The Welfare System and the Social Lifeworld : Paradox and Agency in the Policy Process [1 ed.] 9781527538863, 9781527537200

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The Welfare System and the Social Lifeworld

The Welfare System and the Social Lifeworld: Paradox and Agency in the Policy Process By

John J. Rodger

The Welfare System and the Social Lifeworld: Paradox and Agency in the Policy Process By John J. Rodger This book first published 2019 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2019 by John J. Rodger All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-3720-X ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-3720-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables ............................................................................................. vii Part 1: Social Welfare as an Autopoietic System Introduction ................................................................................................. 2 System Integration and Social Integration ............................................. 5 The Paradox of the Welfare State .......................................................... 8 Outline of the Book.............................................................................. 13 Chapter One ............................................................................................... 17 Sociological Theory and the Welfare System The Semantics of the Enlightenment and Luhmann’s Anti-Humanism ........................................................... 17 The Differentiation of Society and Human Rights............................... 22 Civilising and De-civilising Tendencies in a Differentiated Society ... 27 The Social Policy Context of British Social Welfare ........................... 32 Concluding Comments......................................................................... 34 Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 37 The Economic System and the Colonisation of the Third Sector: The Role of Financialisation and Neo-Philanthropy Introduction.......................................................................................... 37 Financialisation .................................................................................... 39 The Active Citizen and the Civil Society Strategy .............................. 43 The New Philanthropists as the Conscience of New Capitalism ......... 45 The Colonisation of the Social Lifeworld ............................................ 49 Concluding Comments......................................................................... 56 Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 58 Street-Level Bureaucracy and Welfare Organisations Introduction: Systems Theory and Street-Level Bureaucracies ........... 58 Michael Lipsky’s Perspective on Street-Level Bureaucracy ............... 60 The Client-Processing Mentality ......................................................... 61 Applying Lipsky’s Perspective ............................................................ 64 Karl Weick’s Theory of Sensemaking in Complex Organisations ...... 69

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Table of Contents

Recursivity in the theories of Weick and Luhmann ............................. 76 Concluding Comments......................................................................... 79 Part 2: The Social Lifeworld in a Society of Autopoietic Systems Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 82 The Bridge between Lifeworld and System Introduction.......................................................................................... 82 Habermas’s Discourse Theory of Law................................................. 85 The Political Public Sphere .................................................................. 90 Lay Morality and the Social Lifeworld ................................................ 92 The Mass Media System ...................................................................... 99 Concluding Comments....................................................................... 107 Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 109 Human Emotion and the Paradox of Social Work Introduction........................................................................................ 109 Homines Aperti: The History of Human Nature ................................ 110 Other Directedness and Synthetic Emotions ...................................... 112 The Managed Heart ........................................................................... 116 The Paradox of Social Work and Social Care .................................... 120 Resolving the Paradoxical Nature of Social Work............................. 126 Law’s Authoritative Voice in Social Work ........................................ 132 Concluding Comments....................................................................... 133 Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 135 Compassion, Altruism and the Welfare Systems Introduction........................................................................................ 135 Titmuss and the Principles of the Modern Welfare State................... 138 The Social Lifeworld and the Degeneration of Civility ..................... 145 Compassion and the Proximity Principle ........................................... 149 Concluding Comments....................................................................... 154 Chapter Seven ......................................................................................... 156 Concluding Observations Reviewing the Argument ................................................................... 156 Theoretical Postscript: Autopoiesis, Democracy and Brexit.............. 160 Bibliography ............................................................................................ 164 Index ........................................................................................................ 175

