Abstract
We begin with what might be called the ‘empirical’ or ‘pragmatic’ approach to welfare — part of a tradition of social investigation and reform that goes back to the last century. In Britain it is represented by the work of such scholar-reformers as Titmuss, Townsend and Donnison, who follow in the footsteps of Booth, Rowntree, the Webbs, Beveridge and others. Many other countries, including the United States, appear to share with Britain this tradition of social investigation and ameliorative reforms, though in each case the peculiarities of national development stamp it with distinctive characteristics. In Britain the systematic study of discrete social problems and their solution by way of piecemeal reforms has come to be known — and institutionalised academically — as social administration. In the United States broadly similar activities are carried on under the rubric of social policy, social problems or social welfare.1
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Notes and References
This chapter is focused on Britain but its basic argument is about a particular kind of approach to welfare and is therefore applicable more generally. On Britain see Richard M. Titmuss, ‘Social Administration in a Changing Society’, Essays on ‘the Welfare State’ (London: Allen & Unwin, 1958);
Helmuth Heisler (ed.), Foundations of Social Administration (London: Macmillan, 1977), especially the ‘Preface’.
On the United States see Martin Rein, Social Policy (New York: Random House, 1970), especially the Introduction and part I.
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) ch. 4;
Karl R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London: Routledge, 1961), pp. 64–70. See also K. R. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. II, chs 17–20.
Robert Pinker, Social Theory and Social Policy (London: Heinemann, 1971) p. xii.
D. V. Donnison et al., Social Policy and Administration Revisited (London: Allen & Unwin, 1975) ch. 1; Joyce Warham, ‘Social Administration and Sociology’, Journal of Social Policy, vol. 2(3), July 1973;
Maurice Broady, Social Administration: Some Current Concerns, inaugural lecture, University College of Swansea, 1972.
‘The Social Division of Welfare’ in Richard M. Titmuss, Essays on ‘the Welfare State’ (London: Allen & Unwin, 1963). In a recent article Sinfield admits that ‘we have done very little’ to develop and improve on Titmuss’s threefold division of welfare. What he fails to examine are the reasons for this inactivity on the part of social administrators.
See Adrian Sinfield, ‘Analyses in the Social Division of Welfare’, Journal of Social Policy, vol. 7(2), Apr 1978, p. 130.
See also David Donnison, ‘Social Policy since Titmuss’, Journal of Social Policy, vol. 8(2), Apr 1979, p. 146.
See Anthony Forder, Concepts in Social Administration (London: Routledge, 1974). Judging by the literature of social administration, these concepts seem to have made little headway.
Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1963).
Richard M. Titmuss, Income Distribution and Social Change (London: Allen & Unwin, 1962).
For example, John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972);
W. G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (London: Routledge, 1966);
Raymond Plant, Community and Ideology (London: Routledge, 1974);
Albert Weale, Equality and Social Policy (London: Routledge, 1978).
Robert Pinker, The Idea of Welfare (London: Heinemann, 1979);
Victor George and Paul Wilding, Ideology and Social Welfare (London: Routledge, 1976);
Jeffrey H. Galper, Politics of Social Services (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975);
Graham Room, The Sociology of Welfare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979).
Dorothy Wedderburn, ‘Facts and Theories of the Welfare State’, in The Socialist Register 1965, ed. Ralph Miliband and John Saville (London: Merlin, 1965) p. 128.
In 1898 New Zealand became the first English-speaking country to introduce non-contributory old age pensions (ten years earlier than Britain) and in 1926 the first in the world to grant family allowances. Both benefits were means tested. See P. R. Kaim-Caudle, Comparative Social Policy and Social Security (London: Martin Robertson, 1973) pp. 156, 251.
The Social Security Act of 1938 came close to introducing a national health service. See W. B. Sutch, The Quest for Security in New Zealand (London: Oxford University Press, 1966) pp. 243–8. The post-war governments however seem to have encouraged private rather than socialised medicine. See Kaim-Caudle, Comparative Social Policy and Social Security, p. 323.
Although British ‘socialised medicine’ has been the subject of investigation by many American scholars I am not aware of any systematic comparison of the development of health care in the two countries. But see Brian Abel-Smith, ‘The History of Medical Care’, Comparative Development in Social Welfare, ed. E. W. Martin (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972). For a more general comparison of the development of welfare in Europe and America see Arnold J. Heidenheimer, ‘The Politics of Public Education, Health and Welfare in U.S.A. and Western Europe: How Growth and Reform Potentials have Differed’, British Journal of Political Science, vol. 3(3), July 1973.
Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, Power and Poverty: Theory and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970).
J. H. Westergaard, ‘Sociology: the Myth of Classlessness’, in Ideology in Social Science, ed. Robin Blackburn (London: Fontana, 1972) p. 155.
For a comprehensive account of the nature and causes of poverty, see Peter Townsend, Poverty in the United Kingdom (London: Allen Lane, 1979). Townsend’s definition of poverty has for a long time been closer to relative deprivation or inequality rather than to a subsistence standard amenable to administrative solutions. More recently, he seems to concede that elimination of poverty of the former kind is unlikely without fundamental, structural changes (see ibid., pp. 913–26).
Pinker, The Idea of Welfare, p. 233. In Britain, Ramesh Mishra, ‘Marx and Welfare’, Sociological Review, new series, vol. 23(2), May 1975, and George and Wilding, Ideology and Social Welfare (1976) were among the earliest attempts to draw attention to the relevance of the Marxist view of welfare.
In the United States, radical works such as Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor (London: Tavistock, 1972), and Galper, Politics of Social Services, seem to have alerted students of welfare to the neo-Marxist perspective. Moreover, the resurgence of Marxist social science more generally has also had a trickle-down effect on the study of social welfare. On more recent Marxist literature on welfare see Chapter 5.
Ibid., p. 234. Cf. William A. Robson, Welfare State and Welfare Society (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976): ‘The term welfare state offers no guide to the proper limits of individual freedom or governmental action…. There is at present no philosophy of the welfare state and there is an urgent and deep need for such a theory’ (pp. 36,7).
The absence of such a sociological viewpoint seems to be a major lacuna in the thinking of Keynes and Beveridge on welfare. Both thought largely in managerial and technocratic terms and seem to have been quite oblivious of the unintended and unforeseen consequences of embarking on welfare statism. A modern-day Keynesian would have to come to terms with these problems. For a perceptive discussion of some of these issues, see Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (London: Routledge, 1977) ch. 9.
Pinker now rejects the residual/institutional dichotomy as (a) too limiting and (b) misleading, in its equation of egoism with the residual model and altruism with the institutional model. He may not therefore wish to associate his model of mixed economy and moderate collectivism with the term ‘institutional’. For all practical purposes, however, his neo-mercantilist model can be seen as a version of the institutional view of welfare, outlined in its classic form by Harold L. Wilensky and Charles N. Lebeaux, Industrial Society and Social Welfare (New York: Free Press, 1965) pp. 138–40.
Richard M. Titmuss, The Gift Relationship (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970).
More recent studies show an increasing awareness of constraints on social action, especially those stemming from the structure of power. See, for example, Phoebe Hall et al., Change, Choice and Conflict in Social Policy (London: Heinemann, 1975).
For an excellent, if brief, discussion of the different views of society, state and power underlying ideologies of welfare, see George and Wilding, Ideology and Social Welfare, especially ch. 1. On power more generally see Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan, 1974).
In social welfare reform there is a place for the ‘heart’ as well as the ‘head’. The role of ‘moral witness’ must therefore remain important in all open societies. As examples of this genre of work we could mention Michael Harrington’s The Other America (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963) on poverty and Peter Townsend’s The Last Refuge (London: Routledge, 1963) on the aged. On the notion of ‘moral witness’, see Martin Rein, Social Science and Public Policy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) pp. 26–7. The point is that there are very definite limits to how far ‘social conscience’ can influence social reform. For the influence of the ‘social conscience thesis’ on the subject of social administration, see John Baker, ‘Social Conscience and Social Policy’, Journal of Social Policy, vol. 8(2) Apr 1979.
See, for example, George and Wilding, Ideology and Social Welfare; Richard M. Titmuss, Social Policy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974) ch. 2;
Julia Parker, Social Policy and Citizenship (London: Macmillan, 1975) pp. 18–27. Of these, George and Wilding’s approach comes closest to the kind of models or paradigms that I have in mind here.
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Mishra, R. (1981). Welfare as Social Reform: Social Administration or Piecemeal Social Engineering. In: Society and Social Policy. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16596-4_1
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