According to BBC Newsnight: the main new policy announcement in Gordon Brown’s Labour Party Conference Speech tomorrow will be a plan to tackle the digital divide amongst young people. This will be done through a voucher scheme that will subsidize the cost of a computer or an internet subsciption for low income households with children…. if that is the case then it is an interesting development.
Obviously this is a hugely important speech for Brown. If he is pinning his political hopes on the headline grabbing potential of a plan to address the digital divide then this marks something of a return to the fore of the ‘e-galitarian’ rhetoric I wrote about in 2003. It will be a clear attempt to respond to Cameron’s claim that Brown is an ‘analogue politician in a digital age’ by plugging, once again, into the modernising imagery of new technology, but doing so in a way that suggests modernisation must be tied with a concern for equity that is the traditional hallmark of Labour (and, by implication, alien to the Conservatives, no matter how modern they might now appear.)
That the scheme will only be for young people is a nod to the human development potential of the internet for those in education: investment to boost equality of opportunity for learners rather than a social right for all. Internet access is not, it seems, regarded by Brown as an end in itself, but merely a means to an end, a way of improving human capital by boosting learning and, in turn, of improving social outcomes through a more level educational playing field.
In short, the plan has all the hallmarks of the limited, fragmented vision of e-galitarianism rather than the universal, comprehensive egalitarianism of Old Labour.
I haven’t had time to properly digest the Cities Unlimitedreport from Policy Exchange yet - too busy writing a conference paper - but the fact that David Cameron has felt the need to dismiss the work of his closest think tank as ‘insane‘ says it all.
For those not familiar with the report, here’s a snippet from The Times:
David Cameron has been embarrassed by his favourite think-tank after it suggested that Liverpool, Sunderland and Bolton should be abandoned because the North would never improve. The Tory leader, who begins a two-day tour of the North today, firmly rejected a report by Policy Exchange, which suggested that the Government should help northerners to relocate to Oxford and Cambridge. It suggested that Britain’s two university towns are likely to be able to “form the basis of strong, successful, substantial cities”. Singling out Sunderland as an example of a town in decline, the report says: “It is time to stop pretending that there is a bright future for Sunderland and ask ourselves instead what we need to do to offer people in Sunderland better prospects.”
Wow! I’ll probably have more to say later, but given Sunderland is my hometown I feel duty bound to challenge some of the report’s claims! The short boxed case study on Sunderland in the report itself is woefully inadequate.
Firstly, the authors have no understanding of Roy Keane (very important in my book), quoting him in support of their thesis as follows:
Sunderland suffers from very poor economic geography. It is a long way from most places. It is not somewhere that outsiders consider a desirable place to live. Roy Keane, Sunderland Football Club’s manager, commented on the difficulty of attracting good players to the Premiership club despite offering equivalent wages to clubs in the South: “I find it surprising that geography seems to play such a big part … Retire at 35 or 36, you can live wherever you bloody well like – London, Monaco, wherever – and any half-decent footballer will be a multimillionaire anyway. Why is there such a big attraction with London? It would be different if it was Chelsea, Arsenal or maybe Tottenham, but when they go to a smaller club just because it’s in London, then it’s clearly because of the shops.”
This was a joke guys - a sly dig at some players who wouldn’t sign for us because we were (then) officially the worst time in Premiership history x 2. (And, BTW, it’s Sunderland ASSOCIATION Football Club: if you’re gonna have a dig, get it right.)
Secondly, they are under the impression that the only economic change since the 1970s has been the arrival of Nissan. While over-hyped for sure, it’s odd that they made no mention of Sunderland winning the digital challenge competition, being named as one of most connected cities in the UK and a leader in the take up of digital television and broadband internet. Certainly there is a long way to go here before these technologies can be said to have had a major impact on the city’s economy, but things have happened that needed to explored, understood and acknowledged in the report, and all of them have happened in the last ten years, aided by regeneration money.
