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Rethinking Social Policy
Rethinking Social Policy is a comprehensive introduction to, and analysis of, the complex mixture of problems and possibilities within the study of social policy. Contributors at the cutting edge of social policy analysis reflect upon the implications of new social and theoretical movements for welfare and the study of social policy. Topics covered criminology and crime control; race, class and gender; poverty and sexuality; the body and the emotions; violence; work and welfare in Europe. Examples are drawn from a variety of welfare sectors such social services and community care, health, education, employment, and criminal justice. This is a course reader for The Open University course (D860) R
368 pages, Paperback
First published April 11, 2000
24 people want to read
About the author
Gail Lewis
21 books3 followersGail Lewis is a British writer, psychotherapist, researcher, and activist. She is visiting senior fellow in the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics, and Reader Emerita of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, London. She trained as a psychodynamic psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic.
Lewis's work is rooted in black feminist and anti-racist struggle, and a socialist, anti-imperialist politics. She was a co-founder of the Organisation for Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), and she was a member of the Brixton Black Women's Group. She was a founding collective editorial member of the Feminist Review. Lewis was interviewed for the oral history project "Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation", archived at the British Library, a project that interviewed "feminists who were at the forefront of the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s and 80s".
Lewis's work is rooted in black feminist and anti-racist struggle, and a socialist, anti-imperialist politics. She was a co-founder of the Organisation for Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), and she was a member of the Brixton Black Women's Group. She was a founding collective editorial member of the Feminist Review. Lewis was interviewed for the oral history project "Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation", archived at the British Library, a project that interviewed "feminists who were at the forefront of the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s and 80s".
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October 13, 2015
This is an edited collection – so a series of shortish chapters – on social policy that was written just prior to 2000, which was shortly after Tony Blair came to power and therefore also within the early days of New Labour in Britain. This collection of essays covers lots and lots of ground – everything from the politics of the body to understanding criminology from a Marxist perspective.
I’m not really going to review this book so much as point to a couple of particularly interesting chapters. One is Chapter 4 which gives a particularly good introduction to the work of Foucault and how that can be applied to social policy. It helps define such ideas as his Power/Knowledge, Discourse, Panopticon and Governmentality – all in easy to understand language and in about ten pages. Hard to complain about that.
Chapter 8 on social policy and the body is also a great introduction to what has become a key idea, or rather, topic of social theory.
All the same, I think the chapters I enjoyed the most where the ones on criminology – chapters 14 to 16. Particularly the first of these which asks why certain acts are considered criminal when others, often much ‘worse’ are not – relating this, of course, to the position of power the person committing the second act holds. For instance, one way we could define a ‘crime’ might be to say that it involves someone acting in a way that intends to cause harm to someone else. So, if I slap a child in a classroom I could expect to have some criminal sanction imposed upon me. But when I was growing up everyone my age faced a constant barrage of advertising from cigarette companies. Companies that knew their product caused cancer and death. One act falls under the rubric of criminology – the other possibly not. Which is odd, as the second one surely caused much more damage to many more people. In much the same way our ‘food’ industry today is causing much the same conscious harm to people in what, likewise, is probably unlikely to every be viewed as a criminal act.
Sharon Gerwirtz is always worth reading (and the reason why I read this collection in the first place). A lot of the problems with school reforms – and social reforms generally – is that by conflating reforms with market mechanisms, particularly managerialism, the tendency is to create measures and then to see how those measures ‘improve’. But as she has shown elsewhere this often means that schools are rewarded for focusing on those who are ‘just’ below a good performance – mostly because these kids are the easiest to help and therefore the most likely to show the most improvement for the least expended effort. Other research has shown fairly consistently that those kids least likely to shown an improvement and therefore least likely to have resources spent on them tend to be black, working class kids. The ones that prove to be just below the mark that are seen as capable of making the biggest improvements (and therefore in providing the school with the biggest rewards for meeting its ‘targets’) are white middle class boys. And so the world reaffirms itself.
Some of the other chapters worth looking at here are the one on economics and how the language and categories of economics have come to dominate policy work – I particularly enjoyed the discussion on exchange and how this could be barely made to fit the interactions that existed between ‘clients’ and ‘client providers’ in various healthcare settings. The problem always is that a change to this kind of language isn’t merely a matter of shuffling deckchairs. It is something of real importance as it fundamentally changes the way we perceive different people’s needs and our responsibilities associated with meeting or addressing those needs.
This is perhaps a little dated now, but it is remarkable how few of these issues have gone away. We have moved further along this road, but the major questions raised here around social policy remain with us, I feel.
I’m not really going to review this book so much as point to a couple of particularly interesting chapters. One is Chapter 4 which gives a particularly good introduction to the work of Foucault and how that can be applied to social policy. It helps define such ideas as his Power/Knowledge, Discourse, Panopticon and Governmentality – all in easy to understand language and in about ten pages. Hard to complain about that.
Chapter 8 on social policy and the body is also a great introduction to what has become a key idea, or rather, topic of social theory.
All the same, I think the chapters I enjoyed the most where the ones on criminology – chapters 14 to 16. Particularly the first of these which asks why certain acts are considered criminal when others, often much ‘worse’ are not – relating this, of course, to the position of power the person committing the second act holds. For instance, one way we could define a ‘crime’ might be to say that it involves someone acting in a way that intends to cause harm to someone else. So, if I slap a child in a classroom I could expect to have some criminal sanction imposed upon me. But when I was growing up everyone my age faced a constant barrage of advertising from cigarette companies. Companies that knew their product caused cancer and death. One act falls under the rubric of criminology – the other possibly not. Which is odd, as the second one surely caused much more damage to many more people. In much the same way our ‘food’ industry today is causing much the same conscious harm to people in what, likewise, is probably unlikely to every be viewed as a criminal act.
Sharon Gerwirtz is always worth reading (and the reason why I read this collection in the first place). A lot of the problems with school reforms – and social reforms generally – is that by conflating reforms with market mechanisms, particularly managerialism, the tendency is to create measures and then to see how those measures ‘improve’. But as she has shown elsewhere this often means that schools are rewarded for focusing on those who are ‘just’ below a good performance – mostly because these kids are the easiest to help and therefore the most likely to show the most improvement for the least expended effort. Other research has shown fairly consistently that those kids least likely to shown an improvement and therefore least likely to have resources spent on them tend to be black, working class kids. The ones that prove to be just below the mark that are seen as capable of making the biggest improvements (and therefore in providing the school with the biggest rewards for meeting its ‘targets’) are white middle class boys. And so the world reaffirms itself.
Some of the other chapters worth looking at here are the one on economics and how the language and categories of economics have come to dominate policy work – I particularly enjoyed the discussion on exchange and how this could be barely made to fit the interactions that existed between ‘clients’ and ‘client providers’ in various healthcare settings. The problem always is that a change to this kind of language isn’t merely a matter of shuffling deckchairs. It is something of real importance as it fundamentally changes the way we perceive different people’s needs and our responsibilities associated with meeting or addressing those needs.
This is perhaps a little dated now, but it is remarkable how few of these issues have gone away. We have moved further along this road, but the major questions raised here around social policy remain with us, I feel.
Displaying 1 of 1 review