36 results
Foreword
- Rachel Humphris, University of Birmingham
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- Book:
- Home-Land Romanian Roma Domestic Spaces and the State
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 27 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 26 March 2019, pp xiii-xiv
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Summary
As Rachel Humphris states, ‘this book opens up new questions for academic and political debates about citizenship, migration and belonging’ (p 16). These are all debates which are highly topical in the UK as it contemplates the realities of, and reasons for, Brexit. And it is as both an academic and politician that I read the work and found in particular her notion of ‘intimate state encounters’, which frames the study, highly illuminating.
One of feminism's contributions to citizenship theory has been to interrogate the public-private divide, which previously confined questions of citizenship to the public sphere and ignored the relevance of the private, domestic sphere and the care work undertaken within it. The opening up of the domestic sphere as a site of citizenship has been an important element in the multi-scalar conceptualisation of citizenship, as stretching from the intimate and domestic through to the global rather than simply being linked to the nation-state.
Rachel's analysis of intimate state encounters throws new light on what everyday citizenship can mean through a study of a highly marginalised, racialised group – Romanian Roma – when the domestic and the nationstate meet in their homes. It explores the gendered complexities of these encounters, which to a large extent involves mothers having to meet frontline (typically female) workers’ expectations of ‘good motherhood’.
While in some cases intimate state encounters could play a positive role in the women's lives this very much depended on judgements of deservingness and appropriate signs of gratitude, and on sentiment rather than on the exercise of rights. This will be of interest to students of streetlevel bureacracy. Here, though, we see the representatives of the state (and also volunteers) operating behind the domestic front door. It brings home how the state is not some faceless monolith but, ‘digital by default’ notwithstanding, in some domains encounters with the state are highly personalised, and this is especially true of those such as Romania Roma women and members of marginalised groups more generally. These are just some aspects of the study which will provide rich pickings for students of citizenship and the operation of the welfare state.
Read as a politician, the book helps us understand the realities of the government's ‘hostile environment’ policy, now rebranded a ‘compliant environment’, even though it was still in its infancy when the study was conducted.
9 - Coming off the fence on universal basic income
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- By Ruth Lister
- Edited by Amy Downes, Stewart Lansley
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- Book:
- It's Basic Income
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 11 April 2023
- Print publication:
- 14 March 2018, pp 54-57
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Summary
‘… for all my ambivalence, I am coming round to the idea of a UBI as a means of ensuring everyone a modicum of basic security in an increasingly insecure world.’
I’ve always sat on the fence when it comes to universal basic income (UBI). There’s much that is attractive in an approach that, in its pure form, does away with means-testing and contribution tests to guarantee every individual a basic income in their own right. I’ve thus also always welcomed the debate about basic principles that proposals for a UBI encourage while not actually signing up to any of those proposals.
In part my reluctance to sign up in support has reflected an ambivalence around the total absence of any conditions attached to entitlement. On the one hand this absence represents the absolute guarantee of security that is so attractive and it challenges the contemporary fetishisation of paid work as the citizenship responsibility. It leaves it to individuals to decide how they divide up their time between paid work, caring, community and citizenship-focused activities, education, creativity, family and friends, leisure pursuits or just being, without being dictated to by an intrusive state. On the other hand, as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams warn in Inventing the Future, the work ethic is deeply ingrained into our identities. Even for someone such as myself, critical of the fetishisation of paid work, it’s not so easy simply to shrug it off. When Srnicek and Willams call for ‘the right to be lazy’, I find myself recoiling at the idea that other people should be required to subsidise that right. That doesn’t mean I believe many would necessarily exercise it as, on the one hand, there are many reasons why people would nevertheless still want to undertake paid work and, on the other, even those who don’t may be busy in other ways.
Nevertheless, such fears are why I have found the idea of a ‘participation income’ a potentially attractive compromise. Put forward by the Commission on Social Justice, published in 1994, and, more recently, the late Tony Atkinson, it would allow for a more inclusive form of conditionality, based on making a social contribution, than do the rules currently governing entitlement to social security.
Foreword
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- By Ruth Lister
- Ruth Patrick, University of Liverpool
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- Book:
- For Whose Benefit?