Thirdly, their discussion of the transport infrastructure - mocking the pathetic number of trains a day to London and their tardy speed and, similarly, pointing to the better Metro links in Newcastle and so on - totally misses the point. It is precisely because of the lack of investment in the transport infrastructure that the city has suffered so badly in the post-industrial era!
Fourthly, and relatedly, so much of this is about politics and political institutions but this goes uncommented. Sunderland’s transport infrastructure has been poor compared to Newcastle’s because Thatcher scrapped the Tyne & Wear Metropolitan Council when it was half way through a twenty year transport investment programme centred around the Metro; at this stage the Tyne section was well developed but the Wear section still to follow… consequently, Sunderland paid for Newcastle-Gateshead to get the Metro from the late 1970s/early 1980s but didn’t get it itself until a few years ago, after Labour came back into power in and began to plough in the regeneration funds that Policy Exchange dismisses as ineffective. The authors, of course, seem unaware of this and even mock the direct Sunderland-London train for being slower than the London-Newcastle and Metro to Sunderland route…. well, without the regional regeneration money it would have been a bus to Sunderland for us all…
Worse still, the report, badly abuses the notion of path dependency, using it an overly-deterministic way that fails to account for the influences on the branching effects of economic and social policy development. Chief amongst these is the UK’s overly centralised political system; the authors of the report completely write politics out of the picture though - the word itself hardly gets a mention in fact. It’s hardly surprising that a region with no political institutions of any significance should become one in which businesses do not tend to locate their headquarters and key decision makers. The authors of the report seem to think that successful cities are large ones, drawing this conclusion on the basis of their earlier work in which they examined a series of successful cities from around the world; but most of the successful cities they highlight are close to key political decision makers, being capital cities, regional capitals with significant powers or strongly represented at the national level as part of a federal system of politics.
The rhetoric surrounding the Brown government’s latest plans for welfare reform - published in a green paper today - has been fascinating. As Polly Toynbee notes in the Guardian, James Purnell has been spinning like crazy ahead of its publication, with wildly different messages for different audiences, though as she points out, the overall message was simply ‘tough, tough, tough’.
Like practically every secretary of state responsible for social security in the post-war era, Purnell claims his reforms hark back to the principles of Beveridge. (The most notable example here was John Moore who, when defending Thatcher’s reforms of the late 1980s, suggested that the slashing of benefits for 16 & 17 year olds was a return to Beveridge on the grounds that Beveridge’s original plans had not covered people under the age of 18.) Purnell’s arguments rest on the claim that Beveridge’s deeply held principle of individual responsibility has been ‘left… out of the equation‘ of social policy, being overlooked from the 1960s onwards. (To stress his Beveridgean credentials on this, Purnell begins his foreword with a direct quotation from the Beveridge report.)
It is striking, as Toynbee again notes, that this line of rhetoric foregrounds so many of the core criticisms of welfare that the right have made since the 1970s and downplays many of the more nuanced parts of the proposals the government make in the green paper; as such, ‘Purnell missed the chance to take ideas about welfare away from endless punishment into Labour terrain, showing what really works in easing impoverishment, illiteracy, and all that leads to unemployment’.
Brown’s introduction to the paper sings from the same hymn sheet, arguing that ‘In 1997, this Government inherited a welfare state weighted heavily towards rewarding and supporting people who were not actively seeking to improve their situation’. He then talks tough while dodging the normative debates, blaming it all on the out-of-control macro forces - ‘in a globalised world, we simply cannot afford the high price of large numbers of people on benefits’ - before rounding off with some classic competition state style rhetoric: ‘we need people in work, making the best use of their talents and helping us compete’.
So far, so clear, but this little passage in Brown’s introduction struck me as being rather bizzare:
‘These reforms will ensure we have a world-class welfare system that maximises the numbers in employment and minimises the numbers on benefit. They reflect our drive towards world-class public services across the board – delivering personalised services tailored to individual needs, giving more freedom to frontline professionals and increasing people’s control over the services and support they choose to access’.
