Normal View Dyslexic View
Conversation
Pushing the borders of social policy analysis
Lydia Morris†
, ,
ldmorris@essex.ac.uk
Mary Daly§
mary.daly@spi.ox.ac.uk
Abstract
In this conversation the joint winners of the 2023 British Academy Peter Townsend Book Prize discuss their books with Mary Daly. The prize is awarded biennially for outstanding work in social policy. Lydia Morris, author of The Moral Economy of Welfare and Migration and Fiona Williams, author of Social Policy: a Critical and Intersectional Analysis, discuss their analyses of social change and social welfare since the start of austerity in 2010. Both authors highlight the ways in which the increasingly restrictive, controlling and punitive policies of migration and asylum at the borders have been carried into domestic welfare policy. Both focus on the immiserating impact on specific populations and the connections to ethnonationalist discourses. For Morris, employing the concept of civic stratification, this ‘welfare/asylum/migration nexus’ is part of a moral economy whose devices of control have far reaching implications for how we are governed as a total population. Williams contextualises these developments in terms of four intersecting global crises: the racialised crisis of borders and the crises of care, of climate change, and of financial capitalism. Both authors consider the forms and influence of social justice resistance.
Keywords
welfare austeritybordersmigrationcivic stratificationintersectional analysisinequalitiescrisis of careclimate changeethnonationalismgovernanceCongratulations to both of you on the great books. Each of them merits a conversation on its own, such is their complexity and depth. Let’s start with some themes common to both books. One such theme is migration. Both of you suggest that migration is central to an understanding of social policy. Could you say why?
Lydia Morris
Yes. In a sense, I don’t see myself principally as a social policy person, but rather I try to do a Sociology of Social Policy. If we think back to an early approach to social policy, its traditional orientation was the functioning of the welfare state, and perhaps we could even say it was the functioning of the welfare nation state. When the national state as a discrete, self-contained entity is questioned, as it has been over at least the last thirty years with debates about post-nationalism and cosmopolitanism, then attention turns to how far migrants are either included or excluded. It’s that blurring of the concept of a bounded nation that is significant.
Particularly striking for me is the way political discourse has increasingly linked domestic welfare issues and migration together through a series of related assertions that are now overly familiar, such as British people being trapped on welfare because migrants are taking their jobs, and, something of a contradiction, that migrants are themselves a drain on welfare resources. This is an argument that is coming from political discourse that engages and encourages a particular combination of public concerns. So there are questions about both the management of migration and the welfare system, and there is a particular perception of how those two things are connected. Then there are other questions about the empirical validity of the claims that are being made. That’s the set of issues that my book revolves around.
Fiona Williams
My work in social policy has, for a long time, questioned the meaning and practice of nation and the nation-welfare-state in social policy as a discipline. As part of that, I’ve argued that migration as a dimension of the boundaries of nation is an issue that is central to social policy but one often ignored by social policy analysts.
In my book, I argue that there are four crises that are shaping welfare states across the world, and one of these is what I call the ‘racialised crisis of borders’. I don’t call it the ‘migration crisis’ because that plays into the idea that immigration is a big problem, so it’s more specific. The racialised crisis of borders is about the way in which migration becomes a political issue and part of the surge of ethnonationalist sentiment and ideologies that influence government action. ‘Crisis’ indicates that the issue is unresolved: it’s part of the unresolved nature of colonial/post-colonial European welfare states. It’s part of the way in which hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion are created at the national border.
When it comes to actual social policy within the nation, we can see the ways in which these technologies of inclusion and exclusion happen, creating different hierarchies and racist practices that have been extended and applied to the domestic population. I have a very similar analysis to Lydia in that respect. What’s important is that it’s not simply about migration. It’s about migration and racism and about particular populations whose wellbeing has become more vulnerable and dispensable through some of the changes in social policies.
Your responses lead rather nicely to the next question on the notion of inequalities and the nature of inequalities. Both your books talk about inequalities and how the process happens. Can you talk a bit about that, please?
Fiona Williams
One of the things that I argue is that inequalities are more complexly formed these days. They both shape social policy and are shaped by social policy, particularly in the austerity welfare reforms over the last decade or so. I am concerned to offer not just a national framework, but also a global one. What is important is not only inequalities within countries, but also inequalities between countries (take climate change and the pandemic, for example). What I mean by this complexity is that there has been a lot of discussion about the rising levels of poverty and inequality, but there are particular populations who experience these—those who are positioned at the intersections of class, race, gender, place, disability and migration. We need to know why those populations are particularly affected at this moment in time.