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 05 April 2022
- Print publication:
- 12 April 2017, pp xi-xiv
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Summary
‘Welfare reform’ has been a central objective of social policy for successive governments. Many reports and articles have been written about it. But few have explored its implications from the perspective of those most affected. This is what Ruth Patrick's study does – together with the associated ‘Dole Animators’ film, All In It Together: Are Benefits Ever a Lifestyle Choice? – with its emphasis on the lived experience of ‘welfare reform’. ‘Walking alongside’ the participants over a period of time has allowed her to act as a conduit for their voices as they talked about their experiences, anxieties, aspirations and attitudes to the social security system and the cuts and restrictions to which it has been subjected. It also enabled her to understand how the participants coped with the changes over time.
Her findings illustrate how the significance of ‘welfare reform’ lies not only in its material impact but also in its symbolic/cultural effects – both on those directly affected and on how the social security system and those currently reliant on it are viewed by wider society. From this perspective, the process and political and media representation of ‘welfare reform’ are as important as the outcome. Take the very way it is framed as ‘welfare reform’: the use of the stigmatising term ‘welfare’ in place of social security and the positive term ‘reform’ in place of cuts and restrictions performs an ideological function, which serves to justify the latter.
First, that neutral term ‘reform’. It's true that there have been some genuine elements of reform in the two major pieces of ‘welfare reform’ legislation introduced by the Coalition and Conservative governments, most notably the replacement of most means-tested benefits by Universal Credit, payable in and out of work. However, genuine reform has been overshadowed – and to some extent undermined – by a series of cuts and the further ratcheting up of conditionality, combined with a more punitive sanctions regime.
The use of the term ‘welfare’ as a synonym for – and increasingly instead of – social security has been particularly damaging. The original use of the term ‘welfare’ as applied to the welfare state was intended to convey a positive meaning; one of the state helping its citizens to fare well from cradle to grave.
R. Lupton , T. Burchardt , J. Hills , K. Stewart and P. Vizard (eds.) (2016), Social Policy in a Cold Climate: Policies and their consequences since the crisis, Bristol: Policy Press, £25.99, pp. 394, pbk.
- RUTH LISTER
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- Journal:
- Journal of Social Policy / Volume 46 / Issue 3 / July 2017
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 03 April 2017, pp. 643-644
- Print publication:
- July 2017
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four - The age of responsibility: social policy and citizenship in the early 21st century
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- By Ruth Lister
- Edited by Chris Holden, Majella Kilkey, University of Sheffield, Gaby Ramia, University of Sydney
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- Book:
- Social Policy Review 23
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 17 June 2011, pp 63-84
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Summary
A few decades ago Maurice Roche concluded an influential book on citizenship with the observation that ‘the politics of citizenship has for generations formulated its goals, fought its battles and found its voice in the discourse of rights. In the late twentieth century’, he argued, ‘it also needs to be able to speak, to act, and to understand itself in the language of citizens’ personal responsibility and social obligation, in the discourse of duties as well as of rights’ (1992, p 246). Whatever the validity of that statement at the time, the politics of citizenship in the UK has subsequently changed in the direction called for by Roche so that ‘the processes of “responsibilization”’ have increasingly shaped the ideal citizen of today (Clarke, 2005, p 451). Nevertheless, writing in autumn 2010, as we head into the uncharted waters of coalition government, Prime Minister David Cameron speaks as if Roche's criticism were still apposite. He thereby ignores the persistent drumbeat of responsibility, which provided the soundtrack for both the Blair-Brown and the Thatcher-Major years.
To recap: back in 1988, John Moore, then Social Security Secretary, called for ‘correcting the balance of the citizenship equation. In a free society the equation that has “rights” on one side must have “responsibilities” on the other’ (1988). In the early days of New Labour former Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that ‘duty is an essential Labour concept. It is at the heart of creating a strong community or society’. And he distanced himself from ‘early Left thinking’ in which the ‘language of responsibility [was] spoken far less fluently than that of rights’ (1995). Yet, 12 years on, when he became leader, Gordon Brown told Labour's Annual Conference that ‘we have not done enough in the last ten years to emphasise that in return for the rights we all have, there are responsibilities we all owe’ (2007).