Ah… the rhetoric of ‘world class’. What does it mean in this context? And how might it be measured or benchmarked? And how does more conditionality in social security tie in with giving people more control over world-class public services? And is it really possible to combine giving more freedom to frontline professionals while also increasing people’s control over the services these professionals deliver?
I foresee a thousand new social policy essay questions…
But, today’s news that the personal details of all families in the UK claiming Child Benefit (theoretically all with a child under 16) have gone missing after being placed on two CDs and then biked by a courier, in an unregistered delivery, has to be up there with the best of them. The discs, destined for the National Audit Office, apparently carried the full records of all claimants, meaning whoever finds these discs potentially has access to the name, address, date of birth, National Insurance number and bank details of up to 25 million people. The data is, we are told, password protected, but astonishingly is not encrypted so getting into the records shouldn’t be too difficult. Such basic inadequacies in protecting data really do beggar belief and, while the Chair of HM Revenues & Custom has resigned over the matter, deeper questions surely need to be asked here.
I watched some of the debate that took place in the House of Commons after the Chancellor announced the full details of the incident. The Lib Dem’s Vince Cable rightly asked why on earth data was being transported in this manner and pointed the finger at the prehistoric computer systems that underpin the whole social security sector. The Conservatives are using the event to attack the ID card proposals and they may well be right in suggesting this will shatter public confidence in the government’s ability to run such a national ID system in a way that does not threaten privacy, especially if the HMRC data does fall into criminal hands and this breaks into the media. But, what I found most amazing of all was the intervention of Edward Leigh, the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, who said he had spoken to the Comptroller General and been told that the NAO had specifically requested that they only be sent the National Insurance numbers of Child Benefit recipients; all other personal details should have been stripped out of the data they were sent. Leigh had also established that after the NAO had informed HRMC that the data had not arrived they sent two more copies of the discs (presumably by the same method!?!?).
In other words, it seems HMRC have been biking insecurely protected personal data of millions of people around the country for no good reason other than they could not be arsed to reformat it, delete the unneeded items or to fill in the extra paper work needed for a registered delivery. As Leigh says, the HMRC appear to have been ‘criminally irresponsible’ here.
There is some good news though. Given the track record of computing projects in the sector, chances are the discs weren’t burned properly and when they are found they will probably have no data on them at all.
It takes a real geek to stumble across social policy issues during their first few hours in Second Life (see previous post!), but my geekiness knows no bounds! (Or, from the policy end, should that by wonk/wonkiness?) It turns out that the NHS will be using the Second Life platform during consultations on the future of the health service with a virtual conference planned for Wednesday! Naturally, I had to check out the NHS zone on Second Life and it was interesting - a mock up of a future care facility and a few videos outlining options for the future - but, as with so much on Second Life, is mainly a loosely veiled marketing effort.
The same is true of yet another social policy area I came across: a Diplomacy Island where David Miliband delivered a speech last week (archived on YouTube). This area seems to have real potential (a library of UN publications looked very interesting for instance), but the only virtual embassy open to date belongs to the Maldives and, well, it is a nice PR piece that highlights recent public policy gains while skipping over some of the major issues about democracy in the Maldives.
How far REAL debate is taking place on Second Life is a question I want to explore a little more as I get further into it, but so far debate has been hard to find…
Oh, and here’s a picture of people dancing for their welfare money on Second Life’s Welfare Island..
After some live demos of interesting Second Life apps at BarCampLeeds and a few interesting questions from fellow Yorkie John Holmes about whether there was anything more than hyperbole in the Guardian’s two page spread on virtual worlds this weekend, I thought I’d better finally get round to properly checking out Second Life to see what the fuss is about.
My view has long been that I am sure that virtual worlds hold great potential, but at the moment the investment of time needed to get up running on a platform like Second Life is still too high for truly mass usage to be a possibility. After setting myself up Second Life, I can see that the investment of money needed should not be underestimated too: my nearly new MacBook Pro struggles a little at times to keep pace and no other application I use sends the cooling fans whirring so regularly! Moreover, after a few hours wandering around I can’t say I was anything other than moderately entertained by the whole thing, not least because linden dollars - the Second Life currency which can be bought using real world dollars or earned by selling goods to other Second Life citizens - are needed for just about anything of real interest. (Indeed, it seems that in the Second Life, income poverty is as exclusionary as in the first life.)