My work is a bit of a corrective to social policy as a discipline where mainstream theory has treated race and migration as tangential. It tries to offer a way of thinking about this and of analysing these complexities as part of social policies of their wider dynamics. Perhaps I can come back to that in a moment.
Lydia Morris
I would agree with what Fiona’s said, although I probably take a narrower focus. I’ll come to the actual substance later on, but I’ll answer conceptually for the moment.
The sociological paradigm has traditionally put class at the centre of understanding inequality, and over the years, it has built in gender and race. Intersectionality notwithstanding, I would say social class, or at least economic inequality, has still been the issue driving analysis. But I would also say that there is a growing awareness and elaboration of the role of rights in shaping social structures. At one point in particular, there had been some optimism about the growing reach of human rights and questions of how far universal rights are possible, and this is where social policy comes in.
I am interested in examining more fully the role of rights in relation to existing inequalities or possibly in constructing new ones, exacerbating existing divisions or creating new dimensions, and looking at rights as a terrain in which we can also explore all the questions we ask about economic inequality by looking at who gets what through a system of guaranteed rights. That is why I find the concept of civic stratification helpful.
In the David Lockwood (1996)1 article that introduces this concept, he actually starts with the comment, ‘Since class war is nowhere on the horizon, perhaps we should turn our attention to the institutions that are meant to secure integration.’ I thought it was just such a clever insight at that time in the 1990s. In fact, we find that inequalities of class, race and gender are reproduced through the system that is intended to secure integration. But the inequalities that are built into the operation of rights actually have a dynamic of their own. That is really where my focus goes, and this is clearly a central issue for social policy.
Thank you. That’s very clear. Let me turn to your book specifically, Lydia. I wanted to ask you first about the moral economy framework, both in terms of how you develop it from existing work, and also how you use it to reveal certain key processes and outcomes. Could you talk about that, please?
Lydia Morris
Yes. The concept is most closely associated with Edward Thompson and his article on popular protest against rising food prices, which occurred in 18th-century England (Thompson 1971). This was based on a paternalistic notion that called upon a moral obligation for landowners to ensure that economic principles should be constrained by an obligation to ensure the survival of the poor. From there, you get his concept of the moral economy of the poor, which is a protest from below.
As I was embarking on my own work for this book, it had been some time since the announcement of an age of austerity in Britain. What particularly drew my attention to the idea of moral economy was the repeated use of the concept of morality in austerity discourse, as in David Cameron’s moral mission of welfare reform. My starting point was, ‘What’s morality doing in here?’ In a sense, I saw that as a version of moral economy that turned Edward Thompson’s concept on its head in asserting a distinctive moral economy imposed from above, rather than a protest from below.
We know the formula, which is the emphasis on the obligation to work for a living, an attack on dependency culture, and a stress on protecting the hard-working taxpayer. In fact, a literature has sprung up that broadens Thompson’s concept, and argues that all economies are moral economies in that they are all based upon some underpinning set of moral principles. The interesting question is what those moral principles are.
The way this is worked through in austerity Britain has been most overtly through the increasing cuts and conditionality built into welfare, to such an extent that the safety net has been shredded, including the two-child limit on child tax credits, the benefit cap, frozen benefit rates, removal of the supplement for people with limited capacity to work and the harsher sanctions regime. You could go on indefinitely. This is the moral economy of austerity, but its emphasis is on economy rather than morality, or it has a particular version of morality supporting it. There is a view of personal independence and public spending constraints as moral principles. I found that turning upside down of the concept quite helpful.
Yes, I like the way that you summarise it by saying that there is an emphasis on the moral rather than the economy part. I was also impressed by the way you used the concept to interrogate the legitimisation of certain values such as fairness, rights and responsibilities.
Lydia Morris
I also make a link with civic stratification here. This concept looks at how the formal framework of who gets what rights is cross cut by informal influences that we can construe in terms of stigma or prestige. Lockwood uses the term moral resources—we could say moral standing. As a group accrues moral standing in society, they are in a stronger position to push for an expansion of their rights. But if their moral standing is impugned (for example, EU migrants taking jobs and benefits), it is easier to achieve a contraction of their rights. So rather than focusing simply on the rules of entitlement, or the letter of the law, it provides a framework for a sociological understanding of those things—so, of course, the idea of moral resources or moral standing links with the social construction of a moral economy.
