Search results

Britain's coalition government of 2010-2015 ushered in an enduring age of austerity and a "moral mission" of welfare reform as part of a drive for deficit reduction. Stricter controls were applied to both domestic welfare and international migration and asylum, which were presented as two sides of the same coin. Exploring the idea of a moral economy Lydia Morris examines Britain's reconfigured pattern of rights in the fields of domestic welfare and migration.

Cover -- Contents -- Series Foreword -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- Social Theory and Human Rights -- The Dynamic Dimension of Human Rights -- Citizenship and Human Rights -- Rights Beyond Citizenship -- Power and Control -- Organisation of the Book -- Guidance for Teaching and Learning -- 1 Understanding Torture: The Strengths and the Limits of Social Theory -- Idealism versus Realism -- The Idealist Approach: Absolute Prohibition -- The Realist Approach: Thinking the Unthinkable -- Power and Control -- Dramaturgical Analysis: The Destruction of a Personality -- Torture as a Total Social Phenomenon -- The Discursive Construction of a Social Order -- A New Kind of Enemy and a New Kind of War -- The Uncertain Boundaries of the Law -- Responsibility and Judgment -- Conclusion -- Guidance for Teaching and Learning -- 2 Civil and Political Rights and the Human Condition -- The Human Condition -- Terror and the Human Condition -- The Gulag -- Social Solidarity and the Civil Sphere -- 'Solidarity' and Civil Religion -- Civil Rights and the Challenge of Diversity -- Deliberation, Activism and Action Outside the Law -- Promise and Forgiveness -- Guidance for Teaching and Learning -- 3 The Community of Rights: Membership, Rights and Recognition -- Normative versus Grounded Theory -- Honneth and the Moral Grammar of Social Conflict -- Expansion of Rights and the Social Medium of the Law -- The Community of Rights -- Welfare Conditionality under New Labour -- Social Rights and Human Rights in South Korea -- Stateless Citizens and Hurricane Katrina -- Redistribution or Recognition? -- Civic Stratification -- Civic Stratification, Welfare Rights and Human Rights -- Guidance for Teaching and Learning -- 4 Human Rights as Trans-national Rights: Migration and Asylum -- Post-national Society -- The Limits of Post-nationalism.

This pioneering book demonstrates how different traditions of sociological thought can contribute to an understanding of the theory and practice of rights. It provides a sociological treatment of a wide range of substantive issues but never loses sight of the key theoretical questions. It:considers some varied cases of public intervention, including welfare, caring, mental health provisions, pensions, justice and free speech alongside the rights issues they raiseexamines the question of rights from the point of view of distinctive population groups, such as prisoners and victims, women, ethnic

A cluster of contradictions: the politics of migration in the European Union Chapter; rights and controls in the management of migration: the case of Germany; the ambiguous terrain of rights: Italy's emergent immigration regime; the shifting contours of rights: Britain's asylum and immigration regime; stratified rights and the management of migration: national distinctiveness in Europe; gender, race and the emdodiment of rights; managing contradiction: civic stratification and migrants in Europe

While accepting Banton's recently expressed view that sociology and social policy are distinct disciplines, this article argues that times of radical change can profitably bring the two into closer dialogue. Considering an argument from Emirbayer and Mische that agency becomes especially apparent in unsettled times, it focuses on conceptions of agency at play in the design and implementation of recent UK welfare reforms, and in subsequent legal challenges. Identifying a series of key measures in the Welfare Reform Act of 2012 and the Welfare and Work Act of 2016, this article examines the challenges that have ensued, and the way that agency is revealed as both a site of disciplinary control and as a focus for contestation, pitting the purposive rationality of welfare reform against the practical reason that emerges from claimant experience.