ABSTRACT
It has become a central tenet of the current welfare state literature that we now live in an economic environment that is fundamentally different from the one which prevailed when the core institutions of modern income protection came to maturity. French sociologist Pierre Rosanvallon has suggested that advanced welfare states are confronted with as much as a ‘New Social Question’. Many others have made or have come close to making similar claims. The following quote from Esping-Andersen et al. (2002, p. 2) is reflective of much of current thinking:
We are in the midst of economic upheaval, the emergence of a very different kind of integrated global economic order from that which reigned in our grandfathers’ time. Technological transformation and the dominance of service employment provoke major changes in the social risk structure, creating a wholly new set of societal winners and losers. The standard production worker and the low-skilled could by and large count on a decently paid and secure job in the welfare capitalism era. This is unlikely to be the case in the twenty-first century. The basic requisites needed for a good and secure life are growing and changing at the same time. Those with insufficient skills or cultural and social resources may easily slide into a life course marked by low pay, unemployment, and precarious jobs. Our contemporary preoccupation with social exclusion appears very much as an echo of the ‘social question’ that permeated debates in the 1930s.
