Social Welfare Responses in a Neoliberal Era: Policies, Practices, and Social Problems

Listen to the podcast about Cory Blad’s chapter in this book ‘Searching for Saviors: Economic Adversities and the Challenge of Political Legitimacy in the Neoliberal Era’.

This book seeks to explore welfare responses by questioning and going beyond the assumptions found in Esping-Andersen’s (1990) broad typologies of welfare capitalism. Specifically, the project seeks to reflect how the state engages, and creates general institutionalized responses to, market mechanisms and how such responses have created path dependencies in how states approach problems of inequality. Moreover, if the neoliberal era is defined as the dissemination and extension of market values to all forms of state institutions and social action, the need arises to critically investigate not only the embeddedness of such values and modes of thought in different contexts and institutional forms, but responses and modes of resistance arising from practice that might point to new forms of resilience.