All this, I guess, is what I expected. What came as a real surprise though was the representation of the welfare state in Second Life. After mastering the basics of Second Life (choosing hair style, deciding whether to have baggy or tight fit jeans, making my avatar taller and thiner than the real me etc…) I searched for some popular places to hang out and right there in the top five most popular destinations was ‘Welfare Island’. The promise of some modest assistance appealed, not least because as a new character with no linden dollars I couldn’t actually get up to much fun.
Now, having long ago dipped into Howard Rheingold’s work on virtual communities, I thought that some of that old hippy counter culture spirit might still be alive and well in Welfare Island: some support for new comers perhaps or friendly support at least. I couldn’t have been more wrong. If Welfare Island is indicative of Second Life’s culture then it is way off the scale on the right hand side of the social policy spectrum.
First off, the ‘Welfare Office’ on Welfare Island pays out money not on the basis of entitlements or need but through ‘Welfare ATMs’. No social contract here, but a cash machine that dishes out dollars in an indiscriminate manner to anyone who turns up looking for them. This is pretty bold anti-welfare imagery, but is only the start, with visitors told they can ‘make more money on Welfare Island than anywhere else on Second Life’. Welfare is described in terms of ‘free money’, the ‘easy way to earn linden’ or ‘handouts’. An Uncle Sam like figure (Uncle Sands) appears regularly (a figure of the state’s beneficence?) and exhorative proclamations to ‘get off those camping chairs stupid’ and learn how to ‘make it out of the ghetto’ by actively seeking more welfare payments rather than ’standing in line’ fly at your character from all directions.
Added to this, welfare has no dignity in Second Life. Welfare payments are never a right, but are offered in exchange for some activity. For the most part this is filling in marketing surveys. I guess this could be seen as some sort of work-for-the-dole style system, but the labeling of recipients with the phrase ‘I’m on Welfare’ above their head doesn’t do much to alter the view that it’s some kind of punishment. Worse still, the main alternatives on offer revolve even stricter control and degradation of the recipient of welfare: dancing for cash with ‘I’m on welfare’ above your head for instance or, staggeringly, the offer of $75L for users taking a picture of themselves holding a piece of paper with one of these phrases written on it:
I’m On Welfare !!
I’m a Welfare Millionaire !!!
Welfare Island Rocks !!!
Welfare Pays !
Welfare Island Supports Me!!
Uncle Sands Rocks !!!
Uncle Sands Paid Me !!!
Note: these are pictures of actual users and NOT their avatars. These pictures are to be used, at some stage, on the island’s own web site at www.WelfareIsland.com, presumably as a marketing campaign, though no sign of them at the time of writing. Amazingly, users are told ‘You will get paid *BONUS* Linden for creativity. Examples: Dressing as a Hobbo’. Fucking hell - did the love-child of Charles Murray and Margaret Thatcher design this island?!?! I won’t even hazard a guess as to why the main social area of the island is a bar called the ‘Stoned Crow’…
Now, if it’s only a game, perhaps none of this matters and I am not one for making simple virtual world gaming equals real world problems links. (After all, I love stealing cars, shooting people and causing mayhem in Grand Theft Auto, but wouldn’t say boo to a goose in the real world.) But if Second Life has aspirations to be a genuine (virtual) community, what does it say that so many Second Life users draw linden dollars from an island that completely trashes the welfare state and takes cheap shots at the poor? There are rules in place in Second Life to protect the social fabric of the virtual world: the first thing I tried to do on being landed into Second Life was fly someone’s helicopter - a natural action in GTA! - only to be prevented from so doing because I didn’t own it, so it’s not like anything goes there. In other words, a virtual ’state’ of sorts exists, but it is a minimal state and the idea of welfare is only there to be scoffed at.
