; attitudes and constructions of deservingness; and following or leading opinion. It is argued that the ‘anti-welfare’ orthodoxy has always been far more equivocal than claimed, with consequent implications for anti-poverty action and re-setting debate. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2022-05-04T05:26:39Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183221091553
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Authors:LYNDAL SLEEP Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. This article argues that women social security recipients are governed by multiple political rationalities through the couple rule in Australia. It focuses on different periods of development of the couple rule – its inception within women's only payments of the 1970s, it's ‘de-gendering’ with the Social Security Act 1991 (Cth), and its current intersections with the digitisation of social security administration. It shows that different governing tools emerged across time to govern women through their relationships, but did not replace each other. Rather, the result is that women are now multiply governed by these seemingly contradictory rationalities. Women are governed as dependents by welfarist rationality through expectations of frugality and fidelity to a paternal state. They are governed as independent individuals through neo-liberal political rationalisations of ‘choice’. In addition, through algorithmic governmentality, women are constituted and reconstituted into a possibly promiscuous digital persona using information which is abstracted from women's daily lives. Through each of these modes of governing, the patriarchal assumptions of the couple rule endure. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2022-05-04T05:26:19Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183221089265
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Authors:Irene Gedalof Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. This article draws on the insights of narrative analysis to critically review recent changes to UK government equality policy through three examples: the announcement of a new equality strategy, changes to the governance of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), and the establishment and report of the Sewell Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. I argue that these policy initiatives and the narratives justifying them signal moves to further weaken the UK government’s formal commitments to protections against discrimination. This involves not only the familiar argument in favour of a limited, liberal model of individual equality of opportunity, but is also about bolstering normative whiteness in the face of growing calls for a reckoning with the UK’s legacy of colonialism, slavery and deep-seated racial inequalities. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2022-05-02T07:08:05Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183221093788
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Authors:Tara Mantler, C. Nadine Wathen, Caitlin Burd, Jennifer C. D. MacGregor, Isobel McLean, Jill Veenendaal Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. COVID-19 illustrated what governments can do to mobilise against a global threat. Despite the strong governmental response to COVID-19 in Canada, another ‘pandemic’, gender-based violence (GBV), has been causing grave harm with generally insufficient policy responses. Using interpretive description methodology, 26 interviews were conducted with shelter staff and 5 focus groups with 24 executive directors (EDs) from GBV service organizations in Ontario, Canada. Five main themes were identified and explored, namely that: (1) there are in fact four pandemics at play; (2) the interplay of pandemics amplified existing systemic weaknesses; (3) the key role of informal partnerships and community support, (4) temporary changes in patterns of funding allocation; and (5) exhaustion as a consequence of addressing multiple and concurrent pandemics. Implications and recommendations for researchers, policy makers, and the GBV sector are discussed. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2022-04-26T06:53:13Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183221088461
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Authors:David James Hogg Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in basic income proposals. While this is not an entirely new phenomenon, what is different about the current discourse is the Left’s wholehearted embrace of what has traditionally been seen as a conservative social policy in Britain. It is my contention that UBI is potentially a dangerous policy for the Left, in that it risks undermining the – admittedly imperfect – welfare protections already in existence. This paper draws on Marxist political economy in order to demonstrate how the emancipatory potential of UBI has been somewhat overstated by some of its Leftist supporters, while a discussion of the neutrality of the State is important in considering how this ‘shape-shifting social policy' is likely to be implemented in practice. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2022-04-26T06:53:03Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183221092151
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Authors:Jie Lei, Tian Cai, Chak Kwan Chan Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. This study used the contracting projects of a district branch of the Women's Federation in Guangzhou as case examples to demonstrate both the Chinese state's contractual controls over social work organisations (SWOs) and the pragmatic response strategies of SWOs and professionals. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seventeen participants, including local officials of the Women's Federation and social workers from contracted SWOs. It was found that with the ultimate goal of consolidating the legitimacy of the Communist Party of China, the Women's Federation's dual role in politics and service provision had led to normative, managerial, technical and relational controls over SWOs. SWOs and professionals were generally submissive to these controls, but they employed diverse coping strategies, including compliance, bargaining, transformation and investment in personal relationships. The interactions within the contractual relationship created a pragmatic professionalism that embraced dominant political ideologies, employed de-politicising techniques, and personally depended on individual officials. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2022-04-26T06:52:45Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183221089009
