as new vulnerable ‘risk groups’ which included migrants and disabled people. While this formulation acknowledged these groups and the challenges they pose, it tended to focus on the relationship they have to the labour market, as human capital, and to strip them of any claims they might make in their own right, as well as the more profound implications of those claims. Third, and similarly, in subsequent research on the impact of post-industrialism on welfare states, Esping-Andersen (1999) employed ‘family’, in addition to state and market, as an analytical concept and recommended moving domestic care work from the household to the state or market as the strategy to enable women to enter paid employment. Such investment would increase fertility, secure a tax base and productivity for the future, and protect and provide opportunities for the low-paid and unemployed (see also Esping-Andersen 2009). While the acknowledgement of social provision to enable women to work was welcome, this utilitarian and heteronormative approach ignores the wider aspects of gender equality such as the unequal gendering of household and care work, not to mention the shaping of these by class, migration and race, disability, age, and sexuality.
A second factor that inhibited the influence of the critiques was in the response to the intellectual shift across the social sciences and humanities to post-structuralist thinking. This was challenging to a discipline rooted in the analysis and measurement of structural inequalities and material poverty. The unfolding analyses of governmentalities, following Foucault, spawned a literature on how the restructuring of the (welfare) state marked a shift in how the behaviour of welfare subjects was to be managed (Rose 1999; O’Brien and Penna 1998). In addition, following Butler (1990), the connections between culture, subjectivity, identity, agency and difference began to be explored. These developments furthered an understanding of the complexity of power, but, for some in and out of social policy, questions of difference and the ‘politics of identity’ were (and still are) characterized as a culturalist shift away from the ‘real’ material struggle around the growing impoverishment and disempowerment of deindustrialized communities (Gitlin 1995). The separation of economic from other forms of injustice is a reflection of an ongoing current in ‘left’ politics of assuming that solidarity based on (working-)class interests constitutes the central force for change (Dean and Maiguashca 2018). In their study of minority ethnic women’s struggles against austerity in France, England and Scotland, Leah Bassel and Akwugu Emejulu (2018) found that the entreaties to solidarity from socialist and social democratic organizations were often implicitly made in economic terms to a white male constituency and thus provided little engagement with issues of racism or sexism. The idea of race as exogenous to class was to come back to bite during the Brexit campaign (see chapter 4). Back in the critical quarters of social policy, far from ignoring economic polarization, this shift offered opportunities to grapple with the way cultural and economic inequalities were complexly intertwined, as, for example, in John Clarke’s examination of what the ‘cultural turn’ means for the study of welfare states (Clarke 2004; see also O’Brien and Penna 1998; and Lister 2004). It was (and is) still the case, however, that many contemporary and influential studies focus exclusively on material inequalities, a tendency reinforced by the clear polarizing of inequalities emerging from the 2000s. Thus, in Thomas Piketty’s analysis of the inequalities of capitalism, powerful and influential as it is, there are no references in the index to gender, ethnic, minority, migrant or disabled inequalities (Piketty 2014).2
Third, and more widely still, by the end of the 1990s and into the new century, neoliberal marketized, managerialized and modernized social policies had taken hold, trade unions were weakened in many countries, and there was a decline in local new social movement activism. Although the profiles of social movements dimmed, they did not go away. Activism around disability, sexual citizenship and rights for migrants, for carers, older people and children and environmental policy, influenced pressure-group activity over this period and was reflected in social policy research. There were important struggles against racism with the first recognition of institutionalized racism in the police force, although these were very hard fought and often on the back foot (Macpherson 1999). There was the declaration of women’s rights at the Beijing Conference in 1995 and the beginning of important moves for gender equality and anti-racist policy in the EU (Hoskyns 1996; Williams 2003). By 2004 in the UK, civil partnerships for same-gender relationships and gender recognition for transgender people became legal, as did same-gender marriage in 2013 (except for Northern Ireland). The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 led to a raft of climate change and energy legislation from, in the UK, 2004 onwards, while environmentalist critiques and some of the arguments for a citizens’/basic income began to identify the limits of assuming a future based on continuing economic growth and productivism (Fitzpatrick and Cahill 2002). Preparation went on for the UN Convention on the Rights for Persons with Disabilities, which was passed eventually in 2006. In some ways, these developments indicate how feminist, anti-racist and other activists were moving higher up the political hierarchy from their bases in the grass roots into EU and international NGO politics as well as horizontally into more transnational coalitions (Watkins 2018).
Fourth, at the national level, both culturally and politically, particularly in the emerging ‘Third Way’ politics and New Labour, there was a different shift – away from what were considered ‘out-dated’ conflicts of both the social democratic politics of class and redistribution and the politics of the new social movements, especially feminism and anti-racism: ‘post-feminist’ and ‘post-racial’ became new political catchwords (see chapter 4). John Denham, a former secretary of state in the New Labour government, said in 2010 that it was ‘time to move on from “race”’, and Theresa May, as Conservative home secretary and later prime minister, went further, to say that ‘equality is a dirty word’ (both cited by Craig et al. 2019: 1). For others, it was political correctness that had gone ‘too far’, or cultural diversity that had undermined class solidarity and (mythical) national homogeneity (Alesina and Glaeser 2004; Goodhart 2004). Gail Lewis’s study of local government policies in the 1990s termed this as a ‘blind-eye’ of successive governments to the issue of racism (Lewis 2000), and a study done almost two decades later on the struggles of minority ethnic women identified this as ‘political racelessness’ (Bassel and Emejulu 2018; and see chapter 5).
Fifth, back within the study of social policy, several further dynamics were significant. One was that paid work became the central social policy referent to welfare reforms in much of Europe and the US, providing the financial and moral imperative to get everyone – men, women, disabled, minority ethnic groups – ‘off welfare and into work’. This shifted the axis in what was important in ‘the social’ (Williams 2001). In so far as there is a longstanding predisposition of social policy research, as well as independent policy research organizations, to investigate the agenda framed by governments (Taylor-Gooby and Dale 1981), then from the turn of the century much of this focused upon the priorities of government and EU reforms – a social investment approach which saw opportunities for paid work for women and disabled people and minority ethnic groups as a way to minimize social exclusion and promote multi-ethnic integration. The combined effect was that much useful empirical work was produced, but the focus of inequalities became narrowed into issues of discrimination, social inclusion, community cohesion and integration.
At the same time, another rather different factor in the social sciences more generally was that the academic studies of gender, race, ethnicity, migration, disability, age, sexuality, childhood, youth, age and eco-social policy themselves became disparate, specialist and siloed. And this too was reproduced in social policy studies. The effect of these two dynamics was that single categories of gender, race, etc., came to signify specific descriptors, stand-alone critiques or measures of diversity rather than as challenges to the theoretical underpinnings of what stands for universalism in welfare. Of course, it is also the case that these critiques have themselves needed to stand alone in order to pursue more deeply the specificities of their intellectual journeys, but this separation was influenced by other developments. It was not simply that the fragmentation of social movements was mirrored in the social sciences, or, as some have argued, that feminism’s critique of the state dovetailed with neoliberal