Three years later, on the steps of No 10 Downing Street, Cameron declared ‘I want to help try and build a more responsible society here in Britain. One where we don't just ask what are my entitlements, but what are my responsibilities’ (2010c). Responsibility is one of the trinity of values guiding the Coalition.
six - Social justice for children: investigating and eradicating child poverty
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- By Ruth Lister
- Edited by Alan Walker, University of Sheffield, Adrian Sinfield, University of Edinburgh, Carol Walker, University of Lincoln
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- Book:
- Fighting Poverty, Inequality and Injustice
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 01 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 15 June 2011, pp 111-132
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Summary
Peter Townsend was a towering figure in the anti-child poverty cause. It is difficult to exaggerate the impact he had both on the study of child poverty and on the campaign to eradicate it. Yet, surprisingly, the concept of ‘child poverty’ does not figure prominently in his writings about poverty in the UK. Of course, this is not to say that Townsend downplayed the significance of child poverty in the UK. He was, after all, a prominent campaigner against it. Rather, he did not separate it out from the wider issues of poverty and privilege as a discrete problem, which could be solved without addressing the underlying structures of inequality that maintain social injustice. In the Foreword to a history of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), with which he was closely associated, he wrote: ‘More attention must be given to the exposure of excessive and unnecessary privilege, as much as excessive and unnecessary power. It is impossible to raise the poor without simultaneously diminishing the rich’ (1986). This means, therefore, that any assessment of his work on child poverty and its impact cannot be easily divorced from his work on poverty and inequality more generally. The first part of this chapter considers Townsend's contribution both as a social scientist and as a campaigner within this wider context. The second part discusses how we might build on Townsend's legacy with regard to both the investigation into and the eradication of child poverty.
The contribution: social scientist and campaigner extraordinaire
Townsend's contribution to the anti-child poverty cause is particularly notable for his powerful structural analysis of poverty, his conceptualisation of poverty as relative, his contribution to the ‘rediscovery’ of child poverty and his role as an engaged academic who also campaigned against child poverty.
A structural analysis
Underlying Townsend's contribution as a social scientist and campaigner was a clear structural analysis of poverty and its causes. This was firmly articulated in Poverty in the United Kingdom:
The theoretical approach developed in this book is one rooted in class relations. Some account has to be given to allocative principles and mechanisms and developments in the pattern of social life and consumption.
John Hills, Tom Sefton and Kitty Stewart (eds.) (2009), Towards a More Equal Society?: Poverty, Inequality and Policy Since 1997 (CASE Studies on Poverty, Place and Policy). Bristol: Policy Press. £22.99, pp. 432, pbk.
- RUTH LISTER, CBE
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- Journal:
- Journal of Social Policy / Volume 38 / Issue 4 / October 2009
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 01 October 2009, pp. 713-714
- Print publication:
- October 2009
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eight - Social investment: the discourse and the dimensions of change
- Edited by Martin Powell
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- Book:
- Modernising the Welfare State
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 21 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 30 September 2008, pp 125-142
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter assesses the nature and scope of changes to the welfare state in relation to the ‘social investment’ turn. We argue that Tony Blair's New Labour governments recalibrated welfare state priorities, programmes and expenditures, both as a response to social risk and to promote economic competitiveness, through an embrace of social investment discourses and practices. While social investment, at its core, is all about activation (that is, labour market policy ‘concerned with helping people successfully master transitions across the life-course’; see Giddens, 2007, p xi), it has nevertheless ‘activated’ far wider realms and actors than initially anticipated, having an impact on policy ideas and instruments, as well as institutions, interests and identities (Dobrowolsky and Saint-Martin, 2005), with implications beyond the conditional welfare state (see Chapter Twelve, this volume).
6 and Peck suggest that modernisation represented more than ‘some general slogan’ (2004, p 4). Similarly, social investment was not just about words (Dobrowolsky, 2002; Dobrowolsky and Jenson, 2005). It required ‘coordination and integration’ and involved various processes of ‘standard setting’, targeting and benchmarking (for example, reducing child poverty by 2020). Social investment policies reflected ‘devolution but limited decentralisation’ and typically played out in terms of ‘area-based initiatives’ (for example, Sure Start). At the same time, we see both an ‘extended role for private capital’ (for example, public–private partnerships, or PPPs) as well as an ‘increase in citizen obligations’. Consequently, social investment, like modernisation, produced an ‘organisational settlement’.