We have already talked a bit about why migration is conceptualised somewhat differently in Fiona’s work and why that and domestic welfare developments have to be seen as closely linked, even within a similar paradigm. Could you talk about what you see as the common elements of the treatment of these? In the book you mention crossover elements in particular.
Lydia Morris
I think Fiona’s opening statement actually touched on elements of this. I became aware that we’ve seen conditionality increasingly built into the way the welfare system operates, but there’s a parallel resource-driven conditionality that’s built into the management of migration. To me, that is one unifying issue that domestic welfare and the whole of the immigration system have in common.
The way I would put it is that both are using rights as a mode of control by linking the granting or denial of rights to requisite conditions that are also geared towards coercing behavioural change. This vocabulary is certainly written through political speeches, for example, in the view that limiting people’s benefits will force them into work, or that asylum seekers will be deterred from applying for asylum by lowered rates of support. For migration, in relation to family unification, the minimum income requirement has been raised massively, based on the idea that you shouldn’t expect to form a family abroad and be given unquestioned access back to Britain with that family. Conditionality runs right through all three of the fields that I’ve been focused on. In thinking specifically about crossover effects or the key features that cut across what I call ‘the welfare–migration–asylum nexus’, I would firstly say that there is a linkage between rights and controls. There are also other consequences that cut across the component parts of this triptych of a system.
The ‘creation of a hostile environment’—this expression was explicitly used against migration, but in fact, the same tactic is used in the welfare system. It was even described by the UN rapporteur on poverty as a system that instils fear and loathing into claimants, so it’s a hostile environment, and it operates through cuts and conditions aimed at behavioural change.
A consequence of some of this escalation of conditionality is that the system is rife with administrative errors. Again you see this running across all three fields, including poor communication to claimants; poor-quality decision-making; high rates of success on appeal. We’ve seen this in relation to sanctions; the work capability assessment; and failure to monitor the vulnerable. In relation to asylum, there is a bullying and target-driven culture in the Home Office; poor decision-making on both asylum claims themselves and on questions of whether a claimant reaches the threshold for destitution, which is required as a condition of support; and guidance on when the no recourse to public funds condition on migrants can be lifted, which has been found by the courts to be inadequate and even misleading. There has been a failure to monitor the impact of the hostile environment on minorities, of which the Windrush scandal is the worst example, but there are others. There is a culture of denial and defensiveness, as has been officially recorded in both the Department of Work and Pensions and the Home Office, as well as various failures of access to justice, cuts to legal aid, retrospective validation of some welfare regulations, non-responsiveness to the Windrush scandal and recurrent patterns of discrimination.
These are always against the same groups, including large families, women, ethnic minorities and children. The heightened income requirement for family unification is damaging to children, because it splits up families. The lack of recourse to public funds hits women and children disproportionately. The benefit cap removes benefits that are directed at children as a means of influencing the behaviour of their parents and, similarly, with asylum, the removal of preferential rates of support for children. Children appear as victims in relation to welfare, migration and asylum. Across the three fields, destitution is again used as a mode of control. That’s an example of what the crossover effects are.
This is a very powerful argument. A final question for now is about the significance of political discourse in your analysis. You offer a persuasive account of the moral content of political discourse, particularly in the last decade or more. What’s your thinking in that regard? You seem to place a lot of emphasis on the manipulation of discourse.
Lydia Morris
Yes, that’s true. What I don’t do, and I’m not sure how one would do it, is actually investigate the reception of the discourse, which would be another project and a different kind of project. I do analyse the construction of the discourse, and I’ve found Michael Freeden on ideology very helpful here (Freeden 2003). He has an argument that social truths are created through the translation of abstract concepts into substantive content, and this is where we see the transition. The key concept of morality is perceived as fairness, and then fairness is interpreted as fairness to the hard-working taxpayer. There’s a chain of meaning that’s constructed, and all of these things are then set against profligacy and dependency. Then there is this technique of setting up oppositions. Interestingly, when migration comes into the picture, there is another opposition of welfare claimants, or the British people, set against migrants who are taking jobs and welfare.
You can track the construction of these logics quite closely through political speeches on austerity, but of course, the whole edifice is based on flawed arguments. Most unemployed welfare claimants are back in work within six months. Those who aren’t tend to have a learning disability or a mental health problem, and they are also the groups that are the hardest hit by sanctions. The country is highly dependent on migrants as key workers, and this became apparent in the pandemic, but they often earn below the salary threshold that’s required for a work visa. In fact, that threshold had to be lowered in the wake of Brexit.
