Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Welfare state – History – 21st century'

This thesis addresses the phenomenon of 21st century "doomsday" prepping. Prepping is a primarily American phenomenon centred on storing food, water, and weapons for the purpose of surviving future crisis or social collapse. Growing rapidly post-2007/8, it is the successor to the right-wing American survivalist movement that flourished (and then disappeared) in the late-20th century. This thesis engages with a lack of scholarly knowledge on prepping, which has resulted in this phenomenon being understood through media-driven stereotypes and theories of older survivalist activity. Such understandings suggest that prepping is apocalyptic, millenarian, politically-extreme, and a product of the United States' fringe right-wing militia culture. Drawing on research that involved 200 online surveys responses, ethnography and interviews with 39 American preppers, and attendance at three prominent prepping conventions, the thesis challenges such dominant ideas. It shows prepping to be a distinct, more moderate wave of American survivalist activity. The thesis establishes that preppers typically do not prepare for an "apocalypse", nor do they think in millenarian terms. Preppers instead use their preparations as precautionary protection against temporary social collapse and job loss. The thesis also reveals that prepping is not as politically-extreme as is often speculated. Rather than militia ideology, prepping intermingles with waves of right-wing "Tea Party" discontent, as well as widespread frustration at the dysfunctional and post-political state of American democracy. Additionally this work reveals that, as far as preppers retreat from political and community life, their withdrawal is symptomatic of wider currents of American individualist values, and processes of civic decline. It is thus argued that prepping must be understood as a product of "mainstream" American society. It is concluded that prepping should be principally explained as a product of: late modern capitalism's effects on democracy, secure employment, and collective sympathies; contemporary media's impact on disaster-related fears; and the American Right's promotion of political anxiety and individualistic thinking.

American agriculture in the twentieth century underwent immense transformations. The triumphs in agriculture are emblematic of post-war American progress and expansion but do not accurately depict the evolution of American agriculture throughout an entire century of agricultural depression and economic failure. Some characteristics of this evolution are unprecedented efficiency in terms of output per capita, rapid industrialization and mechanization, the gradual slip of agriculture's portion of GNP, and an exodus of millions of farmers from agriculture leading to fewer and larger farms. The purpose of this thesis is to provide an environmental history and political ecology of overproduction, which has lead to constant surpluses, federal price and subsidy intervention, and environmental concerns about sustainability and food safety. This project explores the political economy of output maximization during these years, roughly from WWI through the present, studying various environmental, economic, and social effects of overproduction and output maximization. The complex eco system of modern agriculture is heavily impacted by the political and economic systems in which it is intrinsically embedded, obfuscating hopes of food and agricultural reforms on many different levels. Overproduction and surplus are central to modern agriculture and to the food that has fueled American bodies for decades. Studying overproduction, or operating at rapidly expanding levels of output maximization, will provide a unique lens through which to look at the profound impact that the previous century of technological advance and farm legislation has had on agriculture in America.

The purpose of this thesis is to understand the changing nature of contemporary China's state and society relationship by focusing on the construction of the relationship between newly emerging non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the state. The term "construction" refers to the process in which China NGOs emerge, struggle for existence, negotiate with state organizations and other social agents. In this process, how China's NGOs link with the state policies of both local and national levels, practices of both local government officers and the government organizations of superior branches is of the most interest. It has been found that Chinese social organizations often come to be congruent with the state at both local level and national policy level. Through the articulatory elements, which are the theoretical tools borrowed from post-Marxist theories, the state and the social organizations are integrated as if they are in a coherent whole under the macro state policies. Such pro forma consistency between state and social organizations provides legitimacy and room for social organizations to develop their own values and practices, which actually do not completely coincide with the state dominant orientations. A civil society constituted by social organizations with different value pursuits is likely emerging in China.