The actual term ‘social investment’ was coined by Anthony Giddens (1998, p 117). His view that states should manage risk (1994), his advocacy of partnerships between states, markets, families and communities with respect to welfare provision, as well as his conceptualisation of social investment, intended as a term that would foreground human capital (1998), encapsulate the principles of a Blair government that would describe itself as ‘maximising opportunities and minimising risks’. Giddens recently offered the following concise definition for the social investment state: ‘State-provided or regulated investments in human or social capital’ (2007, p xiii).
In brief, under the rubric of social investment, social policy reforms were geared towards excelling in the competitive global marketplace. Investing in human capital – increasing the capacity of everyone to engage in the productive economy – became a core preoccupation.
five - Recognition and voice: the challenge for social justice
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- By Ruth Lister
- Edited by Gary Craig, Tania Burchardt, David Gordon
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- Book:
- Social Justice and Public Policy
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 19 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 18 June 2008, pp 105-122
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Summary
Introduction
This chapter addresses both the more theoretical and the more policyoriented themes of this volume. It begins with an overview of how some of the theoretical literature on social justice has addressed the relationship between distributional and relational justice (couched in the language of recognition and voice). Is social justice about distribution or is it about relations of respect, recognition and voice – or a combination of the two?
The chapter then turns to its central concern, namely the recognition paradigm of social justice. The first issue it addresses is the association of this paradigm with social movements and identity politics. According to Barbara Hobson (2003, p 2), ‘recognition has been grounded in normative political theories of justice, citizenship, and democracy in which inclusion, rights, and membership are the cornerstones’. ‘Identity is at the core of the recognition paradigm’, Hobson (2003, p 4) states, and recognition struggles ‘make claims resulting from devalued statuses and misrecognized identities’. However, as will be argued, that does not mean that recognition struggles necessarily constitute identity politics (Lister, 2005).
Indeed, the chapter will contend that the recognition paradigm of social justice helps us to make sense of the contemporary politics of poverty, more typically associated with the distributive paradigm and certainly not a form of identity politics. Despite having worked within the distributive paradigm as both a campaigner and an academic for most of my adult life, through my readings of political, social and feminist theory and also through listening to and reading what people in poverty say about what poverty means to them, I have come to believe that a poverty politics of social justice must integrate distributive and recognition perspectives. This can be identified as ‘a politics of redistribution and of recognition & respect’, in acknowledgement of how people with experience of poverty themselves use the language of respect (Lister, 2004).
From an analytical perspective, ‘recognition and redistribution become specific lenses for viewing the same struggles, rather than discrete categories’ (Hobson, 2003, p 2). Anne Phillips (2003) reinforces this point. She observes that ‘struggles for recognition are and have been very much struggles for political voice’ (2003, p 265) and that understood in this way the struggles are less obviously about a particular category of injustice.
Postscript Gender, citizenship and social justice in the Nordic welfare states: a view from the outside
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- By Ruth Lister
- Edited by Kari Melby, Anna-Birte Ravn, Christina Carlsson Wetterberg
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- Book:
- Gender Equality and Welfare Politics in Scandinavia
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 21 January 2022
- Print publication:
- 05 March 2008, pp 215-222
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Summary
This postscript offers an outsider's assessment of the political ambition represented by the Nordic welfare-state model from a gender perspective. More than any other welfare-state model, the Nordic or social-democratic model is not just a label applied by welfare-regime analysts but is worn with pride by Scandinavian governments and citizens. As this volume demonstrates, gender equality is treated as a hallmark of this model (even if there are differences between the Nordic countries). The original class-based ‘passion for equality’ was gradually extended explicitly to embrace gender so that, according to Arnlaug Leira, gender equality is now ‘integral to Scandinavian citizenship’ (Ellingsæter and Leira, 2006, p 7). This shapes the gender culture within which specific policies operate in the Nordic welfare states.
Nevertheless, as this volume again demonstrates, there are considerable differences between the Nordic countries. In particular, while the Nordic welfare states tend broadly to be characterised as among those that have moved furthest towards a dual earner or adult worker model, the policy mechanisms deployed to support those with care responsibilities differ in terms both of the specifics of policy and of the gendered citizenship models underlying them.
