[Book Review] Workfare States (Jamie Peck, 2001)

Environment and Planning A, 2007

Makeshift Work in a Changing Labour Market

Theodore 2000), pushed by large-scale organizations such as the EU and the OECD, has further fuelled flexibilization, through an accent on the capacity and agency of individuals to create their own job opportunities and careers. In a similar way, notions of 'entrepreneurship' and 'lifelong learning' highlight the readiness for change and for learning-to-learn anew that are deemed necessary in the competitive global labour market (see Weinert et al. 2001). Buzzwords such as these, however fluid and polyvalent, offer a sense of direction to what might otherwise be experienced as the opportunistic and chance-like movements of contemporary capitalism. Despite its powerful homogenizing force, globalization is not a single unified process or phenomenon, but a complex assemblage of interrelated processes. Globalization does not occur in the same way everywhere. Rather, large-scale processes interact with particular national institutional structures, policies and systems of meaning to articulate quite specific outcomes. In this sense, large-scale economic developments do not involve the stamping of identical imprints across the world, but their outcomes are contingent processes, which depend on their interactions with locally specific circumstances. Accordingly, the world of work is 'creolized' in particular ways, reflecting dynamic interactions of global influence and local cultural specificities (cf. Hannerz 1987). We thus need to be wary about generalizing too fervently about the implications of globalization on local or national labour markets and work practices. Whilst national labour markets are undoubtedly becoming increasingly drawn into transnational circuits, there is still a degree to which they are international in character, rather than globalized. National regulatory frameworks, conventions and traditions tend to retain some of their influence. Neoliberal ideals have had different impacts in state politics around the globe, mixing with other ideals and translating differently into differing political and organizational contexts (Bonoli and Natali 2012; Ong 2006). Still, market-based solutions to labour market policy have influenced the welfare state politics of Sweden and have gained a strong hold as an organizing principle and ideal model for social life. The Swedish welfare state has been increasingly hollowed out and mass unemployment has become a reality in what used to be seen as a model case for a full employment society. 1 Social insurance entitlement levels and services have been reduced and subject to increasing sanctions. This is indicative of an increasingly neoliberal direction in labour market policy. This book

Labour History, 1996

ANALYSING THE NATURE and effects of labour's relationship to the welfare state has been a vexed enterprise. On the one hand, labour has long been suspicious of the welfare state as a weapon to undermine working-class radicalism. On the other hand, labour has sought to support the welfare state as a means of easing the worst excesses of capitalist exploitation. This ambivalence, in part, reflects conflicting labour traditions -one committed to the overthrow of capitalism and the other to die "civilising" of capital. And it is these diverse traditions that have allowed labour to play an active role in both contesting and shaping important features of the modern welfare state. In recent years, however, labour's relationship to the welfare state has become more problematic; indeed, its status as a progressive and radical critical voice has been questioned by the emergence of alternative political movements such as feminism, gay rights and queer politics, movements of indigenous peoples, ethnic communities, environmentalism, and disability groups in both Australia and Canada. And while sections of the labour movement have sought to find common cause with these movements, these alliances have sometimes disturbed, even alienated, labour's traditional constituency. Moreover, these different politics have challenged many aspects of labour's compact with the welfare state. Additionally, extensive new right critiques of the welfare state, trade unions, and labour parties have forced labour to defend the hard won gains of a century of welfare state development, blunting any critical labour position. Labour's relationship to the welfare state is being questioned from all sides. An historical understanding of the development of this relationship may illuminate some of these contemporary dilemmas, especially if we escape from a narrow national exceptionalism. A focus on particular national or regional developments obscures broader

British Journal of Industrial Relations, 2011

2009, 405 pp., ISBN 978 0 521 51456 9, £65.00, hardback.

Indian Journal of Labour Economics, 2003

European Journal of Political Research, 2007

The concepts that address different paths to transformation of the welfare state as a 'workfare', an 'enabling' or an 'activating' state share the idea that traditional welfare policies, mostly aiming at decommodification, are more and more replaced by social policies emphasising (re-)commodification. Activating labour market policy therefore is supposed to play a central role within the paradigm shift of welfare state policies. It is understood to involve a mix of the enforcement of labour market participation, the conditioning of rights and growing obligations of the individual at one side, and an increase of services in order to promote employability and restore social equity at the other. In this article, the different perceptions of the workfare and the enabling state perspectives on the positive and negative aspects of activating policies are reconstructed as 'pure forms' in order to obtain theoretical standards against which the empirical cases of activating labour market policies in Denmark, the United Kingdom and Germany are characterised and compared. The actual reform path is described by a combination of two indicators: the strength of the workfare and the strength of the enabling elements of the activating labour market policies. The evidence on activating labour market reforms confirms that in both dimensions a move in the same direction is taking place, but without producing growing convergence. Different welfare state types keep on producing different mixes of workfare and enabling policies, leading to very different levels of decommodification and (re-)commodification. Thus, an ongoing divergence of policies also exists within the new paradigm of an activating labour market policy, although single countries seem to change their alignment to a particular welfare state type. Some studies of social policy claim that the traditional postwar 'Keynesian welfare state' has been transformed into a 'Schumpeterian workfare state'