work, Social Policy in the Modern World, which informed some of the content in this book, and of eight editions of Understanding Social Policy. Co-authoring the eighth edition (2009) of the latter provided the impetus for our writing partnership on this book.
As most authors acknowledge, their work is also dependent on the goodwill and encouragement of family, friends and colleagues, and we also thank them for their support. Zoë Irving would like to acknowledge the University of York MA students on the 2018–19 Global Social Problems and Global Social Policy module. Many of the chapters here were refined in learning and teaching with this superb group of students, who brought their knowledge of, and experiences from, countries in all world regions, and whose insights and engagement with most of the issues discussed in the book were very much valued. Table 7.1, which was the topic of a particularly productive and memorable teaching session (and with regret for the ‘missing data’), is dedicated to them. Our thanks too, to the anonymous reviewers who took the time to comment on the full text. We recognize our limitations in ‘exploring the world of social policy’; retaining the strengths of regime theory while attempting to step outside of this framework is a work in progress. Nevertheless, we hope that the book makes a worthwhile contribution to a widening and deepening internationalization of social policy study.
Social policy and social progress: how can we explore the world?
This book builds on an approach adopted in the eight editions of Understanding Social Policy (most recently Hill and Irving, 2009) and also in the book Social Policy in the Modern World (Hill, 2006). The former was essentially an analysis of policy in the UK while the latter represented a comparative review of developed welfare states across a number of policy domains and dimensions of disadvantage, with an approach embedded in the traditions of cross-national comparison. In one sense this book represents some continuity in the analysis of social policy development and its cross-national comparison. However, it also represents a broadening shift of perspective in response to changes that have occurred in the discipline of social policy and the scope of field of study. Although since the 2010s many countries now seek to turn inwards politically, economically and socially, it remains the case that momentum for global and world regional social policy has gathered pace, and that three decades of economic globalization means that no policy now emerges or exists in national isolation. That implies a need to combine a global perspective with a comparative one, accepting that, while there are many shared influences on national policy, responses vary considerably from country to country in ways that comparative analytical frameworks can help to explain.
The title of the book deliberately has a triple meaning, explored in this and the next two sections. First, it looks at the worlds of social policy in the comparative sense established by Esping-Andersen (1990) – that there are different welfare regimes, ways of arranging and organizing welfare provision based on different welfare relations, principles and mechanics. This approach to categorizing national welfare systems has dominated comparative study for a quarter of a century, providing insight and provoking further investigation in equal measure. While the ubiquity and impact of the ‘three worlds’ approach is undoubtedly sensed in general reading of international and comparative scholarship, in metric terms the study of ‘welfare regimes’ is indicated as the ‘leading topic’ in citation classics among key social policy journals (Powell, 2016). Since the 1990s, a significant critique and elaboration of this approach has contributed to its further embedding as a valid foundation for comparative research. Recent three worlds anniversary collections in the journal Social Policy and Society (2017) and Social Policy Review 27 (Irving et al., 2015) attest to the continuing influence of welfare state typologization as an analytical mainstay in comparing national welfare states and determining the factors that produce similarity and difference between them.
The welfare regime approach has, however, two important weaknesses. First, its limitations are most apparent where it is stretched beyond advanced welfare states (see Gough and Wood, 2004). Second, as an analytical approach it is more comfortably applied within some areas of social policy, particularly income security, than others. While it indicates essential parameters for the study of social policy around the world, these are most useful where the idea of regimes is used to suggest political and cultural characteristics that cluster and seemingly suggest determinants of change, rather than as an analytical prison that reduces debate to the accuracy of the typologies produced. This is particularly the case when attention is directed beyond countries with established welfare state architectures.
The second way in which the book looks at the world of social policy, is in the geographical sense, drawing on examples and systems from across the globe. In the twenty-first century, while it is possible to evidence many claims that the world is a better place than it has ever been – that human rights are more protected, that there are fewer social and geographical divisions and that more people have more power to determine the course of their lives than ever before – this has been an uneven development, and potential setbacks are only too evident today. Where global social progress has occurred, social policy has been central to its achievement, but because analysis of social policy is often restricted to the realm of established welfare state institutions, its wider arrangements and contribution outside of formal structures are less recognized, or at least less well integrated into policy debate and discussions of social politics centred in the global North. Because social policy is associated with recognizable administrative structures, distinctions often made between national categories, such as ‘mature’ welfare states, ‘emerging economies’ and ‘low-income countries’, carry the assumption that nation states remain the most important socio-political and policy units, an assumption that is challenged in the contemporary global circumstance.
The significance of the nation state has been a matter of debate within the globalization literature since the 1990s (for example Ohmae, 1990; McGrew and Lewis, 1992; Rhodes, 1994; Mishra, 1998; Pierson, 2001). The perceived strength or weakness of national actors divides perspectives in international political economy, and contrasts perspectives on the state as a ‘zombie category’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002) in the new forms of governance, with those that see the state as an enduring locus of government. The focus on ‘methodological nationalism’ has similarly vexed some analysts of social policy where comparative analysis of worlds of welfare capitalism (Esping-Andersen, 1990) and families of nations (Castles, 1999) has been argued to neglect both the transnational character of Western welfare state development and the rising influence of global actors, organizations and collectives on contemporary welfare evolution across the world.
In considering countries themselves, there is debate regarding the porous borders of welfare state development in the global North, and contestation of the idea that developed welfare states were ever ‘national’ or formed and managed within national borders (Clarke, 2005). This is not only because national borders themselves are subject to change, as secession, independent statehood, annexation and state formation shape and reshape countries geographically. The movement of people also means that ‘national’ populations have always been fluid, with consequent differentials in (welfare) citizenship. Additionally, however, as Clarke (and others, for example Williams, 1995) points out, the welfare states of advanced economies have been built on the labour and contribution of migrants. In Europe in particular, its place in the history of colonialism combined with the post-war expansion of a regionalist supranational organization, the European Economic Community, to become the European Union, has created a further European context for social policy development