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1 ....................................................................................................... 24 Co-Evolution of Societal Structure, Role of State and Legal Form Table 2 ....................................................................................................... 31 The Differentiated Society and the Civilising Process: Key Features and Sociological Tendencies Table 3 ....................................................................................................... 51 Summary of the Key Structural Elements in Social Systems Table 4 ....................................................................................................... 53 Comparing System Attributes of the State Welfare System, Neo-Philanthropy and the Third Sector Table 5 ...................................................................................................... 55 Polyphonic Communication Codes and Third Sector Organisations Table 6 ....................................................................................................... 89 Diagrammatic Illustration of Possible Relationships in the Model of the Circulation of Power Table 7 ..................................................................................................... 100 The Structural Coupling of the Mass Media System to the Political Party System Table 8 ..................................................................................................... 102 Luhmann’s Model of the Mass Media System Incorporating Social Media Table 9 ..................................................................................................... 118 Emotion Management System Table 10 ................................................................................................... 126 The Social Work/Client Encounter

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List of Tables

Table 11 .................................................................................................. 128 Landmark Child Abuse Events Table 12 ................................................................................................... 144 Welfare Paradigms in post-war British Welfare Table 13 .................................................................................................. 149 Incarceration Rates in Key Western Countries 2017-2018

PART ONE SOCIAL WELFARE AS AN AUTOPOIETIC SYSTEM

INTRODUCTION

This book is about describing and understanding the complex system properties of the modern welfare state and its citizen facing relationships. It will present an analysis of the encounter between the welfare state, seen as a complex social sub-system of law and politics, and what is described by Habermas (1987) as the social lifeworld within which people create meaning and a sense of social solidarity as they interact in accordance with their everyday negotiated sense of natural justice and lay morality. Often the citizen’s meaning system does not connect with the regulatory protocols of the street-level bureaucracies with which they must deal. The gatekeepers to the myriad of health and welfare services, the local government and charitable organisations that deal with their housing problems, the lawyers who mediate their relationship with the courts and the policemen and women who watch over the public disorder in their communities, appear to many people to adhere to rules and regulations divorced from “common sense”. The main issue here is that the welfare state gives rise to conflicting expectations about its purpose and role in modern complex societies. Is it a mechanism for institutionalising social solidarity; promoting the virtues of altruism and other-regarding social values through the design of compassionate social policies which seek to enhance and deepen the quality of social relationships between citizens? Or, is it a self-reproducing legal and political system which operates in accordance with its own internal logic, independently of the human agents who try to steer it towards benign social outcomes? There is a view which has been dominant in British social policy analysis since the inception of the modern incarnation of the welfare state in the middle of the 20th century that whatever failings the system has, it remains a modern, progressive and enlightened project. At the centre of this book is a doubt about whether that is an appropriate way to look at the welfare state in the 21st century. Today we live in a global world in which economic markets, scientific knowledge and communication are truly international and can impact on a nation state’s perceived interests and sense of economic competitiveness with an immediacy that was unknown in the middle of the 20th century. In response to these changes, the role of the state has been shifting and after nearly four decades of neo-liberalism, and a global financial crisis from 2008 onwards, there has been a discernible reduction

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in welfare support in almost all western societies. The optimistic and progressive pursuit of a just social order is struggling for survival in the midst of growing inequality and social divisions in what has become an era of austerity. In considering whether the optimistic view of the welfare state remains credible, and by way of introducing the key themes to be discussed in the following pages, it is worth bearing in mind the observations made by filmmaker Ken Loach on the present-day welfare system. The film “I, Daniel Blake” tells the story of an unemployed 59-year-old widower’s encounter with the welfare benefits system as he seeks unemployment and living support allowances while he recovers from a heart attack at work. Despite the fact that Daniel’s cardiologist deems him to be unfit to return to work, the regulations governing the administration of welfare benefits require those seeking assistance on the grounds of ill-health to undergo a capability assessment. As the film opens Daniel is being asked a series of general questions about his ability to lift his arms, put a hat on, press a button, convey simple messages to another and whether he has any particular problems evacuating his bowels. Daniel protests that he has answered all of those types of questions in the 52-page form he completed in advance of the interview and pleads for the assessor to focus on his heart condition. He is told that he must be cooperative and answer verbally all the questions that he has already provided written answers to. He is being assessed not by someone who is a qualified doctor or nurse with the competence to assess his serious medical condition but by someone who describes herself as a “fully trained healthcare professional” who works for the private company appointed by the Department for Work and Pensions to undertake health assessments. It transpires that on the completion of the ‘health assessment’ Daniel is deemed to be fit for work and denied unemployment and support allowance. His doctor is not contacted about the decision. As a consequence of this outcome, Daniel must look for work and take all necessary steps to make himself ready to take any employment opportunities offered to him. The remainder of the film revolves around Daniel’s attempt to have his case properly reassessed at an appeal hearing. However, a lifetime working as a joiner means that Daniel is not equipped with the IT skills essential to negotiate the online world of information and forms necessary for him to complete the appropriate paperwork to make a successful application. It is the help and support of his friends and acquaintances rather than the welfare bureaucracy which facilitates Daniel’s appeal. There are a number of issues which arise from this award-winning film which resonate with the themes to be analysed in this book. First Daniel’s