There’s nothing wrong with a bit of scoffing of course, but welfare island isn’t sophisticated political satire, it’s just weak cover for a marketing operation. Indeed, there is a good reason for the minimal state in Second Life: it is so much more than a game for the owners of Second Life and the real world companies - such as Welfare Island - who have ambitions to develop profitable real world companies within the Second Life platform. Second Life citizens need linden dollars to do pretty much anything in Second Life (including developing their own personality by buying new outfits etc and buying land and property in order to properly join a community). If they have real world dollars they can exchange them for linden dollars. If they don’t, then tough: you start with $0L and will have to get yourself off to Welfare Island to get yourself up and running. Desperate citizens will stoop low: they will fill in marketing surveys that they wouldn’t otherwise fill in that will lead to real world profiling and mail shots; they will offer their own real world image up to the Welfare Island company for future real world marketing campaigns; and, they will generally waste their time in a hived off portion of the Second Life game performing stunts for linden dollars so they can access the regular parts of Second Life they really want to be in. I guess that if all citizens started off with $1,000L then very few would need to buy more linden dollars from Second Life’s founders and companies like Welfare Island wouldn’t exist at all.
In short, at first glance Second Life looks a pretty mean spirited place and its institutions (i.e. rules) foster this spirit in order to drive profit. A far cry from the virtual utopia that some present or the value laden community celebrated in earlier literature on virtual communities.
I am at BarCampLeeds today and, if the battery holds out, will be liveblogging the event!
11.00: TV 3.0 by Mark Sailes. Interesting idea: tagging TV and film with meta-data and time stamps to allow, for example, Star Wars geeks to find and watch all the light sabre fights without the excuse for dialogue that pads that bits that people really want to see. But a big debate about how to get the meta-data up there: IM chats, voice recognition of fans chatting on the phone? Many seemed to favour logging phone chats, but I am not sure this will work as people will need to stay on topic the whole time. A big stumbling block could be legal issues: what if each time a particular actor appears they are tagged as a child abuser following, say, a contested tabloid story? Or, if people watching news or documentaries repeatedly label a government minister as a liar? Without heavy moderation it could be a money spinner for the libel lawyers I guess!
11.50: Giving Web a Voice by Georgia Brown. An interesting demo of a tool that can be embedded into social networking sites (demos of linkedin, myspace and second life) to allow people to chat to their friends using their existing VOIP accounts. The Second Life demo was particularly cool: they plan to link up with some bars in Second Life and allow people to start chats in special area of the bars themselves. (More at: www.phonefromhere.com) One potential issue is the question of how far their target demographic (younger people) is interested in voice chat rather than text chat; the explosion in text message volumes seems to have been in part driven by a preference for texting over calling.
Another issue raised by Georgia’s talk for me is that of the BarCamp format. At 10.00am the agenda for the unconference was drawn up with people using post-it notes to place short titles of their talks on a white board, but there is no additional context for each talk (usually not even a name for the presenter). As a social scientist, the title of this talk - ‘Giving Web A Voice’ - conjured up all sorts of images about the democratic governance of the web, but for the techies it was obvious it was about VOIP! On the way out of the session another problem with scheduling emerged: people are moving the post-it notes and some (good natured) arguments are breaking out about scheduling!
After lunch: Paul Robinson on why futurology is rubbish. No confusion with this title! A provocative talk that suggested a lot of social science that looks towards the future is a waste of time - ouch! I agreed with much of what he said about the impact of unpredictable factors on the future (with a nod to chaos theory and complexity theory), but his overall conclusion that there is no point looking to the future I couldn’t agree with… I asked him if past action was no guide to the future how he could know whether to put trousers on before leaving the house… He also raised the old chestnut about Thomas Watson, the head of IBM in its early days, predicting a world market of only five computers as a classic example of a failed prediction. However, it seems more likely that this was a case of failed historical research: there is no convincing evidence Watson ever said this and, having read Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust I can’t imagine an operator as cold and ruthless as Watson dismissing ANY opportunity for IBM to sell a new product.
