Abstract
This opening chapter provides a general sociological framework for the contributions collected about the targeting practices in the institutional framework of the welfare State and the making of the “right” publics for social policies. The paper builds on the diversity of existing international research, before sketching out complementary lines of investigation in which this collective work is grounded. More specifically, we suggest the use of a comparative and multilevel approach, anchored in empirical research and mindful of the effective practices of targeting, as well as of the way in which the diverse groups within the potential publics react. Connecting in-depth case studies thus allows the observation of transformations occurring in modes of government at the international level. Finally, the text suggests a few ways in which the welfare State’s targeting practices can be reformulated, without obscuring the social relations and the various forms of inequalities (of class, race, gender) to which targeting participates.
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Notes
- 1.
We thank Jean-Gabriel Contamin, Anne-Cécile Douillet, Vincent Dubois as well as the participants to the panel intitled « Creating target publics for welfare policies » which we organized at the congress of Interpretive Policy Analysis (IPA) in July 2015. We are also grateful to Myrtille Picaud for the editing of the book’s introduction and conclusion.
- 2.
For an exemple of the transformation of modes of government pertaining to the public regulation of education and its link with social reproduction in France, see Barrault-Stella 2013.
- 3.
On the creation and use of this category, see Warin 2016.
- 4.
In spite of its contextual variety, the concept of universalism retains its essential core by always referring to something that is “common to all”. For a critical discussion of this concept as it applies to welfare policies and their international or cross-sectorial comparison, see Anttonen et al. 2012.
- 5.
- 6.
For example, about the consequences that the transformation of the welfare State had on urban segregation, see Musterd and Ostendorf 2013.
- 7.
This is a classical question in the sociology of organizations (Blau 1955).
- 8.
At the birth of sociology, Durkheim writes about such bias Durkheim (1988 [1895]).
- 9.
That is to say “in-depth studies of situations, organizations, or types of singular events” (Becker 2016, p.11).
- 10.
But the use of these materials necessarily entails reflexivity, since statistics are also subjected of sociological analyzing processes of quantification (for example: Bruno et al. 2016).
- 11.
The disciplinary model that Foucault describes as having emerged at the end of the eighteenth century combines legal mechanisms with “modern” surveillance instruments (Foucault 1977 [1975]).
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Barrault-Stella, L., Weill, PE. (2018). The Making of Target Publics for Welfare Policies. From Targeting Practices to Resistances of Governed People. In: Barrault-Stella, L., Weill, PE. (eds) Creating Target Publics for Welfare Policies. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 17. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89596-3_1
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