What Welfare States do to People and how People use Welfare States Programms
28th and 29th May 2015
at University of Applied Science Düsseldorf
Welfare States in industrialised countries have transformed considerably during the last decades. Although different in timing and degree, many countries have introduced reforms influenced by such ideas as activating welfare recipients, investive social policy, enhancing efficiency of welfare provision by market competition, furthering individual responsibility, choice, customer-orientation and autonomy. Against the backdrop of changing welfare state paradigms, we are interested in understanding what such kinds of policies actually do to people, and how people make use of new welfare state programmes implementing these ideas. While many studies have focused on categorising and explaining welfare state change, this call is interested in papers studying policy effects in terms of outcomes (e.g., effects on poverty, the quality of service provision, or working conditions in the social services sector) as well as behaviour (e.g., reactions of the insured, welfare recipients, or service providers).
We invite submissions of papers from PhD students who focus on the following aspects: Country case studies as well as comparative papers on the effects of labour market activation policies; privatisation and marketisation of pension, health, care or other schemes; the introduction of new(investment driven) care policies; changes in local programmes, e.g. housing, youth and family welfare;
shifting responsibilities between different welfare state institutions or major actors; as well as studies on the day-to-day strategies of welfare recipients and users of different programmes or services.The workshop seeks to bring together PhD students from German and international universities and research institutions. We welcome papers from different theoretical, methodological and empirical
perspectives.
The workshop is organised by the German Section of the European Social Policy Association ESPAnet (www.espanet.org), an interdisciplinary organisation of social policy research at European level, and supported by the social policy sections of the German sociology (DGS) and political science (DVPW) associations.
