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Beland & Petersen Published
Beland & Petersen Published
Beland & Petersen Published
construction of the social Europe through book tackles head on many of the problems
some radical measures, has also a strong that mainstream historical institutionalists
left flavour. While this solution is not new, have been facing with regard to the role of
Offe’s effort to show the problems of the ideas in shaping policies.
other potential solutions makes it stand If the accumulation of inequalities fol-
out more. However, in his desire to make lowed national patterns [Kaufmann 2012:
the case for social justice policies, the 25], do welfare states also evolve with distinct
author fails to recognise that this solution policy languages? All contributors rightly
also has weaknesses: the agents most likely note that existing answers in the literature
to push through such radical changes are focus mostly on the role of ideas, without
likely to be the ones paralysed by the crisis. paying much attention to concept forma-
In sum, the pertinent analysis and the tion and policy language. The book offers
flowing argument make this a must-read a two-layered affirmative answer. First, as a
book for social science scholars interested concept with Old Norse origins (p. 13), but
in disentangling the intricacies of the pro- British-centred spread and fame (p. 60),
cesses we witness nowadays in Europe. welfare states appear as a response to the
But the book’s potential reach is wider, as functional necessities of industrialisation,
it speaks to all European citizens who feel as a nexus of the worthy-unworthy debate
entrapped and are searching for a way out. from the English Poor Laws and the social
mediation function from the early 19th-
Romana Careja century German Hegelian tradition [Kauf-
University of Southern Denmark mann 2012: 59]. Second, welfare states
Rca@sam.sdu.dk evolved and were fundamentally shaped
through concept-formation fundamentally
linked with constructing the national com-
Daniel Beland and Klaus Petersen (eds.): munity and national institutions (p. 297).
Analysing Social Policy Concepts and Beyond the linguistic genealogy, which in
Language: Comparative and general is given slightly too much space,
Transnational Perspectives the fundamental processes at play are dif-
Bristol 2014: Policy Press, 344 pp. fusion (p. 132) and adaptation via nation-
building.
Although the push towards modern wel- Although ‘concepts have a life, and
fare states could not have been done with- like all lives, it is probably not linear’ [Pe-
out ideational foundations, the role of ide- tersen and Petersen 2013: 177], the impor-
as has for quite some time been an Achilles’ tance of conceptual history can be seen in
heel for social policy studies. By delving in- the fact that, contrary to English, where the
to the historical development of ideas, con- concept-notion distinction is blurred, in
cepts, and language, Beland and Petersen’s German and French (competing influential
book represents a significant contribution languages of social policy) a clear separa-
to bridging this gap, as it complements tion exists between concept and idea/no-
mainstream literature on ideas and social tion (pp. 66–68). This is an important point
policy with conceptual history tools. The and it relates to two fundamental issues.
research scope is truly impressive—across On the one hand, concepts that underpin
fifteen dense chapters the book covers institutions tend to have long internal tem-
worlds of welfare from Sweden to New poral horizons [Koselleck cited in Escudier
Zealand and from the United States to Ja- 2013], further lengthened by visions of na-
pan, and nation-states as well as highly in- tionhood. On the other, ideas have a more
fluential international organisations. The conflictual life on the intellectual and polit-
453
Sociologický časopis/Czech Sociological Review, 2016, Vol. 52, No. 3
ical canvas of a nation-state. What follows evolution intersects, overlaps, or fully di-
is a very dynamic understanding of the co- verges from the pathway of welfare state
constitutive relationship of agency, struc- institutional change. The neoliberal turn of
ture, and process that underpins the na- the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, did not
tion-building welfare-state nexus. While precede welfare state change, but rather
pre-existing national solidarity offers a sol- followed and was derived from economic
id basis for the implementation of a state- slumps that raised a general awareness of
wide welfare redistribution net, social poli- public spending retrenchment. Granted,
cies also pro-actively create the nation, this is not the central aim of the book and
whose identity is constantly remoulded by virtually all contributors raise awareness
actors both within the state and on the in- of the roles of agency and international
ternational arena [see also McEwen 2010]. contingencies, yet there is a lingering sense
This deep connection with national- of slight rigidity in the path-dependent un-
ism helps shed light on how and why dur- derstanding of causal mechanisms be-
ing unsettled times elites proactively shape tween ideas, actors, and institutions. Mech-
the political arena by using markers such anisms of displacement, layering, drift,
as ethnicity and/or socio-occupational sta- conversion and exhaustion [Streeck and
tus [Vanhuysse 2007]. Therefore, the main Thelen 2005] are hinted at by most chapter
argument of the book is extremely helpful authors, but not fully integrated as explan-
in understanding why and how the wel- atory mechanisms.
fare state is enmeshed in institutionalisa- Let me highlight one case study fo-
tions of the nation, which is uncovered in cused on a nation-state and one on an inter-
most of the case studies—either as a ten- national organisation, both on the hybrid
sion between occupational solidarity and East European welfare regimes. The chap-
national solidarity (for France p. 149), or ter on Hungary and Poland by Aczel, Sze-
more directly as a fear against ethno-eco- lewa and Szikra follows the common de-
nomic cleavages eroding national families nominator in existing scholarship concern-
(interwar Hungary and Poland pp. 37–41). ing the early Bismarkian influences from
The book is equally strong in arguing that the late 19th century as the underlying ba-
welfare states are a salient political issue sis of the two welfare regimes. The key dis-
owing to the long, path-dependent histo- cursive difference seems to have been that
ries of entanglement with nation-build- between the outwardly nationalistic con-
ing processes, understood in a non-static cerns in Hungary and a more broadly de-
fashion (as it is methodologically prob- fined ’statist’ philosophy in the newly inde-
lematic to assume nation-building as ‘com- pendent Poland. Yet, in practice, both wel-
plete and finished’; Beland, Lecours and fare states were quite similar in their high
Kpessa [2011]). levels of centralisation and over-protection
While this partly explains the difficul- of bureaucrats (pp. 37–40). What sets this
ties of welfare state retrenchment, by and chapter apart from other path-dependent
large clear causal connections between ide- inquiries is that by looking at policy lan-
as and changes in welfare state institutions guage the inference made is that the origi-
are more loosely presented here. The vol- nal late 19th-century and interwar welfare
ume is successful in showing why concepts arrangement in Hungary and Poland rep-
and ideas influence social policy and in resented a coherent mechanism with pow-
mapping the changes in conceptual-lin- erful vested interests that became impossi-
guistic landscapes of welfare states, but it ble to fully eradicate by the communist sei-
does not always fully explain when and zure of power. By and large social policy
why the pathway of social policy language was almost completely excluded from the
454
Book Reviews
455
Sociologický časopis/Czech Sociological Review, 2016, Vol. 52, No. 3
456