The ‘new social contract’ and the individualisation of risk in policy

Abstract

Over the last three decades in Australia and Britain, there has been a transformation in the character of the post-Second World War welfare state away from shared responsibility for managing social risks through collective pooling mechanisms towards more individualised responsibility for managing lifecourse risks such as unemployment, parenthood and disability. In liberal welfare states like Australia and Britain, one result has been a range of activation or ‘workfare’ policies. While there has been much discussion about the reasons for these policies and the outcomes for citizens, there is very little exploration of the process by which risks have been individualised through government activation policies. The principle of individual responsibility is politically difficult to sell to citizens and yet how it has been packaged in policy terms has been neglected in the literature. This paper aims to explore the political rationale for the individualisation of risk in the process of contemporary welfare reform by examining government policy documents in Australia and Britain over the last 30 years – the period in which contemporary welfare reform and its emphasis on activation policies emerged. In both countries, I will argue that it is ideas about contractual reciprocity that have been mobilised to legitimise the principle that individuals should manage the risks associated with the lifecourse.

Keywords:

• contract
• risk
• individualisation
• welfare reform
• Australia
• Britain

Acknowledgement

Thank you to Patrick Brown for some very useful comments on this paper.

Notes

1. This trend, while particularly advanced in liberal welfare states where it is said to have its antecedents in the USA (Daguerre and Taylor-Gooby 2004, 29), has also been documented in other welfare regime types such as the social democratic Nordic countries and conservative regimes such as Germany and France (Taylor-Gooby 2001; Daguerre 2007). In order to provide a detailed comparative analysis of this trend, this paper focuses on two liberal welfare regimes: Australia and Britain.

2. The provision ‘actively seeking work’ existed in the 1950s and 1960s but was rarely applied and eventually replaced with the requirement to be ‘available for work’ (Glennerster 1995, 223).

3. This recipient group is referred to in Australia as ‘sole parents’ and in Britain as ‘lone parents’.