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Authors:Hannah Haycox Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. The Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme (VPRS) comprised the UK government's primary response to persons forcibly displaced by the Syrian civil war. Recipients were granted immediate recourse to public funds and a locally-based 12-month integration support plan, designed at the discretion of practitioners. Drawing on forty in-depth interviews with refugees and practitioners in two areas with contrasting local approaches, this article explores the tensions that emerged when broader central government policies (distinct from the VPRS), intersected with resettlement support in recipients’ lives. Two current welfare reforms are identified and evaluated as having impacted resettled families’ housing experiences: firstly; the Two-Child Limit and secondly; the Benefit Cap. The article demonstrates how the financial precarity produced by both policies undermined local practitioners’ resettlement support. In doing so, the article challenges dominant policy narratives of exceptionality, locating those resettled within the routinised systems of precarity and conditionality embedded in the welfare system. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2022-04-15T05:43:17Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183221088532
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Authors:Jay Wiggan, Chris Grover Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. The UK Government's introduction of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) in March 2020 was pitched as unprecedented. Yet, during the 1970s and 1980s, UK governments also operated wage subsidy job retention schemes. Indeed, despite their professed liberal market orientation, Thatcher's radical right Conservative governments presided over the expansive Temporary Short Time Working Compensation Scheme (TSTWCS) between 1979 and 1984. Drawing upon the work of Gallas (2016), we contend this embrace of wage subsidy schemes by Conservative governments almost 40 years apart emanate from a class politics focused on securing the subordination of labour. In our analysis, the TSTWCS is understood as a mechanism to dampen disquiet with the early Thatcher Government's project to restore employer dominance. And the CJRS is a mechanism to preserve the labour market relations of domination and exploitation successfully embedded by the Conservatives in the 1980s. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2022-04-08T05:45:49Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183221086515
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Authors:Alex Broom, Michelle Peterie, Katherine Kenny, Gaby Ramia, Nadine Ehlers Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Harm is a recurring theme in the social sciences. Scholars in a range of empirical areas have documented the deleterious outcomes that at times emerge from social structures, institutions and systems of governance. Yet these harms have often been presented under the rubric of ‘unintended consequences’. The outcomes of systems are designed to appear devoid of intentionality, in motion without any clear agency involved, and are thus particularly adept at evading accountability structures and forms of responsibility. Drawing insights from decades of social theory – as well as three illustrative examples from Australia's health, welfare and immigration systems – this article argues that many social structures are in fact intended to cause harm, but designed not to appear so. In presenting this argument, we offer a theoretical framework for conceptualising harm as actively administered. We also challenge scholars from across the social sciences to reconsider the partially depoliticising narrative of ‘unintended consequences’, and to be bolder in naming the intended harms that permeate social life, often serving powerful political and economic interests. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2022-04-08T05:45:21Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183221087333
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Authors:Joana Díaz-Pont Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. The paper aims to identify whether the interdependencies between climate action and social policies in the urban context are visible and, if so, in what areas and through what framings. Using a content analysis approach, it compares framings of the news on social policies in Barcelona over the course of a year. The results show that climate action is constructed discursively as an isolated issue, with its own logics and complexities, and with few references to other social policy areas. It also reveals that references to climate change in other social policy areas do not operate as framings. The paper claims that discursive strategies that separate climate change policy from other social policy areas can invisibilise the connections that operate between these policies, links that are key for pursuing the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, especially in the urban context. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2022-04-01T06:12:42Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183221089010
