This new study assesses the welfare state to ask key questions and draw new conclusions about its place in modern society. It shows how the welfare states that we have inherited from the early post-war years had one main objective: to protect the income of the male breadwinner. Today, however, massive social change, in particular the shift from industrial to post-industrial societies and economies, have resulted in new demands being put on welfare states. These demands originate from situations that are typical of the new family and labour market structures that have become widespread in western countries since the 1970s and 1980s, characterised by the clear prevalence of service employment and by the massive entry of women in the labour market. Against this background, this book: * presents a precise and clear definition of 'new social risks'. A concept being increasingly used in welfare state literature. * focuses on the groups that are mostly exposed to new social risks (women, the young, the low-skilled) in order to study their political behaviour. * assesses policymaking processes that can lead to successful adaptation. It covers key areas such as child care, care for elderly people, adapting pensions to atypical career patterns, active labour market policies, and policy making at the EU level. This book will be of great interest for all students and scholars of politics, sociology and the welfare state in particular.

Crossing period boundaries separating late medieval, early modern, and long eighteenth-century England, Paul A. Fideler offers a coherent overview of parish-centered social welfare from its medieval roots, through its institutionalisation in the Elizabethan Poor Law, to its demise in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. The study: - incorporates the latest scholarship - weaves together social, economic, demographic, medical, political, religious and ideological history - offers fresh treatments of the contextual importance of Christian moral theology in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, humanist and protestant thought in the sixteenth century and neo-Stoic benevolence and political arithmetic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - explores two competing approaches to social welfare: societas (voluntary, rooted in custom and tradition) and civitas (mandatory, embedded in policy and law) - concludes with a detailed examination of the first histories of social welfare in England undertaken in the late eighteenth century.

As a key staffer on the House Ways and Means Committee, Haskins was one of the architects of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996. Here, he portrays the political battles that produced the most dramatic overhaul of the welfare system, since its creation as part of the New Deal.

Few discussions in modern social science have occupied as much attention as the changing nature of welfare states in western societies. Gosta Esping-Andersen, one of the most distinguished contributors to current debates on this issue, here provides a new analysis of the character and role of welfare states in the functioning of contemporary advanced western societies. Esping-Andersen distinguishes several major types of welfare state, connecting these with variations in the historical development of different western countries. Current economic processes, the author argues, such as those moving towards a post-industrial order, are not shaped by autonomous market forces but by the nature of states and state differences. Fully informed by comparative materials, this book will have great appeal to everyone working on issues of economic development and post-industrialism. Its audience will include students and academics in sociology, economics and politics.