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Introduction

experience of his encounter with the health care professional left him with a sense that he was dealing with a system rather than a logical and rationally acting individual who could empathise with the human being in front of them. The “healthcare professional” in the film is intent on ticking boxes rather than focusing on the real health condition that debilitates Daniel because that is all that she was trained to do. Later in the film there are glimpses of sympathy for Daniel’s plight from one of the administrative staff in the Work and Pensions office who offers advice about the best way to negotiate the system in order to obtain an appeal hearing but when that act of kindness is observed by a supervisor the worker is called into the manager’s office, presumably to be reminded of the need to retain a professional approach to her work; one which is detached and is devoid of any caring, sympathetic or empathising display. Rules, regulation and the determination of eligibility rather than care and support seem to be what the welfare system delivers. Second, and on the other side of the encounter with the welfare state, the film captures the social solidarity and sense of lay morality of ordinary people who share Daniel’s experience. An incident in the Work and Pensions office elicits outrage from the waiting claimants at the way in which a young woman and her children are being treated by the officials. Led by Daniel, they protest at her treatment and voluntarily agree to allow the young woman to jump the queue in order that her problem can be resolved speedily. That flouting of the order and discipline required of those making claims on the welfare system leads to Daniel and the young woman being escorted out of the office by security staff. The close relationship between Daniel and the young woman and her children that follows leads to a mutually supportive friendship. Daniel assists with her DIY and together they venture to the local charity run food bank where sympathetic and supportive volunteers mitigate the sense of humiliation felt by those having to rely on charity to feed themselves. And eventually, when, after weeks of fruitless job searching and administrative reprimands, Daniel expresses his frustration with the slowness and ineffectiveness of the welfare benefits system by spray painting a demand for a date to have his appeal heard on the outside wall of the Work and Pensions office, the passing crowds cheer support for him. It seems that the everyday hardship of the unemployed and unsupported living in an austere post-industrial society can generate an informal sense of interdependence and a sense of injustice. The operational reality of the welfare state is very different, therefore, from the idealistic project which historically has underpinned the notion of a progressive and supportive system of institutionalised solidarity. The

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welfare system has often been portrayed, and justified, on the basis that it irons out the inequities and injustices of living in a liberal capitalist society and that it provides the best expression of enlightenment values that have been incubated in Western cultures. In fact, the welfare state is, and always has been, a bureaucratic system designed to ration help and support to the most vulnerable in society. It has always been premised on the view that its primary purpose is to provide incentives to work rather than to meet social need. It was designed to assess eligibility to receive benefits and channel claimants into work pathways deemed by the system to be appropriate rather than those considered desirable by claimants. And it can be merciless in its dealings with those who seek its help without understanding the grammar of the bureaucratic imperatives which underpin the modern welfare system in a post-industrial society. The encounter between system and social lifeworld is evident in the narrative which drives Loach’s’ film. It is a story which portrays human beings, whether administrative bureaucrats working inside the system or claimants searching for the safety net that the system is supposed to provide, as spirited, opinionated and conscious of the restraints that surround their lives but left feeling largely ineffectual at steering bureaucracies in a different direction: the system does what it does and the human actors must do the best they can to negotiate their way through.