There is an attack on migrants as a drain on welfare, but actually, non-EU migrants could only claim benefits after achieving permanent residence, showing the vacuous nature of the arguments being made. EU migrants pre-Brexit were eligible for benefits, but in fact, they claimed in a lower proportion than British residents. All the arguments that are put forward in constructing the austerity discourse can be undermined empirically, but the discourse itself is quite cleverly constructed to set different groups of people against each other, despite not standing up to close scrutiny.
I was also thinking that there is a parallel in the way you underline the importance of framing to the notion of ideas in the welfare state literature and the significant effect of embedding particular ideas in the public mind or in policymakers’ minds. I was also thinking of that when you referenced the hold that a particular perspective, idea or representation has on the public mind, which is important for what gets put into policy.
Lydia Morris
Yes. In a slim little book called How Institutions Think, Mary Douglas follows through that logic (Douglas 1986).
Thank you very much, Lydia. Fiona, I’d like to now turn to the set of complex ideas in your work. One of the theoretical frameworks that you develop is around the different crises of the welfare state. You mentioned briefly the crisis of racialised borders in your opening statement. Could you talk about the framework as a whole and what the four crises are? Your work shows very nicely how they intersect.
Fiona Williams
Yes, and I will try and relate some of that back to what Lydia was talking about.
Most critical social policy analysis frames poverty and inequality as the consequence of the shift to neoliberal policies across many welfare states. While these policies can vary, they usually comprise the introduction of market principles, new public management, contracting out, labour market activation and a mixed economy of provision. On top of that, the global financial crisis (again a variety of impacts) legitimated constraints on social expenditure and the introduction of austerity welfare, seriously rebalancing the economy away from wages to profits and the welfare state from safety net to coercive workfare with punitive sanctions. More poverty, precarity and inequalities.
There is actually nothing wrong with explaining the changes and challenges to welfare states in terms of neoliberalism. I agree with much of that, but it simply isn’t enough to explain this complexity of inequalities that I was mentioning before and that Lydia elaborated. Along with the crisis-ridden nature of financialised capitalism, there are other global crises that are creating inequalities, poverty and constraints on government. I identify three which are particularly salient for welfare states. One is the crisis of care and social reproduction, marked by the devaluation and depletion of care. For a long time, care has never been properly valued, but we are also seeing its depletion: that is, the failure to provide the support and services as needs for that support increase (including an ageing population, the necessity for women to earn a wage), so that people’s capacity to care is severely constrained. This crisis of care is not just something that we’re experiencing in this country. Wars, violence, illness and climate disasters intensify this depletion in many low- and middle-income countries.
That is one crisis. The second is the crisis of racialised borders, which I’ve mentioned, and the third is the crisis of climate change, which is reinforcing some of the economic and social inequalities that already exist. It’s reinforcing them geopolitically, and also within countries. If you look at the groups who are particularly affected by pollution, by unclean water, and by environmental and climate disasters, then they include those same groups, because they are associated with where people live, their voice and influence, and so on. What these four crises share is not only are they global, but in different ways, they amplify poverty and inequalities, they threaten our sustainability and solidarity, and they’re contested.
In addition, my approach to intersectionality is not just to look at intersections of power at the interpersonal scale but at the global scale: it’s the intersection of these four crises that’s perpetuating social and global injustices. One example is how wealthier countries are able to solve their health and care crises through the employment of migrant women as very-low-paid care workers. This is a new colonial dynamic in which their exploitation is intensified by border rules reducing their social rights and their availability to care for their own children, by racism at work reducing their earning power, all the while adding to the depletion of care in their countries of origin. If we also take into effect the pandemic—an environmental dimension—these workers were hit particularly hard. In some ways, the pandemic was a dress rehearsal for climate change.
What I’m trying to provide is an intersectional, multi-scalar analysis and show how we need to see the connections across different scales.
You have already started on my next question, which is about the particular framework you use. It is the critical intersectional approach or perspective, which is the subtitle of the book. Could you explain that in more detail, please?
Fiona Williams
Yes. I’ve been writing about the intersections of class, race, gender and disability in different configurations for a long time. Only in this century has the idea of intersectionality become more widespread. It’s very important, in my view, to remember its origins in the 1970s in the struggles by women of colour to claim voice and visibility in a feminist movement, which was dominated by white women and in male-dominated civil rights and anti-racist movements. These were social justice claims that linked subjective experiences to pervasive and compounding structural inequalities of power across race, gender, class and sexuality.