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Authors:Enrico Giansanti, Annika Lindberg, Martin Joormann Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Homelessness and other forms of destitution among asylum-seeking migrants are currently on the rise across Europe, as migrants’ access to social rights, including housing, has been restricted through repressive migration policies, fuelled by the welfare nationalism and chauvinism that surge among European states. This article explores the largely overlooked homelessness experienced by migrants seeking asylum in two different geographic and political contexts: Italy and Sweden. Building on research conducted over six years, including interviews with state officials, social and NGO workers, and testimonies of asylum-seeking migrants, we trace the logics and effects of policies that not only fail to deliver minimum welfare provisions to asylum-seeking migrants, but which produce and use homelessness as a way of controlling this group. The implications for asylum-seeking migrants include racialised discrimination, class-based and poverty-related health issues, and other harms, which are the direct result of policies that render access to fundamental social rights, including housing, into instruments of migration control. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2022-03-21T08:04:42Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183221078437
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Authors:Hadrien Clouet, Carolin Freier, Monika Senghaas Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Based on participant observations in the French and German public employment services (PES), this article proposes a new way of analysing bureaucratic encounters following Bourdieu’s capital theory. We show that caseworkers who are supposed to support jobseekers into employment, force the allegedly needy jobseekers to accumulate capital, but only in its cultural or social form, and never both at the same time. While there are national differences in the accumulation process, the findings highlight the coexistence of two different strategies: accumulation of cultural capital for a long-term and stable return to employment or accumulation of social capital for a short-term and temporary access to employment. Caseworkers attribute different importance to each type of capital, which results in an uneven distribution that reproduces inequalities through social policy services. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2022-03-18T07:31:11Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183221084082
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Authors:Sonia Martin, Timothy Schofield, Peter Butterworth Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. People receiving working-age income support payments are often stigmatised as morally and/or behaviourally deficient. We consider the role of the media, as a potential source of structural stigma, in perpetuating negative characterisations of people in receipt of either the Disability Support Pension (DSP) or unemployment benefits (Newstart) during a major period of welfare reform in Australia. Newspaper articles (N = 8290) that appeared in Australia’s five largest newspapers between 2001 and 2016, and referenced either payment were analysed. We found an increased use of fraud language associated with the DSP, which coincides with increased political and policy focus on this payment. We conclude that in a period of increasing political concern with welfare reform, media coverage of welfare recipients is a form of stigma power, acting discursively as symbolic violence. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2022-02-03T04:50:40Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211073945
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Authors:Alexandra Wanjiku
Kelbert Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. In September 2012, Save the Children UK launched the It Shouldn't Happen Here campaign, to raise awareness of the incidence of poverty amongst British children, and raise funds for the charity's UK programmes. Shortly after the launch, SCUK experienced severe media and political backlash, as primarily centre and right-wing commentators described the campaign as a political stunt, and sought to discredit, deny and depoliticise the claims that severe child poverty ‘happens here’. Drawing on interviews with former staff, and an analysis of the media response, this article explores the ways in which the campaign and the ensuing backlash were embedded in a set of colonial and racialized discourses around ‘who is poor’ and who is deserving/undeserving both in Britain and globally. Crucially, the findings from this study raise important challenges to the recent reintroduction of questions of race (as whiteness) in populist discussions around class and poverty. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2022-01-27T01:38:08Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183221075960
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Authors:Erica Wirrmann Gadsby, Gerald Wistow, Jenny Billings Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Discharge to Assess (D2A) models of care have been developed to expedite the process of discharging hospital patients as soon as they are medically fit to leave, thereby improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the healthcare system. This article focuses on the implementation of a D2A model in Kent, England, which formed a case study for a European research programme of improvements in integrated care for older people. It uses the Critical Systems Heuristics framework to examine the implementation process and focuses in particular on why this improvement project proved to be so difficult to implement and why the anticipated outcomes were so elusive. The analysis highlights the value in using critical systems thinking to better evaluate integrated care initiatives, in particular by identifying more explicitly different stakeholder perspectives and power relationships within the system and its decision environment. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2022-01-06T12:04:10Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211065028
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Authors:Robin Sen First page: 350 Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print.
Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2022-02-09T04:13:05Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183221078282
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Authors:Alison Vivian, Michael J. Halloran Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. This integrative review seeks to employ insights from critical social psychology and Indigenous nation building governance research to advance an explanation for why Australian state policy continually fails to improve the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and reproduces trauma. The review suggests that settler-colonial law and policy embed a history of oppressive relations that suppress Indigenous voice, culture, and identity, inexorably leading to intergenerational traumatic social and wellbeing outcomes for Indigenous peoples. Given settler-colonial policy’s ongoing role in continuing the subordination of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander law/lore, the ongoing policy failure to redress Indigenous inequality and improve their wellbeing is unsurprising. Nevertheless, our analysis contributes to understanding how just and viable relations between Australian Indigenous peoples and the settler-colonial state are possible through collaborative politics. Allowing space for agreement and disagreement in their worldviews, collaborative negotiations offer a way forward to redress policy failures and traumatic outcomes that are currently entrenched. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-12-21T10:00:48Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211065701
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Authors:Juan Telleria Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. This article analyses the marginal position cultural diversity is granted in the United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, it analyses and deconstructs the ontological assumptions of the UN's discourse. The inquiry shows that the ontological structure of the UN's agenda creates an essentialist and teleological understanding of history that privileges universality – unity – at the expense of diversity. In this way, the UN's plan of action reproduces what Ernesto Laclau defined as hegemony – a particularity assuming the representation of the totality. The 2030 Agenda naturalises the international power structure designed after World War II and presents it as beneficial for everyone. The article concludes that the 2030 Agenda's ontological assumptions create an inherently ethnocentric understanding of global issues. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-12-20T09:37:52Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211065699
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Authors:Kate Wicker Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Radicalisation has become a highly influential idea in British policy making. It underpins and justifies Prevent, a core part of the UK's counter-terrorism strategy. Experts have theorised the radicalisation process, often beset by a weak evidence base and mired in fundamental contestation on definitions and explanatory factors. Experiential experts have been active contributors to these debates, presenting a challenge to the low-ranking role often given to experiential knowledge in evidence hierarchies and a contrast to policy areas in which it remains poorly valued. This paper draws on interviews with radicalisation experts to examine the dynamics of this pluralisation in practice. With a focus on credibility contests, it explains how experiential experts can claim authoritative knowledge and the challenges they face from those who prioritise theory-driven empirical data as the basis for contributions to knowledge. The paper draws out the implications for understandings of expertise of this newly conceptualised, evidence poor and highly applied topic area. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-12-10T12:23:44Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211063609
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Authors:Liam Concannon Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Ireland has been applauded internationally for its legislative progress in supporting the rights of (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) LGBT+ citizens. Yet much of the positive change within the social and political context of sexuality and gender expression has been achieved by campaign groups, operating outside government boundaries. Notwithstanding these advances, LGBT+ people continue to face discrimination, abuse and violence. Concerns surrounding acts of aggression towards transgender and gay people call for an ongoing dialogue between legislators, policymakers, and practitioners to explore ways in which safety can be ensured. This article draws from an emerging body of scholarship and research to question the effectiveness of current social policy and legislation in Ireland. It offers a discourse on hate crime related to transphobia and homophobia, while challenging the existing political thinking. Multi-agency collaborative working is suggested as key to fostering solutions together with changes in legal paradigms, and the continued formation of policy aimed at safeguarding the LGBT+ community. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-12-07T10:44:47Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211063402
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Authors:Luisa De Vita, Antonio Corasaniti Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. The domestic and care sector continues to display some problematic aspects due to its complexity, especially in terms of regulation. Italy represents a unique and peculiar case, where domestic and care work remains firmly under the purview of family management, and the work itself is entrusted mainly to immigrant workers. This paper aims to investigate, through in-depth interviews with representatives of both unions and employers’ associations, how the key actors involved in regulating domestic and care work intervene, understanding what kind of measures they take and what systems of relations/exchange exist among the different players involved in this process. The research sought to map strategies at a more macro level. While some of the actions undertaken by the social partners seem promising, there is still a lack of full responsibility for care at the public level, with marked asymmetries with respect to both services provided and working conditions. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-12-07T10:38:22Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211064597
