ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the ways in which welfare workers have been forced to confront a central ethical dilemma: how to reconcile the real benefits that state welfare provides with the requirement that those in receipt subject themselves to supervision and control. It does so by pointing to the ways in which this dilemma has become more acute in recent years as the form of state welfare has been subjected to considerable change. Although always bureaucratic, unwieldy and intrusive, workers could once point to the political commitment to social inclusion that underpinned the welfare state and the real improvements that followed. Now, it is argued here, such faith appears harder to justify as state welfare as a source of incorporation and concession has been discarded and new exclusive forms of provision have been put in its place.