It was such an important insight. In this century, the concept of intersectionality has come back into play in a variety of ways, and it has been quite powerful in shaping a reflexivity in the way in which younger generations approach their analysis and their political practice. It’s also been criticised.
Before I come onto the criticisms and how I’ve tried to take account of them, let me just say why I think that the notion of being able to have a method of exploring invisibility is particularly important to social policy. Intersectional method focuses on lived experiences and how these are formed in the contingencies of time and place. Exactly as Lydia describes and analyses, it enables us to find the ways in which the rules of welfare and systematic disadvantage and discrimination interweave to limit people’s access to support. It elicits the specificities of people’s needs through the multiple social categories they occupy. Intersectionality isn’t a grand theory. It’s been called an ‘orientation’, a way of looking at things. That means it’s open to interpretation. It’s true there are limitations in some of the ways it’s being used. For example, intersectionality analysis has been accused of being too parochial, of merely documenting diversity, of depoliticising its subject matter, of diluting the pervasive power of, say, gender violence or the history of colonialism.
I think this behoves a researcher to explain how you are using the idea. I’ll mention some ways I try to avoid these limitations. What’s important for my analysis is that intersectionality links theory, or orientation, to method and to praxis It’s a methodological approach for exploring power and inequalities, and it links that to political practice as well. It enables you to have a frame for examining individual and collective agency. In my book, my analysis of the disaster of austerity welfare goes on to examine what forms of resistance—small scale and large scale—have been part of that reality. And how far have social justice resistances given rise to prefigurative thinking and possibilities for transformative change. In other words, it allows me to have a frame for thinking about what I could call ‘an intersecting moral economy from below’ and new moral principles for welfare. Perhaps I can come back to that. Second, in order to keep structural power and inequality in the picture, I combine it with other theories, such as the political economy of welfare analysis, or at least the ways in which that analysis has been modified by feminist and decolonial thinking, as well as cultural analysis. For example, I found Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics—the power of a state to decide who is and is not disposable—really helpful in bringing together the significance of colonialism to welfare policies (think Windrush, Grenfell) (Mbembe 2019).
Third, as I said, I employ a multi-scalar approach, so I bring to the analysis connections across different domains of power at interpersonal/local/national/supranational/global scales. This approach, which sees those points which intersect as sites of contestation, permits an insight into change. So, in understanding how social policy is constituted at the national scale, I’ve gone back to a framework which I used in my first book which came out in 1989 about race, class and gender in the welfare state (Williams 1989). My starting point was that welfare states are always in a process of settling and unsettling. Change is always happening.
I argued at that point that there are the three key domains of social relations of power and inequality, normative discourse, organisation, etc. that shape the way that governments settle welfare states, or, because of change or contestation, the way that they are unsettled. These are family, nation and work. I argued that family, nation and work are, themselves, all connected to each other.
As much as that is the case today, it was also the case with the first welfare reforms at the beginning of the 20th century, which were concerned with social imperialism. They linked the first maternity provision for women to the idea that ‘the race will move forward on the feet of little children’. It connected the Aliens Act to welfare provision and said, very clearly, who was to be included and who wasn’t. The trade unions accepted the idea that the welfare state was there by virtue of imperial gains.
So this time round, I’ve added a fourth domain and that is nature. That represents the environment and climate change, so my current analysis looks to the interconnections of family, nation, work and nature, how these frame the settling and unsettling of social policies.
Fiona, would you like to say something about nature and what the crisis of nature means in your work?
Fiona Williams
Yes. Well, it’s only relatively recently that social policy scholars have focused on climate change and how it presents quite a challenge to the assumptions of the remit and financing of welfare states. Not only does it, as I’ve already mentioned, expose and amplify inequalities, but the fact that poor parts of the world are having to pay for a for a climate crisis they didn’t create places a much geopolitically wider case for redistribution, or reparation, than just within the nation state. Climate change also presents more unpredictable risks to safeguard against than welfare states have traditionally had to deal with. Also, the assumption that welfare states are only feasible through productivism, consumption and economic growth is challenged by the idea that no-growth or post-growth economies are needed to combat climate change. Furthermore, welfare states, however minimal some have become, rest on a principle of societal interdependence. What climate change does is bring the planet in as another critical actor with whom we need to work out our obligations of respectful interdependence.
