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five - New institutional forms of welfare production: some implications for citizenship
- Edited by Jørgen Goul Andersen, Per H. Jensen
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- Book:
- Changing Labour Markets, Welfare Policies and Citizenship
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 23 January 2002, pp 85-106
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- Chapter
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Summary
Although citizenship may be affected directly by changing labour markets, this chapter concentrates on the unintended effects of policy change. New welfare policies may start as a mere effort to raise the efficiency of welfare production, in reaction to changing labour market conditions. However, we will show that these types of reform may have moral implications in the longer run.
The chapter focuses on the numerous reforms that have been implemented in the Dutch social security system. Often, welfare state reform is studied as a question of retrenchment. The central focus is then on the ways in which policy changes restrict the level of social protection. However, we find that actual welfare state changes (at least in the Netherlands) are not primarily a matter of more or less social rights. More important is a radical change in the institutional production of welfare, especially in the ways in which citizens, (private) organisations and state agencies are involved in the actual realisation of welfare. So we argue for an institutional approach to welfare state reform that concentrates on changes in the institutional logic of welfare production. We will discuss this approach in greater detail in the next section.
As the Dutch case demonstrates, many of the institutional reforms concern the issue of control. In order to discipline the behaviour of clients, firms and administrative agencies, organisational structures and policy programmes have been redesigned. In the third and fourth sections of this chapter we will present a detailed analysis of this process, as it has developed during the 1990s. It is shown that the ambition behind this process of change was to create a more efficient system of welfare production without damaging the level of social protection. Some authors have referred to this as an important element of ‘the Dutch miracle’ (this term was coined by Visser and Hemerijck (1997), who argued that the Dutch had learned how to fight unemployment while maintaining a reasonable level of social protection). However, whether this miracle has actually been realised remains to be seen.
Our analysis shows that the level of protection has largely remained in tact. However, this is only part of the story. As the institutional logic of welfare production has changed, new ideas on the social rights and duties of citizens have emerged.
nine - From externalisation to integration of older workers: institutional changes at the end of the worklife
- Edited by Jørgen Goul Andersen, Per H. Jensen
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- Book:
- Changing Labour Markets, Welfare Policies and Citizenship
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 23 January 2002, pp 183-208
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
The central theme of this book is labour market change, its interrelationship with welfare policies, and their joint impact on citizenship. In this chapter we discuss these changes from the perspective of ageing workers. Labour market and social policies have had a major impact on the organisation of the end of the worklife for this sector of the population in the past decades. In many welfare states, social programmes have been used – as instruments for labour market strategies – to ‘externalise’ older workers from the labour market. This process is referred to as the ‘early exit’ of older workers.
Recently, this policy has been reversed. Many welfare states have tried to change the early exit culture into a late exit culture, to cope with demographic ageing, welfare state costs and new demands on the labour market. Instead of ‘externalisation’ of older workers, the political target nowadays is the ‘re-integration’ of older workers.
Against the background of these developments and changes we will address two questions. Firstly, whether and how countries will be able to turn around the massive and highly institutionalised early exit into a new pattern of late exit. We assume that this change from early to late exit needs a much more complicated and fundamental change in the regulating mechanism of welfare states than is sometimes expected. At the same time, and according to the neo-institutionalist approach, dismantling a (longstanding) welfare state practice might be very difficult as a result of ‘policy feedback’ and ‘path dependencies’ (Pierson, 1994). The empirical test should be those welfare states that combine a longstanding culture of high early exit with a complex institutional structure designed to channel the process of early exit. Within the European region a number of countries seem to qualify for such a test. For empirical reference we will use France and the Netherlands to analyse the barriers and innovations required to reverse the early exit trend. Both countries are known for their high early exit cultures, but they seem to differ strongly in the success of their attempts to raise the employment activity rates of older workers. Finland is also a high exit country with a complex pathway structure. From 1995, employment activity rates among the 55-64 male age group began to increase again, in the Netherlands from 40.5% in 1993 to 48.8% in 1999 (OECD, 2000), in Finland from 36.1% in 1995 to 40.1% in 1999.