This dissertation offers a study of everyday relations between residents and the state on a post-industrial council estate in England. Drawing upon historical and ethnographic data, it analyses how, often under conditions of sustained exclusion, residents rely upon the state in their daily struggles for security and survival. My central ethnographic finding is that residents personalise the state alongside informal networks of support and care into a local sociality of reciprocity. This finding can be broken into three interconnected points. First, I argue that the reciprocal contract between citizens and the state emerged in the post-war years when the residents on the newly built estates negotiated their dependence upon the state by integrating it into their on-going social relations. A climate of relative material affluence, selective housing policies, and a paternalistic regime of housing management all created conditions which were conducive for this temporary union between residents and the state. Second, however, I argue that with the decline of industry and shifts towards neoliberal policies, residents increasingly struggle to hold the state accountable to its reciprocal obligations towards local people. This becomes manifest today both in the material neglect of council estates as well as in state officials' reluctance to become implicated in social relations with and between residents. Third, I argue that this failure on the part of the state to attend to residents' demands often has onerous effects on people's lives. It not only exacerbates residents' exposure to insecurity and threat, but is also experienced as a moral affront which generates larger narratives of abandonment and betrayal. Theoretically, this dissertation critically discusses and challenges contrasting portrayals of the state, and of state-citizen relations, in two bodies of literature. On the one hand, in much of the sociological and anthropological literature on working class communities, authors have adopted a community-centred approach which has depicted working class communities as self-contained entities against which the state emerges as a distant or hostile entity. I argue that such a portrayal is premised upon a romanticised view of working class communities which neglects the intimate presence of the state in everyday life. On the other hand, the theoretical literature on the British state has adopted a state-centred perspective which has seen the state as a renewed source of order and authority in disintegrating communities today. My suggestion is that this portrayal rests upon a pathologising view of social decline which fails to account for the persistence of informal social relations and the challenges that these pose to the state's authority from below. Finally, moving beyond the community-centred and state-centred perspectives, I argue for the need to adopt a middle ground which combines an understanding of the nature and workings of informal relations with an acknowledgement of the ubiquity of the state. Such an approach allows us to recognise that, far from being a hostile entity or, alternatively, an uncontested source of order, the state occupies shifting positions within an overarching sociality of reciprocity and its associated demands for alliances and divisions. I refer to such an approach as the personalisation of the state.

The studio glass movement first arose in the United States in the early 1950s, and was characterized by practitioners who wanted to divorce glass from its industrial associations and promote it as a fine arts medium. This movement began in a few cities in the eastern part of the country, and in Los Angeles, but gradually emerged as an art form strongly associated with the city of Seattle and the Puget Sound region. This research studies the emergence and growth of the studio glass movement in the Puget Sound region from 1970 to 2003. It examines how glass artists and Seattle's urban elites interacted and worked separately to build the support structures and "art world" that provided learning and mentoring opportunities, workspaces, artistic validation, audience development, critical and financial support, which helped make glass a signature Puget Sound art form, and the role that artist social networks, social capital, cultural capital and cultural policy played in sustaining this community. In particular, the research seeks to explore the factors that nourish a new art form and artist community in second-tier cities that do not have the substantial cultural and economic support structures found in the "arts super cities" such as Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco. This study contributes to the growing literature on artist communities, and the roles played by social capital, cultural capital, urban growth coalitions and policy at different stages of community development. Results can assist policymakers in formulating policies that incorporate the arts as a form of community development.