These challenges and new thinking that the Anthropocene poses have interesting synergies with new thinking around the care crisis—for example, I and many others have argued for an ethics of care that values care and places interdependence and human flourishing at the centre of social and economic organisation. Indeed, we can talk about the devaluation and depletion of both the planet and of care precipitating their crises. Both have been a focus for exploitation, extractivism and expropriation.
At the same time, what’s very interesting is the recognition of these synergies for change in policy developments. In Latin America, for example, a report on ‘The Care Society’ from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) (2021) makes these links between the ethics of care and sustainability of the planet—that we have to use the principles of care in restoring care to the planet. I just think that that’s fantastic—care for each other and care for the planet—the idea that care itself has something to tell us about nature, and nature has something to tell us about care.
Lydia, I wonder if there’s anything you’d like to come in on specifically. Fiona has already anticipated my next question of how the book evolved from her existing work, and I wondered whether you’d like to tell us about that, or whether you would like to refer back to some of the points that Fiona has been talking about and present your own work or your own ideas in that context. You can do both of course.
Lydia Morris
I’ll say how my own work evolved, and then I’ll just come back to a point that relates to Fiona’s arguments. This will be quite brief. My own trajectory, I suppose not surprisingly, followed shifting developments in the fields that I’m working in. At the beginning of my research career, I had two projects over a number of years, looking at unemployment, labour markets and welfare issues in the context of both redundancy and industrial decline. That was when my interest in welfare was first developed. Then, as I came through that work, it was around the time of the launching of the EU single market, so I followed up on Marshall’s conception of social inclusion, to think about migration in relation to citizenship and social rights. In a sense, it grew out of the unemployment and welfare work.
By starting to learn about the field of migration, I was also drawn into a wider context for that work, because it was around the time of arguments about post-national society and cosmopolitanism, and a lot of probably over-optimistic speculation about the power of universals. I immediately saw how universal guarantees have a limited effect, both with respect to domestic welfare and migrants’ rights. So I increasingly began to think about the role of rights and the limits of rights across two different fields—the domestic welfare system and the management of migration. That’s what took me in to thinking about how separate fields of interest share a common ground. That, basically, was the project of the book we’re talking about.
What interests me about what Fiona’s just been saying are the different levels or scales of analysis and the different ways that intersections happen. This would have relevance for my research in a way that I’ve not fully developed, and it would be hugely challenging, but one of the points that immediately strikes me is not only the impact of climate change and the climate crisis, but the fact that, as with austerity policies, with climate change the people who suffer most are not in the countries that have contributed most to creating the problem. There’s something very compelling about that, which certainly needs deeper thinking on my part.
In fact, where it would take me, and where it would connect with my other work, is the non-viability of the nation state as a fulcrum for analysis or, indeed, for policy and its operations. To really set that out in detailed analysis would be hugely challenging, but that would be where logic would drive me.
Two things that I’d like particularly to talk about now are the emergent welfare paradigm, or the paradigm of the welfare state that we now seem to have. You both talk about that and historicise it well.
The other thing is about resistance and contestation—something that, again, both of you talk about. I would very much like to hear about especially Fiona’s notion of the social commons as an alternative view or perspective.
If that’s okay with you, could I maybe start on the welfare paradigm that we have or is emergent in this country, and maybe begin with Lydia on that? You talk about that quite a bit.
Lydia Morris
Yes. I was interested in the concept of a paradigm. As a starting point I could give you a definition here that I took from Richard Munch’s work. He sees an emergent paradigm where there is a consistent vocabulary of ideas, concepts and remedies, which spills over from one policy area to another. I came across his argument after I was well into my project, but it was quite helpful in recognising that that’s what was happening. He says that, in the process, you get a reconfiguring of core principles. I suppose, for me, one example would be a reconfiguring of morality or reconfiguring of fairness.
So in terms of the paradigm, concretely, we’ve seen an attack on the something-for-nothing culture, a rhetoric of fairness versus abuse, the use of rights as controls via conditionality, and attempts at coercing behavioural change. They are the elements that are, to use my previous term, crossing over and spilling from one policy area to another, such as to constitute a paradigm.
That then becomes part of a world view that’s written into what I referred to earlier, which is Mary Douglas’s notion of how institutions think. When a model for perceiving and understanding the world is written into our institutional framework, it becomes, almost inevitably, instilled in the general population, which is Mary Douglas’s argument. She says, ‘Institutions ... channel our perceptions into forms compatible with the relations they authorise.’ The way that institutions operate becomes our way of perceiving and understanding the world, and we then get a circular dynamic, because that perception is used to justify the nature of the interventions that are being made.