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Authors:Carol Harrington Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. The United Nations’(UN) response to reports of UN personnel perpetrating sexual violence proclaims “zero-tolerance for sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA).” Drawing on Carol Bacchi's “what's the problem represented to be (WPR)'” framework, this article unpacks how UN policy solutions represent the problem of SEA. It explores the discursive effects of the UN's problematization of SEA drawing on Sara Ahmed's analysis of audit systems and non-performativity within performance cultures. It scrutinizes the Secretary-General's reports on SEA data and policy documents, including training and risk assessment materials. The analysis shows that UN policy problematizes SEA as transactional sex, inevitable in conditions of poverty and gender inequality. Solutions individualize perpetrators as rule-breakers subject to discipline and generalize victims as among the many impacted by SEA globally. Such solutions situate the UN as the answer to, rather than cause of, SEA and restore a narrative of the UN as defender of the vulnerable. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-10-12T12:42:46Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211047928
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Authors:Dimitra Kotouza, Felicity Callard, Philip Garnett, Leon Rocha Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. The mental health and well-being of university staff and students in the UK are reported to have seriously deteriorated. Rather than taking this ‘mental health crisis’ at face value, we carry out network and discourse analyses to investigate the policy assemblages (comprising social actors, institutions, technologies, knowledges and discourses) through which the ‘crisis' is addressed. Our analysis shows how knowledges from positive psychology and behavioural economics, disciplinary techniques driven by metrics and data analytics, and growing markets in digital therapeutic technologies work as an ensemble. Together, they instrumentalise mental health, creating motivational ecologies that allow economic agendas to seep through to subjects who are encouraged to monitor and rehabilitate themselves. Mental health’ as a problem for UK universities has come to be largely defined through the outcomes of ‘resilience’ and ‘employability’ and is addressed through markets that enable training, monitoring, measuring and ‘nudging’ students and staff towards these outcomes. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-08-17T05:49:54Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211024820
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Authors:Turid Misje Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. This article discusses public social welfare provision to homeless EU migrants in Norway. Most of these migrants have no or weak affiliations with the formal labour market, resulting in restricted rights to public social assistance. Drawing on the concept of precarious inclusion, I suggest that rather than being simply excluded from public social welfare, homeless EU migrants are included in the welfare state but in fragile and insecure ways through provisions directed at safeguarding bodily survival. I understand these limited inclusionary policies and practices as forming part of the Norwegian state’s management of ‘undesired’ migrants. Building on interviews with social workers in the public social welfare administration, I reflect on how assessments of cases involving homeless EU migrants signal hierarchical conceptions and differentiation of human worth within Norway’s borders and how territorial belonging emerges as a prerequisite for ‘deservingness’ in social workers’ accounts. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-08-14T07:26:51Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211036580
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Authors:Stina Fernqvist, Marie Sépulchre Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Family policies promoting gender equality and parents’ shared responsibility for their children tend to assume good parental collaboration post separation. However, this assumption obscures the reality of conflict and intimate partner violence (IPV) in some separated families. Focusing on Sweden, this article examines the 2016 reform which implies that the state ceases acting as an intermediary to organise child maintenance unless ‘special reasons’, including the experience of IPV, are invoked. Thus, the Swedish guaranteed child maintenance scheme became conditional. Drawing on interviews with resident parents and case officers at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SSIA), this article suggests that the reform increases the vulnerability of resident parents in several ways. Moreover, the ‘special reasons’ exemption creates a new distinction between ‘violent’ and ‘normal’ families, which case workers struggle to administer, and which leads to a withdrawal of state support for many families. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-08-14T07:24:13Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211036563
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Authors:Kathryn Henne, Krystle Shore, Jenna Imad Harb Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Public demands for greater police accountability, particularly in relation to violence targeting Black and Brown communities, have placed pressure on law enforcement organisations to be more transparent about officers’ actions. The implementation of police body-worn cameras (BWCs) has become a popular response. This article examines the embrace of BWCs amidst the wider shift toward evidence-based policing by scrutinising the body of research that evaluates the effects of these technologies. Through an intertextual analysis informed by insights from Critical Race Theory and Science and Technology Studies, we illustrate how the privileging of certain forms of empiricism, particularly randomised controlled trials, evinces what Woolgar and Pawluch describe as ontological gerrymandering. In doing so, the emergent evidence base supporting BWCs as a policing tool constitutively redefines police violence into a narrow conceptualisation rooted in encounters between citizens and police. This analysis examines how these framings, by design, minimise racialised power relations and inequalities. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of these evidence-based claims, arguing that they can direct attention away from – and thus can buttress – the structural conditions and institutions that perpetuate police violence. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-08-04T09:09:51Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211033923
