Appointment time: Disability and neoliberal workfare temporalities

My primary interest in this article is to reveal the complexity of neoliberal temporalities on the lives of disabled people forced to participate in workfare regimes to maintain access to social security measures and programming. Through drawing upon some of the contemporary debates arising within the social study of time, this article explicates what Jessop refers to as the sovereignty of time that has emerged with the global adoption of neoliberal workfare regimes. It is argued that the central role of temporality within the globalizing project of neoliberal workfare and the positioning of disability within these global macro-structural processes requires the sociological imagination to return to both time as a theme and time as a methodology

Myths of welfare reform

In Australian welfare reform debate, a range of approaches and policies has been advocated. Regardless of their diversity, I argue that the debate has an unnecessarily narrow framework resulting from the widespread acceptance of at least three welfare reform myths. First, is the idea that the current system is anachronistic and in disrepair. lnstead of this narrowfocus on welfare policy, I argue that the welfare reform debate must be widened to include other domains of public policy to involve a 'joined up' approach to addressing poverty and disadvantage. The second myth is that welfare recipients need to be the focus of policy attention. Policy reforms focus on changing the behaviour of recipients and their communities. Because structural changes underlie increased benefit receipt, such reforms will only have minimal consequences. The third welfare reform myth is the false notion that the current welfare system lacks obligation

Psychic wounds and the social structure: an empirical investigation

Empirical linkages between structure and agency, or system and life world, have traditionally not been overabundant in sociology, though work emerging in the field of the sociology of emotions does offer some illumination on this topic. This article uses data obtained in a project which investigated the impact of the Howard government’s dual reforms in the industrial relations and welfare policy arenas. In this article, we seek to explore in some depth how a system that is underpinned by the notion of dignity and rights produces shame in its supposed beneficiaries, based on the evidence in the data collected. As well, we attempt to expose the processes by which shame is produced and how it manifests among the participants in the study. The first part of the article focuses upon the broader structural context, while the second proceeds to examine how this impinges upon agents at the microsocial level. Workfare recipients are constructed as dependants, in a society that privileges independence and ignores the crucial fact of our mutual interdependency. The transcripts reveal that the denial of autonomy and respect are key mechanisms by which dignity is injured. In exploring these phenomena, the purpose of the article is to demonstrate the usually veiled connections between individuals and their larger social context

In bed with the enemy: some ideas on the connections between neoliberalism and the welfare state

The UK, the US and Australia today embody a type of governmentality which includes a strong element of anti-welfare rhetoric. However, these rationalities have retained - though modified - many elements of a welfare state. What purpose is served by this apparent paradox? It is possible to argue that the welfare state is a necessary precondition for the continued health of the globalized capitalist economies in these nations. This article explores these connections on a general level and makes some tentative suggestions on the functional significance of the current arrangements. In particular it is argued that in Australia the dual labour market is upheld by income support payments. The discourse of anti-welfarism legitimizes an increased level of control over income support recipients’ lives while simultaneously ensuring that expectations regarding citizen entitlements will be dampened - in short, this configuration of discourse and practices facilitates the process of constructing ‘docile bodies’