Social Policy and Risk
- Ian Culpitt - Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
This book examines the notion of risk in relation to social policy. It takes ideas about risk (as expressed by sociologists such as Ulrich Beck in Risk Society), and applies them to recent changes in welfare. The author shows neo-liberals have used various aspects of risk to attack welfare dependency, and how various rhetoric's of risk have been used to reshape contemporary politics.
Social Policy and Risk makes a major contribution to our understanding of contemporary welfare politics.
`As the study of social policy comes increasingly to address issues of theorising welfare in a period of fundamental social change, Culpitt's book is especially welcome in helping to update the reader in many of the debates and explorations surrounding social change, in particular those instigated by Foucault some two decades ago - his work on "governmentality" is central to Culpitt's book - and by Beck on risk more recently. The book also serves as a useful introduction to other key thinkers influencing social theory today whose work also addresses issues central to social policy, such as Giddens, Honneth and Turner' - Martin Hewitt, University of Hertfordshire
`This book is a call to social policy theorists to do this work of deconstruction, particularly through constructing a genealogy of risk.... This is a tantalising if difficult book. Tanatalising because it is a complex philosophical reflection that promises a possibility, at least, of creating a breach in the bulwark of neo-liberalism. The chapters on citizenship and the public sphere, and on Honneth's work in attempting to re-establish a 'logic of the social' provide particularly interesting discussions that build on the Foucauldian work of the earlier chapters to offer promising directions forward.... The book is, thus, an invitation for social policy theorists to proceed from the philosophical groundwork offered here, to an investigation of the specific practices of neo-liberal governance.... What is offered.. is a complex working together of the ideas of key social theorists whose thinking is increasingly being recognised as insightful for the discipline of social policy.' - New Zealand Sociology