System Integration and Social Integration The problematic at the centre of present-day sociology is exactly the same as that portrayed in the film “I, Daniel Blake”: to understand the relationship between the structures which shape and buffer human behaviour, and the actions that human beings take to change the restrictive contours of their lives. Sociological theory has conceptualised this issue in terms of two distinguishable levels of analysis: system integration which relates to the orderly/disorderly relationship between the institutions and organisations of a society and social integration which relates to the cooperative/conflictual relationships between people in society. A key task, therefore, of sociological analysis has been to understand better how the system, which operates at a macro level in society, can be influenced and steered by the everyday social actions of individuals living in a democratic society. There has been a social policy strand to this debate. The welfare state from the 1950s onwards was certainly understood to be a progressive institution designed by enlightened social and political action to ameliorate the abject poverty of those suffering under an unforgiving capitalist

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Introduction

system, but it was also viewed sceptically by those on the left of politics who were impatient with the gradualism of this modernist project. They tended to view the institutions of the welfare state as a depoliticising system that pacified the poor by sapping their political radicalism and socialising them into acceptance of a mixed economy in which state socialism and market capitalism reached an accommodation. The system level problem of ensuring social stability was tackled through the project of institutionalising social solidarity through the creation of a welfare bureaucracy and the design of compassionate social policy, particularly in the fields of health, housing and social security. It represents the social policy variant of the system and social integration problem. It was very much in tune with functional notions about mopping up and eliminating residual social problems which might lead to social conflict. Enlightened policy makers such as William Beveridge, and academic theorists of the welfare state such as Richard Titmuss and T.H. Marshall, envisioned the welfare state project as widening and consolidating democracy by giving to everyone, particularly the less well-off, the substantive use powers of good health, education and housing in order to embrace their citizenship fully. Meanwhile the ideal picture was completed by macro economic theorists such as John Maynard Keynes who provided the theory of state and economy that would make everything work (see Offer, 2006). This was the culmination of the enlightenment values and practices begun in the late 19th century; it was a vision of a society created by people choosing to place fairness and compassion at the forefront of their conduct. While there was an understanding of the necessity for the state to organise welfare in the form of a bureaucratic system, the architects of that system were, with hindsight, too sanguine about its beneficence. At the centre of this vision of an enlightened state bureaucracy was an overly simplistic understanding of how social systems work and of the capacity of human beings to control, steer and change those very complex social systems. The predominant mode of thinking about the welfare state is to see it as an allopoietic system which is maintained by an input-output relationship with its environments, which in the case of the welfare system is understood to be primarily groups of people organised into various publics pursuing their economic, political, industrial, employment, party or electoral interests. The complementary theory of Parliamentary democracy that accompanies this model lays emphasis on the importance of converting that organised political pressure into social policies which Parliament transforms in to law. Legislative actions from Parliament into the welfare system are assumed to lead inexorably to outputs which are implemented exactly as intended by the Parliamentarians who designed

