Documents Daly, Mary 15 results

"This review focuses on the concept of care, a concept that has never been more popular as a focus of study. It undertakes a critical review, motivated by the breadth of the field and the lack of coherence and linkages across a diverse literature. The review concentrates first on organizing and reviewing the literature in terms of key focus and, second, drawing out the strengths and weaknesses of existing work and making suggestions for how future work might proceed in COVID-19 times. While the existing literature offers many insights, some quite basic things need to be reconsidered, not least definition and conceptualization. Defining care as based on the meeting of perceived welfare-related need, I develop it as comprising need, relations/actors, resources and ideas and values. Each of these dimensions has an inherent disposition towards the study of inequality and it is possible, either by looking at them individually or all together, to identify care as situated in relations of relative power and inequality. The framework allows a set of critical questions to be posed in relation to COVID-19 and the policies and resources that have been mustered in response."

"Although industrialized nations have long provided public protection to working-age individuals with disabilities, the form has changed over time. The impetus for change has been multi-faceted: rapid growth in program costs; greater awareness that people with impairments are able and willing to work; and increased recognition that protecting the economic security of people with disabilities might best be done by keeping them in the labor market. Here we describe the evolution of disability programs in four countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States. We show how growth in the receipt of publically provided disability benefits has fluctuated over time and discuss how policy choices played a role. Based on our descriptive comparative analysis we summarize shared experiences that potentially benefit policymakers in all countries."

"The aim of this article is to analyse the nature and significance of the recent European Union (EU) poverty and social exclusion target, which has become part of the EU's new 10-year strategy, known as ‘Europe 2020'. It situates this analysis in the politics of social policy, at both transnational and national levels. The agreement on the target proved to be momentous and also contentious for the key actors involved – the Member States, the European Commission, the European Parliament – all of which were forced to change their position at some stage of the negotiations. The agreed target – to lift at least 20 million people out of poverty and social exclusion by 2020 – is ambitious and novel in an EU context. The analysis undertaken here underlines its specificity and some weaknesses. First, the target was the result of a political opportunity seized upon by a number of pro-social policy actors (some in the European Commission, the Parliament, certain Member States as well as non-governmental organizations), rather than an agreement to further Europeanize social policy. Second, the target is a compromise in that it is constituted quite diversely in terms of whether it will succeed by addressing income poverty, severe material deprivation and/or household joblessness. Third, the target allows much leeway in response by the Member States, in terms of both which definition they will use and what level of ambition they set for their target. As such, the target risks both incoherence as an approach to social policy and ineffectiveness in terms of precipitating significant action by the Member States to address poverty and social exclusion."

"This article offers a critical account of the ‘social' in the Europe 2020 strategy, focusing on the new poverty target and the European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion. The article reaches three main conclusions. First, while poverty is given a prominent place in the strategy and the recourse to targets is intended to harden up Member State and EU coordination in the field, the poverty target is loose and risks being rendered ineffective as an EU-wide target. Secondly, the social goals and philosophy of Europe 2020 are under-elaborated. While it is important that the poverty-related measures are treated on a similar basis to the other elements of Europe 2020, it is not made clear how growth will bring about the planned reduction in poverty. ‘Inclusive growth' has little meaning in itself. This leads to the third conclusion which is that Europe 2020 lacks a coherent model of social development. Philosophically, it draws mainly from social investment and liberal approaches, neither of which has a strong orientation to addressing poverty. "

"Analyses regularly feature claims that European welfare states are in the process of creating an adult worker model. The theoretical and empirical basis of this argument is examined here by looking first at the conceptual foundations of the adult worker model formulation and then at the extent to which social policy reform in western Europe fits with the argument. It is suggested that the adult worker formulation is under-specified. A framework incorporating four dimensions -the treatment of individuals vis-à-vis their family role and status for the purposes of social rights, the treatment of care, the treatment of the family as a social institution, and the extent to which gender inequality is problematized—is developed and then applied. The empirical analysis reveals a strong move towards individualization as social policy promotes and valorizes individual agency and self-sufficiency and shifts some childcare from the family. Yet evidence is also found of continued (albeit changed) familism. Rather than an unequivocal move to an individualized worker model then, a dual earner, gender-specialized, family arrangement is being promoted. The latter is the middle way between the old dependencies and the new “independence.” This makes for complexity and even ambiguity in policy, a manifestation of which is that reform within countries involves concurrent moves in several directions."