Between Retrenchment and Recalibration: The Impact of Austerity on the Irish Social Protection System

This article analyzes the impact of austerity on the Irish social protection system. The analysis is situated in Ireland’s wider financial and economic crisis and its status as an ‘early adopter’ of an austerity response which has continued under European Union/International Monetary Fund intervention. We focus on how the crisis instigated a political narrative about the cost and design of the social protection system, leading to a programme of retrenchment and reform which has blended a politics of blame avoidance with credit claiming. Three core elements in this narrative— generosity, sustainability and suitability— are identified, and against this background, a pattern of multi-dimensional change in social protection across the life course dealing with working age, pensions, and child income supports is analyzed

Recommodification and the welfare state in re/financialised austerity capitalism: Further eroding social citizenship?

This article reviews the recommodification of social policy in the context of financialised austerity capitalism and post-crisis welfare states. It sets out an understanding of recommodification as a multiple set of processes that involve the state in labour market-making, by shaping labour's 'saleability'. Under conditions of finance-dominated austerity capitalism, the article argues that recent dynamics of recommodification complicate the long established Piersonian observations. For Pierson, recommodification signifies how elements of the welfare state that shelter individuals from market pressures are dismantled and replaced with measures which buffer their labour market participation. This article examines ways in which recent policy trends in recommodification, whether by incentivising or coercive means, increase exposure to labour market risks and connect with the growing inequalities between capital and labour under post-crisis re/financialised austerity capitalism. This analysis is paired with a synoptic review of recent labour market trends and reforms across the European Union. As recommodification evolves, the insecurity it institutes raises fundamental questions about the underlying nature of social citizenship which are also addressed

Disciplinary neoliberalism: coercive commodification and the post-crisis welfare state

Fiona Dukelow and Patricia Kennett examine the post-2008 welfare states in Ireland, Britain, and the US. They explain how each of these countries experienced an acceleration in the operation of disciplinary neoliberalism - through punitive regimes of surveillance and sanctions - and consider the implications of these contemporary welfare policies

Building the Future from the Present: Imagining Post-Growth, Post-Productivist Ecosocial Policy

The environment remains on the margins of social policy. Bringing degrowth literature into conversation with social policy debates about decommodification, we argue that a re-imagined decommodification remains central to addressing the social-ecological challenges we face and to forging a post-growth, post-productivist ecosocial welfare state. We explore the implications of this for re-imagining and mapping three core areas of an ecosocial welfare state revolving around the work/welfare/care nexus: the redistribution of time across work and care; repurposing of active labour market measures; and reorienting cash transfers and services. In each case we discuss what decommodified social policy in the service of a post-growth, post-productivist future might entail. Acknowledging challenges, we identify how instances of prefiguration of policy programmes and experiments across various countries offer concrete compass points for further transformation and a necessary paradigmatic shift

Discipline, debt and coercive commodification:Post-crisis neoliberalism and the welfare state in Ireland, the UK and the USA

Ireland, the UK and the USA are heterogeneous examples of liberal worlds of welfare capitalism yet all three countries were deeply implicated in the 2008 global financial crisis. Examining these three countries together provides the opportunity to further develop an international comparative political economy of instability in the context of the globalised and financialised dimensions of Anglo-liberal capitalism and disciplinary governance. Our analysis is guided by the concept of disciplinary neoliberalism (Gill, 1995) through which we explore: (i) the dynamics that have shaped the impacts of and responses to the Great Recession; (ii) the ways in which state-market relations, shaped by differentiated accommodations to market imperative or market discipline, have been used as disciplinary tools and how these have interacted with existing social divisions and iii) the implications for shaping conditions for resistance. We suggest that the neoliberal pathways of each country, whilst not uniform, mark a ‘step-change’ and acceleration in the operation of disciplinary neoliberalism, and is particularly evident in what we identify as the coercive commodification of social policy

Liberal welfare states

This chapter discusses contemporary challenges for liberal welfare states. We first describe the key features of the liberal welfare regime from an ideal-type perspective. Then we discuss central developments in liberal welfare states. This over-view is mainly based on aggregate data covering a variety of specific social policy areas as well as data on social expenditure, poverty and inequality. Third, we analyse the extent to which liberal welfare states are prepared to cope with challenges including fiscal pressures due to demographic change, migration, the digitalisation of the labour market, climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. We conclude by commenting on the questions these challenges raise for liberal welfare states in a post-pandemic context and the likelihood of any policy learning from the pandemic being realised