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the policies. This way of conceptualising the system as being primarily driven by human agency encapsulates the common assumption in society and the media about how the political process works. The problem with it is that it conflates actions focused on the political and policy process with matters of policy outcome and implementation. Making law and interpreting law are processes anchored inside two distinct and differentiated social systems: politics and law. The analysis offered in this book will suggest that this conceptual confusion must be clarified in order to establish what social systems do and to identify the limits of human action in changing what social systems do. There are a number of policy sites where we can examine these issues. One site where we can see this problem in a transparent way is inside the street-level bureaucracies where the face-to-face encounter between ordinary people and the welfare system takes place. It is through these interactions that policy is implemented, and discretionary decisions are taken or avoided, which materially effect people’s lives. I will examine these issues in chapter three. Another site is the professional relationship between social work and social care practitioners and their clients which will be discussed in part two of the book. While the debates about the ‘the two sociologies’ of structure and action, system and social integration, may seem rather dated today, the issues which stimulated them have not gone away and sociological theory remains exercised about the relationship between the macro level analysis of social and political institutions and the micro level analysis of human beings and how they might steer and change those macro institutional systems. The perspective being offered in this book suggests that there is a productive reciprocity between Luhmann’s systems theory and Habermas’s theory of discourse and the social lifeworld: Habermas’s sociological writing on the social lifeworld can complement Luhmann’s systems theory because of his conceptualisation of the political public sphere as an institutional space in civil society which enables public opinion formation to take place. This process creates “noise” which is aimed at the key social systems of society. This, as will become clear as the argument of the book unfolds, fills a gap in what Luhmann describes as the “system environment” for law and politics. Another major sociologist to be discussed in this book is Norbert Elias. He spent time in his later life at the same University as Luhmann in Bielefeld, and I have wondered whether they met and talked about their work. I believe there is productive synergy in their respective theories, although I am unaware of anyone else sharing my view. Both Luhmann and Elias have been interpreted as offering “central theories” of society,

8

Introduction

stimulating research in organisational theory, law, public administration and politics in the case of Luhmann (see Brans and Rossbach, 1997; Bakken and Hernes, 2003; Moeller, 2012, 2006; Mathias and Hilkermeier, 2015; King and Thornhill, 2003) and in the case of Elias, sport, medicine, crime and violence, to name only a few of a large number of topics, (see Loyal and Quilley, 2004; Wouters, 2007; Fletcher, 1997; Dunning and Hughes, 2013). Both theorists combined an interest in connecting macrolevel theory to empirical observation in an illuminating way that might be characterised as offering sociology a “central theory” which can guide empirical research. Dunning and Hughes (2013) observe on Elias’s work: Elias stressed the need for central theories that is for theories based on meticulous, detailed and sensitive empirical observation couched at a level of synthesis sufficiently high to be applicable to a range of topics yet sufficiently down to earth to be clearly related to and relevant regarding the real-life experiences of humans. (Dunning and Hughes, 2013, 77)

So, despite their different sociological starting points, the work of Luhmann combined with the insights of Habermas and Elias will be placed in the analytical mix of this book because all three have a great deal to say about the relationship between the welfare system and the social lifeworld.

The Paradox of the Welfare State Underlying the analysis offered in the book is an assumption that all institutions and all institutional systems engage in identity construction. In practice this tends to mean that systems, organisations and institutions operate as if the “ideal” image of their functioning which they project represents the “totality” of their purpose: the contradictions, malfunctions, the paradoxical aspects, of their operations remain undeclared or hidden until some disturbance uncovers them. Legal systems supposedly deliver justice but the paradox remains that they often deliver what is perceived to be injustice; political systems supposedly deliver efficient decision making based on a democratic mandate but they can also deliver what is perceived as undemocratic decision making; and welfare systems are supposedly constituted to deliver economic support to meet social need but often deliver assistance that is overly bureaucratic to access and is designed to coerce those in need into work rather than addressing their often complex social hardships. The analysis which evolves will draw on the notion of paradox which is a key part of Niklas Luhmann’s system’s theory.

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Sometimes it will be explicit but at other times less so. I will describe Luhmann’s system theory more fully in chapters one and two, but it is necessary to sketch out some key aspects of his theory now as an introduction to the perspective being presented. Unlike the allopoietic system described earlier, in which a social system receives inputs from its environment which are transformed by the internal parts of the system leading to outputs in a “mechanical way”, Luhmann’s theory views all social systems as operationally closed and autopoietic: they reproduce the internal parts of the system themselves and are not changed or transformed by inputs to the system from outside; they select from their environments only what is meaningful for the system’s ongoing functional purpose. Luhmann argued forcefully that autopoietic social systems are not theoretical models; they are ontological and describe how social systems actually work in the real world. A key point to be underlined about his perspective on social systems is that because they are closed, they demarcate their boundaries from other systems. For example, Luhmann argued that all social systems operate on a binary code determined by their sphere of interest, so law is organised by the code legal/illegal; politics by the code government/opposition, or power/no power; science by the code true/false and welfare by eligible/not eligible. Holub (1991) has a helpful way of clarifying the boundary issue in Luhmann’s autopoietic theory. Social systems are defined by their relationship to meaning. Luhmann’s contention is that social systems (and psychic systems)1 reduce the complexity of their environment through recourse to meaning. So the boundaries of a social system are not defined physically, but by the border of what is meaningful and what is not. (Holub, 1991, 109)