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Authors:Joe Hanley Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. This article applies the work of Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells to contemporary children and families’ social work in England. Castells’ work suggests that the intractability of many of the issues facing the profession is the result of the new type of society that emerged around the turn of the millennium: the network society. Within this society, the interests and values of dominant networks are imposed upon those who are selectively excluded. Several challenges for the social work profession stemming from this analysis are posed, including in relation to challenging networks and promoting transparency. However, it is suggested that the most significant contribution Castells’ work has for social work lies in shifting the discussion from an analysis of dominant networks, as has been undertaken elsewhere, towards an understanding of how social workers can, and do, build networks of counterpower capable of effectively challenging dominant networks in the space they occupy. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-08-04T09:01:12Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211034727
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Authors:Paddy Farr First page: 177 Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. People in carceral institutions are at increased risk for COVID-19 infection. Applying critical race theory to the problem of COVID-19 provides tools to analyze the risk of infection and evaluate the public health response within the imprisoned, jailed, and detained population. On the surface, this is due to factors related to a lack of hygiene products, an inability to physically distance, a low quality and inaccessible health care, and poor health. However, at root, the increased risk for infection is directly linked to the legacy of slavery and colonization within the history of US prisons, jails, and detention centers. As a solution to the crisis of COVID-19 and prevention of future pandemics within prisons, jails and detention centers, a critical race orientation provides reason and direction for mass decarceration and racial justice. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-03-27T11:11:24Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211001495
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Authors:Natasha Cortis, Georgia Van Toorn First page: 197 Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Despite significant efforts to end it, violence, abuse and neglect continue to contribute to preventable harms and deaths among people using disability services. To explore why these harms persist and what is needed to prevent them, we examine the safety-related attitudes and practices among frontline staff delivering services in the context of an individualized funding scheme, Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Analysis of survey data (n=2341) showed almost half of frontline disability workers were aware of harms affecting clients in the past year, and three in five felt their employers’ safety and incident reporting protocols were inadequate. Workers’ accounts of barriers to performing their safeguarding roles underline how government’s meta-regulatory approach is enabling provider organizations to prioritise financial concerns and tolerate high safety risks. We argue that advancing the rights of people with disability to be safe from harm whilst engaged in social services requires changes in their external regulatory environments and in structures of power between workers and managers, so that policy, funding and regulatory settings enable appropriate local safety practices to flourish. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-06-02T09:30:02Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211020693
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Authors:Andrew Power, Andy Coverdale, Abigail Croydon, Edward Hall, Alex Kaley, Hannah Macpherson, Melanie Nind First page: 220 Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Social care provision across high-income countries has been transformed over the last ten years by personalisation – a policy agenda to give people with eligible support needs more choice and control over their support. Yet the ideological underpinnings of this transformation remain highly mutable, particularly in the context of reduced welfare provision that has unfolded in many nations advancing personalisation. How the policy has manifested itself has led to an expectation for people to self-build a life as individual consumers within a care market. This article draws on a study exploring how people with learning disabilities in England and Scotland are responding to the everyday realities of personalisation as it is enacted where they live and show the relationality inherent in their practices. We propose that the personalisation agenda as it currently stands (as an individualising movement involving an increasing responsibilisation of individuals and their families) ignores the inherently relational nature of care and support. We propose that social care policy needs to recognise the relational ways in which people build their lives and to advocate a redistribution of responsibility to reduce inequalities in the allocation of care. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-03-26T05:28:43Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211004534