A live link up with BarCampOttowa followed, but technical hitches took hold and a voice only Skype chat was all that could be achieved in the end. A nice idea, but…
15.10 Intelligent human-computer interfaces and their possibilities by Reinhold Behringer. A lot crammed into this talk (too much really), but some really interesting stuff including computer driven cars and computers playing music with (and, crucially, being able to keep up with) a human orchestra.
16.30 - Valerie De Leonibus, Regeneration, Tech and the North. A very interesting session that covered a wide range of topics, not least during a lively discussion that went way over the alloted time such was the interest! Issues covered include how to get IP from universities exploited more effectively, how funding for tech industries focuses too much on infrastructure rather than human capital (especially how much harder it is to get some support for investing in labour compared to investing in bricks and mortar), how to make sure the benefits for the wider community can be ensured and what the north might do differently. The movement of high tech talent from Milan to Turin (and the switch of investment from motoring to new ventures there) was one particularly interesting example I hadn’t come across before. Lots of talk about Richard Florida’s work on tech, talent, toleration and place. Also a fair bit of discussion about the importance of events such as BarCamp in aiding the north’s creative economy.
6.20 - Gung Ho Start Up by Guy Fraser of Adaptavist. This was a great talk! He took us through the story of how he and Dan Hardiker (job title: ‘Miracle Worker’) accidentally established a hugely successful start up (Adaptavist) by not planning for the future, not writing business plans and not following the normal rules of the game. They are evidently hugely talented guys and this is clearly a large part of the explanation for their success, but by only planning at most six months into the future and listening closely to their clients about their needs they are able to roll with the latest developments at adapt quickly to change.
7.00 Wrap-Up and After Party. i-Phones and i-Pods were up for grabs in the wrap up prize draw and, amazingly, my name came out of the hat… but for a copy of Photoshop rather than one of the coveted i-Phones… at the risk of sounding a total brat, cool as Photoshop is I am tempted to see if I can swap this for an i-Phone somewhere! A couple of people BarCamp had i-Phones and they look as good as the hype suggests… Following the wrap-up, the after party got off to a shaky start, with Asda failing to deliver the beer on time. However, Rockstar Games put a generous tab behind the bar of a local pub and it is safe to say this did the trick.
Without doubt BarCampLeeds was a successful event and, hopefully, more BarCamps will follow shortly in the North. While at times there was a sense that people were unsure what the nature and tone of the event ought to be, this is inevitable given the movement is in its early days and I am sure more people (myself included) will present next time having seen what a BarCamp looks like in practice. More to the point, BarCampLeeds pulled together a tremendous number of people in a very short time, all of whom signed up to the idea of participant lead event that shares ideas and knowledge on an opensource basis. In a field where commercial events are typically pitched at crazy price levels that was great to see and the energy and vision of the organisers was phenomenal. The low entry costs also resulted in a really interesting mix of people in terms of organisational and disciplinary backgrounds, though I reckon a few more of the social scientists working on the sociology of the internet (including some colleagues at York Uni!) would add nicely to the overall mix … which has me thinking whether a BarCampYork might be a possibility at some point in the near future…
I have a chapter in it looking at the potential for policy to become a learning experience. Putting together the chapter was certainly a challenge; the idea for the book was to take nine core ‘competencies’ identified in a government review titled ‘Professional Policy Making for the Twenty-First Century’ and turn each into a chapter for the book.
Unfortunately (for me), mine - capable of learning lessons - was the final of these core competencies and, on closer inspection, remarkably like the two that proceeded it - open to review and open to evaluation - as well as drawing much from the ‘outward looking’ competency. In fact, once these elements had been covered by my co-authors, there seemed to be remarkably little left to say, and certainly Professional Policy Making for the Twenty-First Century had little more than a few lines to say about my allocated topic! In fact, for the most part, it seemed to relegate lesson learning to the improved dissemination of evaluation findings.