Acceptance and support for government policies do, to some extent, rest on achieving this shaping of perceptions, morality as fairness, no something-for-nothing, etc, and they’re all ways of tying entitlements or rights to preconditions or requirements. So we could call this a paradigm, in the sense that it’s an approach that is spread across a number of fields, but the defining characteristics really enhance conditionality and the erosion of absolute guarantees.
I could link that to something that you were alluding to previously, Mary, which is, what’s distinctive about the current period? I do make an early statement in my book, seeing the austerity period as constituting both a quantitative and a qualitative leap. I know that’s arguable, and you could equally make a case that it’s a continuation of logic that was already there in the system.
What strikes me as different is just, in quantitative terms, the number and severity of the measures and, in qualitative terms, this paradigm of conditionality and control that permeates several areas of policy intervention. This is the welfare–migration–asylum triptych, or ‘nexus’, as I called it. That goes back to the argument about an emergent paradigm and the extent and severity of the measures, but it’s also part of an all-encompassing system with a repetition of strategies and devices across all of these different fields.
Fiona, I have a similar question for you. I think that the word ‘emergent’ is quite appropriate, because it implies that nothing is ever settled, which you’ve already talked about.
Fiona Williams
Yes, that’s right. But I think in my book ‘emergent’ is used more in the Raymond Williams sense of the rumbling of different ideas and practices which don’t necessarily accord with the dominant paradigm. The research I’ve done in the past on changes in family lives and personal relationships shows that reforms often serve to confirm what most people have been thinking or practising for some time—divorce, abortion, same-sex marriage. That research also found that there’s a certain level in which people are, themselves, in their everyday lives, practising things that are quite contrary to dominant neoliberal ideas of individualism and competition and of course we saw that manifest in collective ways in the pandemic. There’s fluidity and contradiction which can, in certain conditions, create change which may or may not take hold. It’s part of the ‘unsettling’ I talked about.
It’s an orientation as well. I think you said that earlier in relation to your use of intersectionality or critical intersectionality—that it is an orientation. Just to comment, I suppose, one real lightbulb moment—of many on reading your books—was your point, Fiona, which is implicit also in your book, Lydia, that so much is unresolved This helps us to understand the many contradictions and even sometimes chaos (I am thinking of the roll-out of Universal Credit as just one example).
As there is time only for one final theme, I would like that to be resistance, an interest in which underlies both books. You use resistance explicitly, Fiona, whereas, Lydia, you use the term contestation. I want to give each of you the time to talk a bit about resistance and how things can or could be different, or how things are different, depending on where one looks. I will start with Fiona on this.
Fiona Williams
Earlier I talked about the significance of the four crises. They have also been the focus for resistance. Some have been global—Black Lives Matter after George Floyd, the Global Women’s Strikes, Occupy, Extinction Rebellion. Some have involved local activism around anti-austerity, anti-racism, municipal initiatives, democratically run cooperatives, clean water protests, mothers campaigning for a playspace and utilising principles of respecting difference, of looking out for each other, of sharing.
The last section of my book is called ‘Praxis’, where I explore the significance of local and global activism giving rise to prefigurative politics about how life could be organised and lived differently, what political ethics might inform an eco-social commons. These are not plucked out of the air but grounded in the practices of movements such as the Global Municipal Movement, which develops intersectional solidarities within cities around the environment, support for refugees, anti-racism and feminism. Similarly, I explore synergies in the ethics of care, and decolonial and environmental political ethics. You have a big environmental writer like Kate Raworth, who wrote a book called Doughnut Economics (Raworth 2017), challenging the idea of economic growth and talking about, without any explicit reference to the ethics of care, an economic system underpinned by the same principles—interdependence, support, human flourishing and so on.
There’s a synergy here between those addressing the climate crisis and those addressing the care crisis. In addition, some of the movements that have come out of campaigns for environmental racial justice and the Buen Vivir groups in Latin America, are prioritising these sorts of issues as well as looking to democratic coexistence through pluriversality, which is redistributive justice based on dialogue and respect for difference. This offers a way of thinking about an unresolved issue in social policies—how to combine universalism with difference. What came out of Black Lives Matter and is there in decolonial analysis is the need to confront dehumanisation. Sylvia Wynter talks about consciously and communally creating a new ecumenical notion of what it means to be human. Paul Gilroy talks about ‘a new planetary humanism’.
