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Assumptive Worlds and Images of Agency: Academic Social Policy in the Twenty-first Century?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2008

Peter Taylor-Gooby
Peter Taylor-Gooby*
Affiliation:
SSPSSR, CoNE, University of Kent, CT2 7NF E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

As many commentators have pointed out, the pressures facing modern welfare states are formidable. One response by government is to place greater emphasis on a policy-making paradigm that rests on an individual rational actor account of agency. This finds its intellectual home in the leading tradition of neo-classical economics, its ideological home in a politics of active citizenry and equality of opportunity and its institutional home in the mechanisms by which the Treasury currently directs social policy.

The resulting policies have strengths in delivering productivity improvements and responsiveness to consumer demand, but weaknesses in accommodating the value positions of an increasingly diverse society, in sustaining the social cohesion necessary to the continuance of state welfare and in confronting the structural basis of some social interests. These issues have traditionally been recognised in the sociology of values, the psychology of trust and the political science of power.

One strength of academic social policy is that it is a field of study in which a number of disciplines are deployed. The ascendancy of one paradigm may obscure the contribution of others. It is hard for social policy academics to gain recognition when they speak a different language from that of policy making at the highest level.

Type
Articles
Information
Social Policy and Society , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , July 2008 , pp. 269 - 280
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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