This text applies ideas of risk - as expressed by theorists such as Beck and Foucault - to changes in welfare. The author demonstrates how neo-liberals have used aspects of risk to attack welfare dependency and shows how rhetorics of risk have been used to reshape contemporary politics. He challenges the apparently common-sense dominance of neo-liberal arguments in social policy and argues that the underlying philosophy of neo-liberalism is individual responsibility and the risk that goes with it.
Welfare Hazard, Social Policy and Risk An Introduction Following Foucault Governance, Security and Risk Welfare Obligations and Safety Nets The Lessening of Risk Contract, Freedom and Choice The Rediscovery of Risk The Risk Arena Citizenship, Rights and the Marketplace Avoidance of Bads Beck's New Ubiquity of Risk? The Radical Rupture of Risk Society A Critical Review Risk and Recognition A View Forward? The Welfare Gaze Risk and the Dilemmas of Dependency Afterword Foucault's Coldest of Cold Monsters!
`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
