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.