This thesis attempts to extend the historical scope of divorce research in Sweden by providing an analysis ofhow the variations in the divorce rate over time and across geographical areas are connected to the economic, normative and institutional restructuring of Swedish society during the period 1915-1974. The thesis finds that the economic reshaping of Sweden into a modern market economy is at the center of the process that has resulted in decreased marital stability during the twentieth century. The shift from a single- to a dual-provider model and an increased integration of both men and women into market processes outside the family have resulted in lowered economic interdependence between spouses, which in turn has decreased the economic constraints to divorce. This conclusion is supported by the empirical finding that indicators of female economic self-sufficiency are associated with increased propensities for divorce, during the entire period under research in this thesis. That changes in the constraints experienced by women have been important is further emphasized by the finding that women have been more prone than men to initiate divorce, and that this gendered pattern of divorce was established already during the early twentieth century in Sweden.The results further indicate that the growth of divorce is connected not only to a shift in the provider model but also to the way sustained economic growth has resulted in a general increase in the resources available to individuals, as proposed by the socio-economic growth hypothesis. During the 1920s and 1930s, high-strata groups, such as lawyers, journalists, engineers and military officers, exhibited a divorce rate on the same level as in the general population of Sweden today. By the early 1960s, however, this positive associa- tion between social class and divorce had changed: by then it was rather couples in working-class occupations who exhibited the highest probability of divorce, which is a pattern that appears to have persisted since then. These findings indicate that a general increase and more even distribution of economic resources betweenboth genders and social classes have facilitated individuals’ possibilities to sustain themselves independent of family ties. This democratization in the access to divorce has meant that growing segments of the populationhave gained the means to act on a demand for divorce.However, another result of the thesis is that it is not possible to limit the analysis to a strictly economic perspective. Rather, economic changes have interacted with and been reinforced by changes in values, as wellas in institutions, during the periods when widespread and rapid behavioral change has occurred. In Sweden, like in most other Western countries, this was primarily the case during the 1940s and a period covering approximately the second half of the 1960s and first half of the 1970s. The studies of the thesis suggest that these two periods of rapid growth in the divorce rate stand out as periods in Swedish history when attitudes also changed more rapidly toward values that can be regarded as permissive, secular and more open to indi- vidual freedom of choice. Trenchantly, these two periods also correspond to the two harvest periods in Social Democratic welfare state policy. In the thesis it is argued that the marked increase in government services and social security at these time points integrated with and reinforced economic restructuring in a way that worked to “de-familializate” individuals by making them less dependent on family ties for social security. Institutional changes of this type have been particularly important for making single life more feasible for women and low- income groups. In the thesis, it is argued that the timings of substantial behavioral change become difficult to understand if the analytical perspective does not explicitly incorporate how such contextual-level changes in values and institutions have integrated with changes in the provider model and the economy during thesedynamic periods of the divorce transition in Sweden.

In following several international migrants in the city of São Paulo, I found that inarticulate moments of hesitation, uncertainty, or suspension punctuated their trajectories. These fleeting and subtle instances revealed that people's lives were pervaded by a certain ‘messiness' that pointed out the limits of understanding life and the world through scientific standards of generalisation and coherence. Requiring a different attitude concerning the making of anthropology, ‘messiness' compelled my ethnographic account to admit that: firstly, people, places and situations, held a ‘mystery' that my efforts of scientific disclosure could never clarify completely; secondly, each attempt to live in the world became a very singular experimentation. In order to ethnographically do justice to the ‘mystery' and ‘singularity' I found in the lives I followed in São Paulo, this account found in Levinas's work inspiration to develop a phenomenological approach. This phenomenological approach combined two movements. The first movement searched for a way of incorporating the faltering occasions of inarticulacy in people's lives through imagination, signalling the limits of understanding these lives through objective knowledge, and proposing to appreciate them through processes of human recognition. This procedure was crafted as a ‘poetics of resonance', an aesthetic operation converting lived experience into written expression in a way that imagination can offer a sense of what it is to live a particular life or experience in its richness. The second movement in this phenomenological approach refers to the recognition of a human life in its singularity, attempting to substantiate it ethnographically in the form of particular ‘life-journeys', which is an approximation to what Levinas described as ‘uniqueness'. As follows, seven specific life-journeys are presented, organised as ‘journeys of being', ‘in-be(ing)tween journeys', and ‘journeys of becoming', according to the elements of affiliation each research participant stressed in their respective course shared with me. From the richness of these ethnographic particulars, insights for migration and urban studies were derived from the phenomenological approach undertaken. The ethnographic evidence questioned a sense of complexity based on categorisation in migration studies and suggested that for the portrayed life-journeys a concept of immensity is more appropriate than a concept of identity. Concerning theories about the urban, the mobility manifested by the life-journeys in São Paulo and beyond conveyed, not a city of ethnic neighbourhoods, but a city of ‘rough' experimentation, according to people's positionality and their ability to find their own ways in the city and in the world.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
I examined a panel of all 50 states over a period of 30 years between 1981 and 2010, estimating a random effects model to examine the relationship between the party of a state’s governor and changes in pretax and transfer income inequality. Though the literature has quite consistently shown that income inequality increases more quickly under Republican governors or when policies favored by Republicans are implemented, I find no evidence to support this, though this is perhaps because I did not allow a long enough lag time for new policies to have an effect. I did, however, find that pretax income inequality increases more quickly under Democratic presidents than under Republicans, in spite of the fact that all previous research shows the opposite to be true. I suspect that this unusual finding is the result of a quirk in my 1981-2010 time frame, namely the effects of the shift in welfare policy under the Clinton administration in the 1990s.