Just as there are differences between policies for gendered citizenship between the Nordic countries, so there are differences among feminist scholars in their evaluation of the Nordic model. Such differences can reflect differing normative positions as to whether the goal is an ostensibly gender-neutral or an explicitly gender-differentiated model of citizenship or some combination of the two (Lister, 1997/2003). Nordic policy discourses have generally been gender neutral, with the explicit aim of promoting equality between women and men. However, some policies, even though still couched in gender-neutral language, arguably are more consistent with gender-differentiated models of citizenship, in which women's particular responsibilities and needs are recognised.
Distinctive too, among some Nordic welfare states, has been the attempt, however tentative, to promote a more gender-inclusive model of citizenship in which men as well as women are able to play a part as citizen-earner/carers and carer/earners. This points towards what Nancy Fraser (1997) has termed the universal-caregiver model in which men become more like women, rather than the universal-breadwinner model in which women are expected to become more like men. Nowhere, needless to say, has achieved the universal-caregiver model.
four - Gendered citizenship: the care of young children
- Ruth Lister, Loughborough University, Fiona Williams, University of Leeds, Anneli Anttonen, Tampereen korkeakouluyhteisossa, Finland, Jet Bussemaker, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Ute Gerhard, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Am Main, Jacqueline Heinen, Université Versailles/Saint Quentin-en-Yvelines, Stina Johansson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Arnlaug Leira, Universitetet i Oslo, Birte Siim, Aalborg Universitet Institut for Kultur og Globale Studier, Denmark, Constanza Tobio, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
- With Anna Gavanas, University of Leeds
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- Book:
- Gendering Citizenship in Western Europe
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 15 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 16 May 2007, pp 109-136
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Summary
Introduction
Since the 1990s, Western Europe has experienced a remarkable shift in political thinking about childcare. A profound politicisation of the relationship between the state and the family has generated renegotiations of the boundaries between public and private responsibilities in the care of young children. Parenting norms, parental responsibilities and relations are changing rapidly in many regions, while families and households are no longer expected to take full responsibility for the care of their children under school age. Policies aimed at reconciling paid work and childcare are accelerating these processes. With a special interest in the transformation of childcare – from private to shared collective responsibility and, in some welfare states, to a social right – this chapter takes as its starting point those policy shifts which are redefining access to various forms of childcare services and benefits as a social right of parents and children.
Within the European Union (EU) there is political agreement that childcare policies are essential in reducing gender inequalities and in changing the gendered nature of social and economic citizenship. This is most clearly evident in the Parental Leave Directive of 1996, the Recommendation on Childcare of 1992 and the targets set for the provision of childcare services at the European Council meeting in Barcelona in 2002. In fact, legislation and policy recommendations have redefined the young child's need for care as a responsibility of both the state and parents. Childcare policy reform has broadened the platform from which parents are entitled to make claims on the welfare state. The elaboration of public policies for the early childhood years is affecting the institutional arrangement between welfare states, families and labour markets, while childcare-related policies have added to the social and economic rights of mothers and fathers (Leira, 2002).
The transformation of childcare policies in Western Europe stands in stark contrast to the policy reforms since the early 1990s in those Central and Eastern European welfare states known in the 1970s and 1980s for their massive public investments in provisions for preschoolers (see Kamerman and Kahn, 1978, 1991; UNICEF, 1999; Heinen and Portet, 2004). Since the 1990s, the dramatic decline in the public provision of childcare services and benefits has meant a shrinking of the childcare-related social and economic rights of parents. The following analysis of national policy reforms covers Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and the UK.
