From a Welfare State to a Welfare Society: The Changing Context of Social Policy in a Postmodern Era (review)

John J. Rodger’s From a Welfare State to a Welfare Society explores recent trends in welfare politics within Western industrialized nations. Rodger argues that there has been a move away from the “welfare state,” which provides a range of goods to its citizens through legal entitlements, and a movement towards a “welfare society,” which provides welfare through private means.

Rodger’s main thesis is that there are three major perspectives dominating current debates about welfare in OECD nations: modernist, antimodernist, and postmodernist. Modernists defend the welfare state and believe that it should distribute income and social services according to universal principles of equality and social justice. By contrast, antimodernists, otherwise known as neoconservatives or neoliberals, criticize the welfare state for interfering with the market and undermining famiy and community responsibilities for social welfare. Postmodernists offer a new line of attack on the welfare state by suggesting that social services should be decentralized and privatized to better serve diverse social needs.

While support for the welfare state still exists, especially within Scandinavian countries and continental Europe, the rise of antimodernism and postmodernism has led to a new political consensus for a “mixed economy of welfare” witin OECD nations. Increasingly, there has been a push for governments to contract our social services to private agencies and to scale back government benefits so that people will rely more on employer-provided benefits, family support, and private charities.

Rodger suggests that the privatization of welfare services reflects the rise of “amoral familialism,” which puts individuals’ and families’ short-term interests above the needs of the larger community. He links the spread of “amoral familialism” to the development of post-fordist economy which demands more labor flexibility and mobility. Rodger claims that as society has become more polarized through economic restructuring, efforts to rehabilitate and re-integrate the poor are being “supplanted by the management of an excluded problem population” through workfare programs, punitive criminal justice policies, and private security forces. Rodger highlights the contradiction between the public cry for greater community responsiblity for welfare and the decline in people’s capacity and willingness to care for the poor.

Rodger’s book provides a good overview of contemporary conflicts over welfare, especially within the European Union. There are several shortcomings in Rodger’s analysis however. First, Rodger oversimplifies contemporary views on welfare. For example, postmodernists’ criticism of the welfare state as a system of social control is hardly new or distinct. Neo-Marxists and feminist scholars have long viewed the welfare state as both a system of income redistribution and a system of stratification that regulates the labor market and family relations.

Rodger’s analysis of the forces behind welfare retrenchment is also wanting. He attributes it mainly to abstract “economic and political pressures” deriving from “international competition for jobs and prosperity” that increases the relative power of capital over labor. Rodger fails to analyze how capitalists and their political associations have actually pursued political support for welfare cutbacks and neglects the role of racism and nativism in the contemporary backlash against welfare. Rodger also provides little evidence for his claim that diverse social movements, such as those based on gender, age, or disability, have actually fragmented and weakened political support for the welfare state, rather than enriched and broadened it.

Rodger’s book also fails to fully explore the consequences of the privatization of welfare, especially for women. He points out that a the welfare states’ role for caring for people diminishes, there will be increasing reliance on private “caring networks.” He fails to highlight how those caring networks are mostly composed of women who are burdened by the decline of the welfare state.

Undergraduate students are likely to find Rodger’s prose dry and inaccessible. On the other hand, I would recommend Rodger’s book for advanced scholars of public policy. While Rodger does not...