NEWS
In the latest blog post, Dr Janne Autto (Principal Investigator for the Finnish research team) discusses the contested nature of the concept of ‘the welfare state’.
The term and idea of the welfare state plays a central role in public, political and academic discussions on prosocial redistribution. Welfare state models and pathways are commonly seen to guide the division of labour between – and responsibilities of – actors of redistribution, such as the state, charity and voluntary organisations, religious communities, private companies, citizen-groups and individual citizens. Consequently, the welfare state matters for ReDigIm, which examines how the emergence of new modes of contribution fostered by digital technology challenge established forms of redistribution.
The nature of the welfare state as a political keyword tends to become particularly evident in times of extraordinary events and social challenges, as we have witnessed during the turbulent times since the 2007–2008 financial crisis. As Moritz Ege and Keijo Lakkala bring out in their blog texts on this site, the value of the welfare state has been restored in public and political discussions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as our project team has noted, it is difficult to avoid the question of what ‘the welfare state’ means. The welfare state is a slippery and bendy term and idea, yet it is often used and assumed to have a shared meaning.
According to a common academic definition, welfare state means a form of state (or government) in which the state has a significant role in the protection of the economic and social wellbeing of its citizens. Welfare state studies, however, do not share a fixed and common definition of the welfare state, nor am I speaking for such. Academic conceptions of the welfare state can be divided roughly into two major approaches.
In the first one, the welfare state refers especially to institutional solutions and practices. Here the welfare state is seen as a real object, as ‘the’ welfare state, which is also operationalised, for example, as a system of income redistribution. Illustrative of this approach are comparative welfare state studies. Even with this approach the concept of welfare state is often criticised for being ambiguous, indefinite and disputable. The proposed solutions for this problem have included, firstly, making a precise definition of the welfare state in the context in which it is used and, secondly, using more accurate concepts, like ‘social policy’, instead.
As John Clarke has noted, sometimes the welfare state is articulated in plural, as ‘the welfare states’. The welfare state in singular bears the idea of shared social problems of states as well as of the efforts and resources to solve the problems as a connecting factor between certain states. The welfare states in plural, instead, takes in the idea that the means, like welfare policies, for example, are always state specific. The similarities, differences and directions of change of the welfare states have been mapped and classified in the welfare state typologies mentioned above. In addition, ‘the welfare states’ often takes in the idea that some states are ’more’ or ‘better’ welfare states than others.
The second approach, instead, focuses more on the welfare state as an idea or combination of ideas by asking, for example, on what kinds of premises, objectives and means the welfare state is based on. With this approach, ambiguity, variability and contentiousness of the meanings of the welfare state are not conceived as a problem but rather as an object of research, a phenomenon to be studied. This way of approaching the welfare state comes very close to studies in which the nation and the state are studied as ‘imagined’.
This does not mean that institutional practices would be seen as irrelevant. On the contrary, this kind of research aims to make visible the ideas and logics that are behind institutional practices as well as to understand the struggles and power-relations behind their production, continuity and change. Besides, sometimes it is at least equally important to examine what is done with ‘the welfare state’ as what is meant with it. For example, in Finland, the government has justified austerity measures as an operation to rescue the welfare state, while critics claim such measures endanger it. Since the welfare state is a popular political idea, it is often used for promoting conflicting or opposite political objectives.
From this perspective, the welfare state is, firstly, very much contested: there are conflicting views on the kind of welfare state that currently exists and the kind that should exist in the future. Secondly, meanings of the welfare state are contextual. Conceptions of what it is and does vary across different historical, cultural and social contexts. In the Finnish debates over the state’s support for culture, for example, securing people’s possibility to enjoy cultural services is commonly seen as a task of the welfare state. In some other contexts, the welfare state’s responsibilities are often thought more narrowly as covering basic human needs, such as minimum livelihood and access to health care services.
John Clarke has made a perceptive observation that the welfare state is a formation in which conceptions of welfare, state and nation are assembled. The list could also include, for example, conceptions of the economy, working-life and gender roles. When thinking in this way, the welfare states actually reflect institutions in the classical sociological sense: as cultural institutions which are based on the dominant norms and role expectations in society, and which regulate family and kinship relationships, industrial relations, division of political power, religious life and education.
According to Pauli Kettunen, the welfare state is a way of social self-understanding including certain kinds of conceptions of a good society. If we think critically about the welfare state as dominant conceptions of how states should work and what kind of society we should have, it has at least two striking features in respect of both redistribution and welfare.
Firstly, it is nation-state centred. This has led and still leads to situations in which all people in the geographical territory of a state, citizens and non-citizens or denizens, are not equally looked after. The nation-centredness is perhaps even more problematic when we think about welfare or wellbeing transnationally. As Erik Olin Wright reminds us, even though the majority of the people in modern capitalist societies believe in some kind of ideal of equality, life-chances of an individual still greatly depend on where she/he is born. Welfare state discourses tend to outsource this problem, assigning it to other systems and sectors of redistribution, such as foreign policy, development cooperation, and intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations.
Secondly, the welfare state is human-centred. Usually the welfare of other living beings has not been thought as an issue for the welfare state, not even when it might be relevant to human welfare. However, thoughts about environmental or more-than-human welfare and the welfare state have started to merge. Perhaps most evidently this comes out in the discussions on the green transition where one of the major challenges is how to realise this transition in socially fair and sustainable ways. In terms of redistribution, this also means that the redistribution of resources is not something that concerns humans only.
One interesting empirical question in ReDigIm is if and how emergent redistributive imaginaries challenge the welfare state especially with an aim to promote welfare and social justice in societies and in the world.