Part One - Historical and cross-national perspectives
- Ruth Lister, Loughborough University, Fiona Williams, University of Leeds, Anneli Anttonen, Tampereen korkeakouluyhteisossa, Finland, Jet Bussemaker, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Ute Gerhard, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Am Main, Jacqueline Heinen, Université Versailles/Saint Quentin-en-Yvelines, Stina Johansson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Arnlaug Leira, Universitetet i Oslo, Birte Siim, Aalborg Universitet Institut for Kultur og Globale Studier, Denmark, Constanza Tobio, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
- With Anna Gavanas, University of Leeds
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- Book:
- Gendering Citizenship in Western Europe
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 15 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 16 May 2007, pp 15-16
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one - Historical perspectives
- Ruth Lister, Loughborough University, Fiona Williams, University of Leeds, Anneli Anttonen, Tampereen korkeakouluyhteisossa, Finland, Jet Bussemaker, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Ute Gerhard, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Am Main, Jacqueline Heinen, Université Versailles/Saint Quentin-en-Yvelines, Stina Johansson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Arnlaug Leira, Universitetet i Oslo, Birte Siim, Aalborg Universitet Institut for Kultur og Globale Studier, Denmark, Constanza Tobio, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
- With Anna Gavanas, University of Leeds
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- Book:
- Gendering Citizenship in Western Europe
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 15 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 16 May 2007, pp 17-46
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Summary
Introduction
As context matters, a cross-national European study of the meanings of the concept of citizenship must, first of all, take the distinctive historical backgrounds into account. Understandings of citizenship have not only changed over the course of time, but its multifaceted, different meanings also reflect both varied political and social histories and legal traditions and cultures in the respective European countries. When, in this chapter, special attention is paid to legal traditions and cultures as characteristic of particular trajectories of development, this is not intended as a reduction to a legal discourse; on the contrary, it is an attempt to be concrete and extend our view of political ideas or conceptualisations to what is called ‘lived experience’. For the notion of ‘legal cultures’ comprises more than norms, doctrines or institutions of a legal system, it also includes attitudes towards the state and the practical experiences of those who were excluded from citizenship rights or became involved with the law. Since citizenship is not only a legal status but also a practice and lived experience (Lister, 2003), the awareness of the significance of legal cultures, therefore, may contribute to an understanding of ‘citizenship regimes’ as ‘historical constructions’ (Jenson and Phillips, 2001) and may explain specific barriers to equal citizenship or particular trajectories of inclusion respectively. These legacies, different historical roots and legal cultures, political struggles as well as particular institutional trajectories, still shape today's discourses and have an impact on citizenship theory and practice. Of special interest are the ‘overlapping vocabularies’ of the different discourses and debates with respect to female citizenship that impeded the possibility of gender equality (Landes, 1996). This means that the history of women's citizenship has deviated from the development usually depicted in the traditional citizenship literature.
In this chapter, however, the attempt at exploring the different historical and political contexts cannot be complete; it must be restricted to an exemplary or ideal type of argumentation. Since ideal types are always theoretical exaggerations, which in reality never exist in pure form, they will be illustrated by exemplary historical features. After introducing the terminology of the legal tradition and the models of the modern concept of citizenship, the second part of the chapter will discuss the delays and the impediments to women's citizenship in the different dimensions of political, civil and social citizenship rights.
three - Gendered citizenship: migration and multiculturalism
- Ruth Lister, Loughborough University, Fiona Williams, University of Leeds, Anneli Anttonen, Tampereen korkeakouluyhteisossa, Finland, Jet Bussemaker, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Ute Gerhard, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Am Main, Jacqueline Heinen, Université Versailles/Saint Quentin-en-Yvelines, Stina Johansson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Arnlaug Leira, Universitetet i Oslo, Birte Siim, Aalborg Universitet Institut for Kultur og Globale Studier, Denmark, Constanza Tobio, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
- With Anna Gavanas, University of Leeds
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- Book:
- Gendering Citizenship in Western Europe
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 15 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 16 May 2007, pp 77-108
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Summary
Introduction
Globalisation, European integration and migration pose new challenges for understanding citizenship from a transnational perspective. Since the 1990s the increase in migrants and refugees has sparked new political debates about multiculturalism and multicultural policies across Europe, debates which have, increasingly after 9/11, been coloured by Islamophobia. These debates follow both similar and diverging paths in different European countries, all of which carry different legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and different histories of migration. In some, the debates about multiculturalism are new; in others, such as the UK, they revive and reshape debates of the 1960s following post-war immigration. Along with these differences, the heterogeneity of groups and the policies and lived experiences also constitute aspects of recent and past migration. With increasing immigration restrictions in Europe, the only way to gain legal access to enter many countries has been through family unification or as refugees or, to a lesser extent, as workers with designated and required skills. Since the early 1980s female labour migration has increased along with a growing stratification between different migrant groups, according to qualifications and skills (Kofman et al, 2005).