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Authors:Kay Cook First page: 241 Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. This article draws on interviews with 41 Australian separated mothers, and the government forms, information and instructions used to administer their child support and benefit entitlements, to reveal four tactics through which women’s decision-making was coordinated to produce financial benefits to the state. The state pursued its preferred outcome by foregrounding women’s obligation to seek and collect child support, while at the same time, information on alternative choices was made deliberately opaque – making the state’s foregrounded option more likely. If women were entitled to, or sought, options that lay outside the default choice, the onus was on them to investigate, instigate and persevere with what was made to be a deliberately onerous and opaque process. As a result, the administration of Australian child support policy perpetuated low-income women’s experiences of economic and social inequity, entrenching the feminisation of poverty in single parent families. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-03-23T05:06:35Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211003474
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Authors:Rosalind Edwards, Val Gillies, Sarah Gorin First page: 265 Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. The article draws on Bacchi’s ideas about problematisation (2020) and links to technological solutionism as governing logics of our age, to explore the double-faceted problem-solving logic operating in the UK family policy and early intervention field. Families with certain characteristics are identified as problematic, and local authorities are tasked with intervening to fix that social problem. Local authorities thus need to identify these families for problem-solving intervention, and data analytics companies will solve that problem for them. In the article, we identify discourses of transmitted deprivation and anti-social behaviour in families and the accompanying costly public sector burden as characteristics that produce families as social problems, and discursive themes around delivering powerful knowledge, timeliness and economic efficiently in data analytic companies’ problem solving claims for their data linkage and predictive analytics systems. These discursive rationales undergird the double-faceted problem-solving for problem-solving logic that directs attention away from complex structural causes. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-06-02T09:30:19Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211020294
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Authors:Mika Hyötyläinen First page: 285 Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. The article explores the experiences of people displaced from work by the introduction of labour-saving technology in Finland. Interviews with 13 unemployed individuals are used as data. The study is underpinned by a Marxist interpretation of potentially emancipatory technology under capitalism reduced to an instrument for reorganizing skilled workers into an exploitable, precarious cadre of surplus and abstract labour. Loïc Wacquant’s thesis on advanced marginality is used as a theoretical framework to unpack and understand the little-studied experience of being displaced from work by technology. The interviewees share a sense of growing alienation and social exclusion. Feeding these experiences are capricious changes in skill-demands and deskilling under automation and robotisation of work. The experiences are exacerbated by digitalised, vertiginous and isolating job-seeking and employment services that cast responsibility on the unemployed individual. While the participants of this study were not on the brink of acute or extreme socio-economic marginalisation, their experiences are rooted in the very same social, economic and political dynamics as advanced marginality. The findings of the study help anticipate the risk of advancing marginality faced by displaced workers, if social policy reforms are not carried out in the short term. In the long term, the findings support the argument that studies on labour-saving technologies and unemployment pay closer attention to the particular role of technology under capitalism. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-07-07T11:20:40Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211024122
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Authors:Jamie Redman, Del Roy Fletcher First page: 306 Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. Between 2010–2015, the Coalition’s pursuit of a radical austerity programme saw Britain’s Jobcentre Plus experience some of the most punitive reforms and budget cuts in its history. Focusing on the outcomes of these reforms, a growing body of research has found that claiming processes became a more ‘institutionally violent’ and injurious experience for out-of-work benefit claimants. The present article draws upon ideas, developed by Bauman (1989), which focus on the processes that facilitate ‘institutional violence’. We use this framework to analyse ten interviews with front-line workers and managers in public/contractor employment services. In doing so, we expose an array of policy tools and hidden managerial methods used during the Coalition administration which encouraged front-line staff to deliver services in ways that led to a range of harmful outcomes for benefit claimants. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-03-24T05:04:19Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211001766
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Authors:Gabriella D’avino First page: 327 Abstract: Critical Social Policy, Ahead of Print. The launch of the private sponsorship scheme, Community Sponsorship (CS), allowing individuals to resettle refugees in the UK, seems to be in contrast with the government’s approach towards immigration aimed to implement the hostile environment policy. Using frame analysis, this research looks at the diagnostic, prognostic and motivational framings used by policymakers in parliamentary debates related to CS to understand how the scheme and the hostile environment coexist. The findings show how the used frames allow the government to manage refugee resettlement more as a tool of migration management rather than exclusively as a tool of international protection, and how this strategy implements the UK’s hostile environment. Citation: Critical Social Policy PubDate: 2021-09-08T07:21:13Z DOI: 10.1177/02610183211023890
Hybrid journal (It can contain Open Access articles)
