Exporting workfare/importing welfare-to-work: exploring the politics of Third Way policy transfer
Section snippets
Third way policy transfer and the workfare state
An explanation of the continuing salience of the American reform model must delve beneath the typical concerns of the policy transfer literature, in which tried-and-tested policy ideas are taken up by those in the market for new approaches. Certainly, as King, 1995, King & Wickham-Jones, 1999 and David Dolowitz (1998) have conclusively demonstrated, there is a long history of US–UK transfers of policies, terminology, and administrative routines in the field of welfare-to-work, for all the
Welfare reform, off-the-peg
For all the exaggerated claims that are made on behalf of the US model, an inescapable fact is that the current salience of its welfare-to-work ‘message’ is strongly predicated on the coincidence of falling welfare rolls across the US. These economically contingent conditions have bestowed on the US model a fleeting authority within overseas policy communities that the more sober results of countless evaluation studies suggest it does not deserve (see Blank, 1997, Handler & Hasenfeld, 1997).
Third Way welfare reform?
According to John Kay (1998: 35), “Welfare-to-work … represents the largest ideological shift by New Labour and most clearly epitomises the Third Way”. However, perhaps the most searching question is how far this differs from the American Way, appropriately repackaged for British consumption. New Labour's reform rhetoric certainly exhibits a strong American accent, even if some of the more contentious terminology is given a European inflection: Blair speaks of the ‘workless class’ rather than
Welfare-to-work policy-making, UK-style
During the period of Conservative government, Labour's social policy stance was based on sustained opposition to Conservative benefit reforms (particularly compulsory work schemes such as Project Work and Jobseeker's Allowance, JSA), combined with the search for innovative social policy-making in northern Europe, Australia, and North America (see Finn, 1987, Walker, 1991, Commission on Social Justice, 1994, King, 1995, Deacon, 1997, Dolowitz, 1998, Jones, 1999). On entering government,
Conclusion: which Third Way?
The parallel welfare-to-work strategies set in train by the Blair and Clinton governments give concrete expression to recent claims that a Third Way policy orthodoxy is under construction. Yet at the same time, this critical field of reform exposes many of the limitations and contradictions of such active forms of social interventionism when operated in the context of a neoliberal economic policy framework. New Labour's welfare-to-work project is being developed in the context of a
Acknowledgements
Nik Theodore acknowledges the support provided by the Atlantic Fellowships programme and Jamie Peck that of the Leverhulme Trust (Research Fellowship 10896) and ESRC (grant number R 000222543). This paper has benefited from discussions with Neil Brenner, Alan Deacon, Dean Herd, Ruth Lister, Lawrence Mead, Frances Fox Piven, William Plowden, and Robert Walker. All the usual disclaimers apply.
References (94)
Workfare in the sun: politics, representation, and method in US welfare-to-work strategies
Political Geography
(1998)- et al.
Training for the future: the rise and fall of the Manpower Services Commission
(1990) - et al.
Welfare as work? The potential of the UK social economy
Environment and Planning A
(1999) - et al.
Privatism and urban policy in Britain and the United States
(1989) The Third Way
(1998)It takes a nation
(1997)Fighting poverty: lessons from recent U.S. history
Journal of Economic Perspectives
(2000)- et al.
The politics of new-style workfare
Socialist Review
(1988) - Brenner, N. (1998). Re-scaling state space: urban regions, uneven development and the contradictory political geography...
- Brodkin, E. Z., & Kaufman, A. (1998). Experimenting with welfare reform: the political boudoirs of policy analysis....