These systems cannot be changed, steered or transformed by inputs from their environments (unless by force or violence) but instead systems respond to the complexity of their environments by reducing it through processes of selecting only the information, or communications, which are meaningful for the system2. Systems adjust their internal complexity to 1

Psychic systems equate with one aspect of human beings. This notion will be described more fully in chapter one. The complexity of the human body is acknowledged by Luhmann and he distinguishes between three autopoietic systems: the biological (body), the psychic (consciousness) and the social (communication). 2 An interesting way to think about human beings as being autopoietic psychic systems can be found in education. John Dewey, Paulo Friere and Jacques Rousseau all, in their different ways, emphasised the human being as an active

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Introduction

construct their view of their environment and make sense of it in terms that the system can process or handle. Consequently, social systems are not constituted by the sum of their parts but operate in accordance with their own logic and sphere of interest. Luhmann was quite clear about this: only by being able to evolve greater internal complexity and the capacity to reduce external complexity (the “irritation” or “noise” aimed at the system from its environments) can a social system survive. For example, a political system which fails to deal with increasingly complex decisionmaking tasks will ultimately atrophy and processes of de-differentiation will set in leading to what Luhmann called “inclusivity overload”. The state becomes ungovernable because issues which have their origins in other social systems such as the legal, economic, financial, education or scientific systems come to be seen as requiring resolution only by the state. In those circumstances the liberal-democratic structure of society may transform into a statist social formation: system boundaries differentiating politics, law, or economics may erode. I will return to this issue in chapter 1 and in relation to Brexit in the concluding chapter. In a society based on a structure of differentiated social systems, therefore, law deals only with matters that are formulated in a legal format and which seek a decision about whether matters brought to it are lawful or unlawful. The determination of legality is made on the basis of existing precedents that the legal system itself has created not on the basis of morality, fairness or justice. A specific point to be underlined at this point in relation to law which illustrates the key principles being advanced by Luhmann’s systems theory, is that actions can be legal while also occasionally being unjust and morally reprehensible: legal interpretation, argumentation and judges rules are all formulated within the legal system and are not subject to outside interference, although Habermas argues against Luhmann in his discourse theory of law which addresses the particular issue of how to make law and politics more subject to normative control and regulation, an issue to be discussed in part 2 of the book. Another example of the separateness of autopoietic systems within society can be seen in government. Politics has as its primary purpose the task of making political decisions and statutory laws which will secure binding agreement from the electorate. However, while the political system makes laws it does not interpret law, that is a matter for the legal system, nor does it implement policy, that is a matter for the many health, welfare and other professionals and agencies working in their fields of learner who critically engages with their environments and learn through working on and selecting meaning from them.