The overall objective of this chapter is to explore the meaning of these challenges of migration and multiculturalism for gendered citizenship. The focus is on the intersection of gender with (minority) ethnicity, in terms of the rights and claims of minority ethnic women, in those nine European countries which are the subject of this book, taking into account their differing citizenship, migration and gender regimes. Multiculturalism is an ambiguous term that refers to principles that either respect minority rights or defend special rights for minority groups. The debates point to how public policies deal with difference and diversity, as well as normative visions about diversity, and strategies for achieving these visions. Multiculturalism is also highly complex because, as Chapter Five shows, policies and public discourses often differ from the lived practices of citizens.
Migration and multiculturalism represent a double challenge for the classic framing of citizenship in that they force us to analyse the tension between equality and recognition of diversity and the relationship between national and transnational arenas. Citizenship is about the inclusion and exclusion of individuals and social groups in societies where struggles over rights have been closely linked to the nation state.
Index
- Ruth Lister, Loughborough University, Fiona Williams, University of Leeds, Anneli Anttonen, Tampereen korkeakouluyhteisossa, Finland, Jet Bussemaker, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Ute Gerhard, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Am Main, Jacqueline Heinen, Université Versailles/Saint Quentin-en-Yvelines, Stina Johansson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Arnlaug Leira, Universitetet i Oslo, Birte Siim, Aalborg Universitet Institut for Kultur og Globale Studier, Denmark, Constanza Tobio, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
- With Anna Gavanas, University of Leeds
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- Book:
- Gendering Citizenship in Western Europe
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 15 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 16 May 2007, pp 201-210
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Part Two - Policy studies
- Ruth Lister, Loughborough University, Fiona Williams, University of Leeds, Anneli Anttonen, Tampereen korkeakouluyhteisossa, Finland, Jet Bussemaker, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Ute Gerhard, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Am Main, Jacqueline Heinen, Université Versailles/Saint Quentin-en-Yvelines, Stina Johansson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Arnlaug Leira, Universitetet i Oslo, Birte Siim, Aalborg Universitet Institut for Kultur og Globale Studier, Denmark, Constanza Tobio, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
- With Anna Gavanas, University of Leeds
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- Book:
- Gendering Citizenship in Western Europe
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 15 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 16 May 2007, pp 75-76
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Frontmatter
- Ruth Lister, Loughborough University, Fiona Williams, University of Leeds, Anneli Anttonen, Tampereen korkeakouluyhteisossa, Finland, Jet Bussemaker, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Ute Gerhard, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Am Main, Jacqueline Heinen, Université Versailles/Saint Quentin-en-Yvelines, Stina Johansson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Arnlaug Leira, Universitetet i Oslo, Birte Siim, Aalborg Universitet Institut for Kultur og Globale Studier, Denmark, Constanza Tobio, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
- With Anna Gavanas, University of Leeds
-
- Book:
- Gendering Citizenship in Western Europe
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
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Gendering Citizenship in Western Europe
- New Challenges for Citizenship Research in a Cross-National Context
- Ruth Lister, Fiona Williams, Anneli Anttonen, Jet Bussemaker, Ute Gerhard, Jacqueline Heinen, Stina Johansson, Arnlaug Leira, Birte Siim, Constanza Tobio
- With Anna Gavanas
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- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 15 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 16 May 2007
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This cross-national study explores a key concept in contemporary European political, policy and academic debates and demonstrates the value of a multi-level conceptualisation of citizenship.
two - Vocabularies of citizenship since the 1970s
- Ruth Lister, Loughborough University, Fiona Williams, University of Leeds, Anneli Anttonen, Tampereen korkeakouluyhteisossa, Finland, Jet Bussemaker, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Ute Gerhard, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Am Main, Jacqueline Heinen, Université Versailles/Saint Quentin-en-Yvelines, Stina Johansson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Arnlaug Leira, Universitetet i Oslo, Birte Siim, Aalborg Universitet Institut for Kultur og Globale Studier, Denmark, Constanza Tobio, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
- With Anna Gavanas, University of Leeds
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- Book:
- Gendering Citizenship in Western Europe
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
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- 15 September 2022
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- 16 May 2007, pp 47-74
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Summary
Introduction
In this chapter, we describe and analyse the range of actors involved in contemporary citizenship debates. These actors include left-wing and right-wing politicians, feminist movements, trade unions and social movements more generally. They may adhere to more dominant and powerful discourses on citizenship or struggle with alternative formulations, attacking mainstream or defending former interpretations. For all these reasons, it is not clear a priori whether citizenship is a liberating or a disciplinary concept; in fact, as stated in the Introduction, it can be both, depending on who is using the concept, in what context, and with reference to which kinds of vocabulary. From a gender perspective, such a contextualised analysis is especially important, since binaries such as public/private, dependence/independence, needs/rights, individual/community, may also be highly gendered, as well as context driven.