With a little prod from some colleagues from within government assigned to offer some thoughts to help shape the argument, the chapter ended up in the (some would say) murky realms of complexity theory, posing some rather difficult questions about what learning might mean in a (non-linear) policy context, particularly when evaluation is often so tightly linked to quantitatively measured performance targets.
The temptation that governments often give into when undertaking reviews of policy making processes (and one that some of the academic policy analysis literature gives into also) is to prescribe tighter and tighter control of the policy making ‘machine’ in order allow for the more efficient delivery of policy makers’ ideas. However, the ‘machine’ is an illusion and ‘control’ impossible. Learning that adopts such overly simplistic views of the policy process risks being too narrow… or so the chapter argues!
Along with York colleagues Stefan Kühner and Stuart Lowe, I have been working on a new introductory social policy text book called ‘The Short Guide to Social Policy‘ that (if all goes to plan) is due to be published by The Policy Press next year. Having just finished the draft manuscript we are keenly awaiting the referees’ comments at the moment!
The project is something of a risky venture for us as there are already a lot of excellent social policy texts on the market. However, we hope to make a distinct contribution in three key areas…
Firstly, as the name of the book implies(!) by providing a short introduction. Many of the texts available now are approaching encyclopedia length. While this is a largely sensible response to the growing scope of the subject of Social Policy, for those only studying, say, a single module in the subject or merely looking for an accessible text to get them up-and-running, a 700 page introduction isn’t always welcome. To cut the book down to size, we have gone ‘back to basics’ so to speak, focusing only on the five giants of welfare identified by Beveridge: health, housing, social security, employment and education.
Secondly, by adopting an international approach. The most popular Social Policy texts remain very much focused on the British case. Yet, our experience as teachers of Social Policy is that the student body is becoming much more diverse in the UK and so the British case is not always a logical starting point for our students. Intellectually, too, there is no compelling reason why the British case needs to form the basis of an introduction to the subject; indeed, a comparative perspective is hugely beneficial. We have, therefore, tried hard to divorce our discussion from any national case. Though our knowledge is still biased towards the countries we are most familiar with, we have included examples and evidence from more than 70 countries in the draft of the book.
Finally, by adopting a common set of conceptually rooted headings for each chapter. In most Social Policy introductions, each chapter is allowed to follow its own logic and/or the content is allowed to be driven by the author’s own concerns. We have adopted a common structure for each chapter that broadly draws on Esping-Andersen’s view that welfare regimes have (varying) social rights, (varying) mechanisms of delivery (state, market, family etc) and produce (varying) degrees of social stratification.
In short, the book is informed by our interests in the comparative political economy of welfare; indeed, while the main chapters, for the most part, offer a description of policy mechanisms and an exploration of empirical evidence, we round the book off with a guide to some of the big picture theories about the development (past and future) of welfare states.
A few weeks ago I was - out-of-the-blue - invited to speak at a conference in Skopje, Macedonia, on ‘Contemporary Challenges in Theory and Practice of Social Work and Social Policy’ organised as part of a celebration of 50 years of social work and social policy education in Macedonia. The conference took place a few days ago:
Skopje Conference Poster
It was my first trip to the region and a great opportunity to meet some new people. Amongst those from or working in the region there were: former York PhD student Eda Tahiraj; conference co-organiser Maja Gerovska Mitev (University Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje, Macedonia); Adrian Dan (Research Institute for Quality of Life, Bucharest, Romania); Mojca Novak (Business and Management School in Novo mesto, Slovenia), Natalija Perišić (University of Belgrade, Serbia); Paul Stubbs (Institute of Economics, Zagreb, Croatia); Vanja Branica (University of Zagreb, Croatia).
I presented a paper from the fuzzy set ideal type analysis of productive and protective welfare state types that I have been working on with Stefan Kühner; a book from the conference with a chapter by us will be appearing in early 2008. An earlier version of the work can be downloaded from the ASPC 2007 website.
