Suchergebnisse

Purpose
The "welfare reform" narrative of successive Conservative-led UK Government emphasises public spending reductions, individual responsibility and strengthening of benefit conditionality. The purpose of this paper is to cast light on how this narrative is challenged and disrupted by the Scottish Government through their articulation of a social democratic welfare state imaginary.


Design/methodology/approach
The study draws together a decentred governance perspective that emphasises ideational tradition for understanding (re)construction of governance (Bevir, 2013, p. 27) with critical discourse analysis to examine how welfare interpretations/representations are carried into the policy and public arena. The Scottish Government documents are deconstructed to interrogate the ideas and form of their emergent discourse and its relation to the independence referendum and welfare governance reform.


Findings
Responding to changing socio-economic contexts and welfare governance, the Scottish Government has developed a discourse of modernisation rooted in British and Scandinavian social democratic traditions. Fusing (civic) nationalism with social wage and social investment concepts, they conjure up imaginaries of a prosperous, solidaristic, egalitarian welfare state as a feasible future reality, recuperating "welfare" as a collective endeavour and positioning a maldistribution of power/resources between groups and constituent countries of the UK as the "problem".


Originality/value
The paper is of value to those interested in how changes to centralised-hierarchical welfare governance can open new spaces for actors at different levels of government to articulate counter-hegemonic discourses and practices. Its originality lies in the analysis of how the Scottish Government has reworked social democratic traditions to weave together a welfare imaginary that directly contests the problem-solution narrative of successive Conservative-led UK Governments.

Drawing on Autonomist Marxist theory this article situates the 2010–15 Conservative–Liberal Coalition government's active labour market policy as the most recent phase in a state 'strategy of underdevelopment' (Cleaver, 1977) to erode the autonomy of labour power and facilitate a reconfiguration of labour and work to impose (competition for) undesirable jobs on the terms and conditions offered by capital (Peck, 2001: 349). The article contends that Mandatory Work Activity and the Work Programme facilitate a pattern of differentiated activation, where segmentation and stratification of the non-employed population (re)produces an insecure, disciplined, segmented and stratified labour power for insecure, segmented, stratified labour markets. From the perspective of capital and the state the differential job outcomes associated with these programmes are less a mark of policy failure than of policy success.

Policy documents are a useful source for understanding the privileging of particular ideological and policy preferences (Scrase and Ockwell, 2010) and how the language and imagery may help to construct society's assumptions, values and beliefs. This article examines how the UK Coalition government's 2010 Green Paper, 21st Century Welfare, and the White Paper, Universal Credit: Welfare that Works, assist in constructing a discourse about social security that favours a renewal and deepening of neo-liberalization in the context of threats to its hegemony. The documents marginalize the structural aspects of persistent unemployment and poverty by transforming these into individual pathologies of benefit dependency and worklessness. The consequence is that familiar neo-liberal policy measures favouring the intensification of punitive conditionality and economic rationality can be portrayed as new and innovative solutions to address Britain's supposedly broken society and restore economic competitiveness.

Welfare to work has received less attention in devolution studies than other policy sectors. Drawing on Hall's (1993) 'orders of change' model as an analytical framework, this article addresses this deficit. The devolution settlement and constitutional question in Northern Ireland limit the likelihood of radical departure from 'parity' with Great Britain1 but differences are emerging.

English
This article argues that the introduction of new governance and performance frameworks for social security administration stems from Labour's adoption of an endogenous growth economic model. The institutional structure for administering employment and social security that Labour inherited in 1997 was not suitable to support its socioeconomic objectives. The creation of Jobcentre Plus and the Department for Work and Pensions and the reorientation of their performance objectives were the response. These were informed by the endogenous growth-inspired policies that (implicitly and explicitly) underpin Labour's claim to be pursuing a Third Way.

The creation, during Labour's second term, of the Department for Work and Pensions and the new delivery agency Jobcentre Plus, was a significant reorganization of the administration of employment and social security policy. Drawing on Regulation theory the article argues that reform was structurally driven by the need to ensure delivery mechanisms aligned with Labour's vision of an `employment first' welfare state. The organization and objectives of the Employment Service and Benefits Agency that Labour inherited hindered moves to promote joined-up working to deliver employment opportunities for the economically inactive. To overcome this problem the Government embarked on a merger to break down the organizational, historical and cultural barriers that had separated the work of each agency. The administrative function of delivering social security and employment policy has been shaped into an active exponent of the Government's socioeconomic strategy for supporting an evolving neo-liberal regime of accumulation.