We focus here on those contextual issues concerning citizenship that have emerged within the European welfare states since the 1970s. We will start with asking why citizenship has become such a key concept. Then we will describe various contemporary vocabularies and feminist critiques of citizenship. In the next section, we examine some striking citizenship issues and debates in contemporary welfare states. Finally, we analyse the consequences of international developments for these vocabularies of citizenship, with a special focus on both European citizenship, and the framing of citizenship in former communist countries.
Social and political developments and the rise of the concept of citizenship
Within recent decades, citizenship has become an influential concept used in various spheres. Among academics it is used as a central concept to describe and explain developments within social and political transformation processes. In politics it is used to reformulate both the relations between citizens and the state, and relations among citizens. Within social movements and activist groups, it refers to questions of inequality, social cohesion and community life. In international organisations, such as the European Union (EU), the concept of citizenship appears to name and frame a shift in the position of the nation state and its citizens.
The main reason behind the popularity of the term ‘citizenship’ seems to be that so many contemporary issues and problems can be related to it. New questions have arisen as to the distribution of citizenship rights as a result of demographic developments, changing family and gender relations and welfare state reform.
Introduction
- Ruth Lister, Loughborough University, Fiona Williams, University of Leeds, Anneli Anttonen, Tampereen korkeakouluyhteisossa, Finland, Jet Bussemaker, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Ute Gerhard, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Am Main, Jacqueline Heinen, Université Versailles/Saint Quentin-en-Yvelines, Stina Johansson, Umeå Universitet, Sweden, Arnlaug Leira, Universitetet i Oslo, Birte Siim, Aalborg Universitet Institut for Kultur og Globale Studier, Denmark, Constanza Tobio, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
- With Anna Gavanas, University of Leeds
-
- Book:
- Gendering Citizenship in Western Europe
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 15 September 2022
- Print publication:
- 16 May 2007, pp 1-14
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Summary
Citizenship links the individual with the collective. This book too is the work of individual researchers who have worked collectively as an international team. The outcome is therefore not the more usual edited collection in which authors of individual chapters work with an editor. Rather it is the product of a collaborative process of iteration in which authors responsible for individual chapters have drawn on material provided by the whole team and members of the team have discussed and commented on each chapter. This process has helped to illuminate some of the challenges faced in researching citizenship in a cross-national context.
The introduction begins with an explanation of why it is necessary to understand citizenship in context. This is followed by a brief account of the meanings of citizenship and of feminist interpretations of them and, finally, an overview of the volume.
Citizenship in context
Citizenship can be understood both as an academic and political concept and as lived experience (Lister, 1997, 2003; Siim, 2000). Our analysis highlights three key elements of citizenship: rights and responsibilities, belonging and participation. The starting point for the volume and central theme running through it is that context matters. Although, as a concept, citizenship is typically constructed in abstract, universal terms, the universal nevertheless is interpreted and articulated in specific national social and political contexts, reflecting historical traditions and institutional and cultural complexes. Thus, for example, the British literature on citizenship has traditionally tended to focus on the relationship between individual citizens and the state, central to its liberal tradition; in contrast, the Scandinavian literature has been more likely than the British to emphasise the relations between citizens as a collectivity, reflecting the feelings of solidarity emanating from a long history of social democracy.
As lived experience, citizenship cannot be divorced from its context – temporal and national. Diverse aspects of gendered citizenship are salient at particular periods of time in different countries (see Chapters One and Two). Indeed, understandings of what it means to be a citizen, and the vocabularies used to capture these meanings, are likely to differ to some extent between European countries, as discussed in Chapter One. Moreover, within countries people may experience citizenship differently depending on factors such as age, class, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality and (dis)ability. These factors interact to weave the texture of lived citizenship for individual citizens (see also the Conclusion).