The thesis is about the relationship between State and Church, taking note of alternative relations which existed over the ages. The government of Bophuthatswana declared their state to be Christian. The main emphasis was that the Batswana were religious people who were deeply Christian and thus the state was to become Christian as well. This was not separated from the issue of land which also was seen as a gift from God for them. Winterveld was used as a case study to show how the state was justifying its own actions to discriminate against non-Batswana from obtaining citizenship and denying them access to land. The transition period showed that the church stood on the other side of the fence when it supported changes that were sweeping South Africa and calling for the end of states such as Bophuthatswana. This saw the new secular state of South Africa coming into existence.
Theology & Religion
D. Th. (Church History)

Defence Date: 12 October 2009
Examining Board: Prof. Giovanni Federico (European University Institute) – supervisor; Prof. Peter H. Lindert (University of California, Davis); Prof. Carles Sudrià Triay (Universitat de Barcelona); Prof. Bartolomé Yun Casalilla (European University Institute)
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digital archive of EUI PhD theses
This thesis aims at understanding the origins, evolution and economic meaning of public pensions, by looking at the particular case of Spain during the first two thirds of the twentieth century. The only way of adequately framing the particularities of this national case is to place the Spanish experience in the wider context of social protection systems in other countries. At the same time, this is the most suitable strategy in order to engage the dominant debate among specialised scholars of Southern Europe welfare states and particularly so in Spain. This debate concerns the poor Spanish performance in the area of social protection, a phenomenon which is commonly attributed to two facts. Firstly, it stems from the country’s position as a peripheral economy, at least since the advent of modern economic growth. Secondly, and more decisively, the welfare gap is believed to be related to Franco’s dictatorship and the big slump that it represented for state engagement with welfare issues. Therefore, even if the country has experienced significant improvements in this sector during the last quarter of the twentieth century in terms of welfare state standards, the roots of the still existent gap in welfare provision have concentrated significant research efforts on Spanish social policy

A large portion of the population of South Africa is made up of people who, due to poverty, disability, old age and/or lack of education, rely solely on social assistance provided by the government for their survival. The issue of the welfare state in terms of responding to these issues has been subject to increasingly heated debates especially with regard to long-term socio-economic improvements, moral obligations and economic sustainability. This dissertation generally explores the status of social welfare in South Africa, and more specifically, South Africa’s socio-economic status as a welfare state against the backdrop of selected philosophical arguments used to justify and criticize existing social welfare laws in South Africa, whilst keeping South Africa’s unique history in mind. Although South Africa already has a detailed set of social welfare laws and policies, the social and economic needs of the country are ever evolving and therefore it is important that these laws and policies be constantly re-evaluated in order to ensure that they are effective in addressing and meeting the changing socio-economic and other demands.
Jurisprudence
LL. M. (Jurisprudence)

(in English): In this thesis I focus on the system of social protection in Japan at the turn of the 21st century and the role of the state in this system. In the first chapter I define the terms society, social policy and welfare state. The second chapter is dedicated to the historical development of the social policy from antiquity to the end of the Second World War. In the next chapter I concern myself with the character of the social protection system in Japan at the beginning of the third millennium, the changes in the Japanese society and the financial state of the social protection system. In the last chapter I analyse the reforms that have been done since the beginning of the new century and which propose was to stabilize the system of the social protection in Japan and make it sustainable.