Pulling these ideas together, I suggest they extend our welfare principles of moral obligations in redistribution, recognition, representation and reparation. These include global interdependence between humans and the planet, extending our intergenerational obligations to those who will inherit the planet in the future, and to the dehumanised suffering of past generations.
Through these synergies of these different movements around the crises, there are really new ideas that can be brought together. A lot of groups also work in intersectional ways that are about creating alliances. Developing these sorts of synergies and conceptual bridges is a corollary of an intersectional approach which in its political practice encourages us to think about strategic alliances.
Thank you, Fiona. Lydia, I don’t know whether you’d like to respond directly to that or talk about your interesting notion of contestation. I thought that your threefold framework of contestation or counterargument—questioning rationality, legality and morality—was very rich.
Lydia Morris
In a sense, I might end up where Fiona has taken us to, but just to trace through my logic, what I was looking at, given the unfolding policies that we’ve talked about, was what is the scope for resistance. In terms of the current record, the most effective resistance seems to have come from civic activists, and this is an interesting notion. It’s one that David Lockwood uses. He makes the point that they achieve an effect way beyond their size and scale, and that is mostly done through legal challenge.
The problem is that, if the political discourse is effective in the way that I was talking about, having what Mary Douglas would call an epistemological effect on how people perceive things, then there’s a bigger question of, how does that perception change? This, in a way, was a theoretical issue in the back of my mind, because there is a received wisdom that says that you can’t prove an ideology wrong. The ideology is simply a way of viewing things. Therefore, you can have an alternative ideology, but you can’t disprove an existing one.
I was troubled by this, so I did begin to try to address how you call an ideology into question, and that’s when I get to this threefold critique. On rationality, you can ask, ‘Do policies achieve their stated aim?’ Or you can ask, ‘Are they internally consistent?’ On legality, ‘Do they conflict with other legal obligations?’ The most notable might be universal human rights, but also the rights of the child, or the Equalities Act, etc. So there is a legality critique where policies conflict with existing obligations. Finally, the most difficult one is the morality critique. Is there a more persuasive moral approach to ‘need’?
I might, at that point, digress to where Fiona left off. The idea of growth as the ultimate and necessary aim is, itself, a moral economy. It begs the question, ‘What is the economy for?’ That is where you might begin to construct an alternative morality. I do see that as the crucial issue to achieve a shift in public conceptions of what the primary morality is that we’re embracing.
I think that there have been some signs of restiveness and shifting in public awareness. For example, in reactions to reports of people who have starved to death while on benefits. The pandemic produced a shift in perceptions about migration and key workers, and there was a visibility of who the principal victims of the pandemic were. The desperate plight of asylum seekers crossing the Channel might be leading to an increased understanding and public sympathy. Just to think of some recent events, they include the public reaction to the riots in Southport, the defence of migrants and asylum seekers, and the public resistance to transfers to the Bibby Stockholm barge. There have been some sometimes surprising public resistances to policy.
What would my closing point be? I suppose it would be about building a sociological understanding of these sorts of dynamics, and particularly the question of how rights are allocated, how they are justified, what legitimises the contraction of rights, but also turning that upside down and saying, what legitimises the expansion of rights? Let’s look at these as dynamic processes.
Thank you. It is a very good place to end.
References
LockwoodD. (1996), ‘Civic integration and class formation’, British Journal of Sociology, 47(3): 531–550. https://doi.org/10.2307/591369
ThompsonE.P. (1971), ‘The moral economy of the english crowd in the eighteenth century’, Past and Present, 50(Feb): 76–136. https://doi.org/10.1093/past/50.1.76
FreedenM. (2003), Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, Oxford University Press). https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780192802811.001.0001
DouglasM. (1986), How Institutions Think (Syracuse, NY, Syracuse University Press).
MbembeA. (2019), Necropolitics (Durham, NC, Duke University Press). https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478007227
WilliamsF. (1989), Social Policy: A Critical Introduction—Issues of Race, Gender, and Class (Cambridge, Polity Press).
Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) (2021), Towards a Care Society (Santiago, ECLAC).
RaworthK. (2017), Doughnut Economic: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st-Century Economist (London, Random House Business Books).
1
David Lockwood was one of the founding Professors of Sociology at Essex. In addition to his influential work on social class, he introduced the concept of civic stratification in his article.
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a49
Published on: 12 December 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 4
Article view count: 147
Article download count: 9
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© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Morris, L. & Williams, F. with Daly, M. (2024), ‘Pushing the borders of social policy analysis’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(4): a49 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a49Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
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