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interest and who are often referred to as street-level bureaucrats. The political system makes decisions based on formal parliamentary processes and procedures established in law which allow many executive commands to be carried out without formal reference to the electorate. Indeed, despite a great deal of public debate about the Brexit vote in 2016, and the widespread acceptance that somehow it was a binding vote on the Government to implement, the Referendum was in fact only discretionary and could have been ignored by government and Parliament. It is this “other side” of systems that we can understand as “paradox”. Modern complex societies of the west are “differentiated societies” consisting of a separation of powers between institutional complexes and clearly demarcated spheres of interest occupied by a number of sub-systems of society; they do not have a central steering authority sitting at the top of society because, as I have indicated, they operate as autonomous centres of authority differentiated from other sub-systems in society which also possess authority and power in their sphere of interest. The central political issue for liberal democratic societies, according to Luhmann, is to avoid society becoming de-differentiated. To summarise and reinforce this point, de-differentiation may occur in circumstances where the legal system loses autonomy and becomes subject to political direction, or the legal system loses its capacity to decide when political authority is acting unlawfully, and where the market economy loses its capacity to operate on the basis of freely entered financial transactions but instead has prices and incomes controlled by political rather than market decisions. And, of course, a troubling example illustrating de-differentiation can be found in Nazi political history where the state determined what aspects of science were true and which were considered false. Many nation states in the world are not differentiated in the sense described by Luhmann and there were periods in western history where the separation of powers was either deliberately overridden as in times of war, or when social unrest created sufficient chaos to threaten processes of de-differentiation, such as during general strikes or other political moments variously documented as “fiscal crises of the state” (O’Connor, 1973), “government overload” (King 1975) and “legitimation crisis” (Habermas, 1976). The welfare state is being treated here as a complex sub-system of the political system. Decisions about social policy are made through the political system but they are also filtered through the legal system and the economic system (a fuller description of the policy process will be made in chapters 2 and 3 in the book). Whilst the welfare system exists to meet social need and provide a social safety net to support individuals and families in times of severe hardship, it does this on the basis of

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Introduction

determining eligibility and, through its administrative practices, managing people’s incentives to find work when unemployed, often targeting benefits on particular behaviours deemed desirable by policymakers. As a complex social system the operation of the welfare state adopts various semantic devices to manage its identity as a moral, caring and fair bureaucratic system but reverts to other mechanisms to conceal the other side of the “paradox” when, as depicted in the film “I, Daniel Blake”, its practices cannot be justified as either moral or fair. At that point the focus is on procedure, form filling, interviewing protocols and appellant processes which are brought into play when the system’s paradox risks “rising to the surface of their operations’” (King: 195, 316). The primary objective of administrative devices is to convey the appearance of an efficient bureaucratic system operating with fairness but in reality, they also act to conceal the very unsympathetic posture which such administrative practices usher into the system. For example, the Work and Pensions Select Committee Report on benefit sanctions published on the 6th November 2018 criticised the system’s “pointlessly cruel” imposition of sanctions on benefit claimants. Some examples referred to in the report illustrate the system’s unbending adherence to the literal interpretation of its own regulations. Luke was sanctioned for failing to show “good reason for missing his appointment” at the jobcentre although he had been admitted to hospital with severe epileptic seizures; another claimant described the stupidity as well as cruelty of the system, reporting that "you apply for three jobs one week and three jobs the following Sunday and Monday. Because the job centre week starts on a Tuesday it treats this as applying for six jobs in one week and none the following week. You are sanctioned for 13 weeks for failing to apply for three jobs each week". Jen, a wheelchair user forced to sleep in a college library for an entire year, including through her exams, was wrongly sanctioned for failing to attend a jobcentre appointment. The jobcentre had told her that it was acceptable to miss an appointment if it clashed with an A-level exam, but she still had her benefits stopped for almost a year. The phenomenon of street-level bureaucracy, which focuses on the interaction between the welfare system and the citizen claimant, will be discussed more fully in chapter 3. A final issue to be introduced at this point in the book is whether there is any place in the formulation and implementation of policy for lay morality to enter the world of the autopoietic social systems. Part 2 of the book will address this issue by examining the relationship between the welfare system and social lifeworld on two levels. First through Habermas’s discourse theory of law which confronts at a theoretical level what some may regard as the rather pessimistic anti-humanist vision of

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society offered by Luhmann (although I will reject this view of his theory in chapter one). And second at the micro level of “emotion work” inside public facing occupations, particularly in the fields of social work practice and social care. It is at the point of interface between system and the individual that, in the terms of systems theory, complexity is increased by “noise” from the system’s environment occupied by people who create pressure on the internal structures and boundaries of systems. Within autopoietic systems people are the environment for the systems; bureaucrats are part of the environment for the bureaucratic system they work in; claimants are the environment of the welfare system and it is people who cause disturbance in the orderly operation of autopoietic systems. And ultimately the big question which all those who continue to support the idea of the welfare state must address is whether there is space for the exercise of compassion and altruism to find expression in the 21st century version of a classic enlightenment institution. This is a large paradoxical question to be answered.

