Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Understanding Theories and Concepts in Social Policy
Ruth Lister
- Theory: What & Why
- Providing new insights
- Put issues and policies in a wider context
- Making sense of descriptive material
- Interpreting facts
- O Brien & Penna
- Gives direction and meaning to what we do
- Some vague hypotheses
- Some more complex
- Generalisations about what exists in the world
- Social theories ask how, why and what questions
- Normative theories ask how things could or should be and what could get us there
- Aimed at changing norms, attitudes, the organisation of institutions, and patterns of responsibility for welfare
- Both social and normative theories inform welfare ideologies
- Make sense of the world
- Make connections between different social phenomena
- Question the assumptions underlying social policies and political programmes
- Adopt a more critical and sceptical stance towards what is presented as common sense
- Conceptual foundation stones
- The individual in terms of identity, the idea of the welfare subject and beliefs about human motivation and behaviour
- The question of identity
- Identity is fluid
- More than one identity
- Welfare subject
- Consumer/Customer/Client/Patient
- The way in which people are named affects their own and others' expectations of them in specific sites
- The interplay between individual human agency, structural constraints and opportunities and culture
- The state, nation and nation state
- The transnational and the global
- Motivation and behaviour
- Public choice theory
- Welfare policy
- Altruism
- Self interest
- Structure, Agency & Power
- Structure: The pattern of social arrangements within a society or social group
- Class, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, economic & political institutions
- Agency: The capacity of individuals to operate independently of the social structure
- Resilience: Withstanding the negative effects of risk exposure
- Power: Being able to make or to receive any change or to resist it.
- Culture: Shared values and beliefs
- As a marker of difference
- As a source of explanation
- As a practice that produces meaning
- The state, nation and nation state
- Role of the state
- Nature of the state
- Globalisation
- Driving changes in welfare states
- Demise of the nation state
- Global governance
- Global social policy