Outline of the Book The first chapter addresses a key issue for those who may be coming to autopoietic systems theory unfamiliar with its most challenging aspects. It is generally accepted by both critics and followers of Luhmann’s perspective that the absence of human beings, or at least the decentred position of people in his perspective, sets an unnecessary limitation on sociological analysis. The argument advanced in chapter 1 is that human beings are not absent from autopoietic systems theory rather they are present everywhere: operating as psychic systems, people migrate between all the social sub-systems of society, engaging with them and creating “noise” which the social systems of society must quieten. Luhmann’s analysis of the development of semantics and human rights are his particular way of acknowledging the presence of human beings in a complex differentiated society. However, he rejects the anthropomorphism which is a defining characteristic of the enlightenment thinking which pervades modern social science because he wished to develop a truly scientific theory of society. The argument of this book suggests that the “facticity” of society’s systems and institutions is something which exists and confronts people as a constraint which imposes limits on their actions. Systems are not steered by human agents in a direct way as is too often suggested by political and policy analysis today. Only by moving away from a view which starts all sociological analysis looking through the lens of the human subject can we grasp this insight. The work of Norbert Elias

14

Introduction

is introduced in chapter 1 to demonstrate that there are points of articulation between his theory of the civilising process and Luhmann’s theory of social evolution despite their apparent differences. Elias describes how social relationships are bound together in figurations which are constantly transforming as power in society changes and he recognises that the orderly pacification of society by the civilising process can be reversed in particular socio-economic circumstances leading to decivilising tendencies taking root in social arrangements. In a not too dissimilar way Luhmann describes processes of structural coupling between the social systems of highly differentiated societies while also acknowledging that there are tendencies in modern society which can erode the boundaries between discrete function systems which can lead to processes of de-differentiation setting in. Chapter 2 examines the relationship between the economic system and the lifeworld through a discussion of two emerging forces in contemporary welfare politics. First financialisation is introduced to illustrate the process of the privatisation of welfare as a policy strategy in a post-welfare state era. The growth of financial intermediaries in the private pensions market is penetrating the social lifeworld as more and more people discover that their retirement futures are tied to the financial markets rather than to the institutionalised solidarity of the welfare state. Second the “civil society strategy”, which has been a feature of government policy since the global financial crash in the period between 2008 to 2010, is discussed. The early incarnation of the civil society strategy, better known as “the Big Society” launched by the Conservative/Liberal Coalition government, remains in place, albeit that Brexit has rather overshadowed its evolution. Key aspects of autopoietic theory are explained and illustrated through examining these key policy developments. Chapter 3 introduces the research on street-level bureaucracies pioneered by Michael Lipsky. The purpose of focusing attention on the client processing interaction in policy implementation is to understand the constraints imposed on individual social actors as workers and as claimants by the welfare system. In order to appreciate the autopoietic character of frontline benefit offices, the organisational theory of Karl Weick is described. However, I will argue that Weick’s perspective is insufficient to be able to make the connections between the micro level analysis of street-level organisations and the broader welfare system which is structurally coupled to the political and legal systems without bringing in Luhmann’s perspective on systems theory. Chapter 4 introduces the substantive theory of discourse ethics offered by Habermas. While there are clear normative differences between

The Welfare System and the Social Lifeworld

15

Luhmann and Habermas which they have debated over the years, by the time of Luhmann’s death in 1998, Habermas had begun to incorporate a great deal of systems theory into his thinking. The key text which this chapter draws on is Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms which recognises the facticity of the legal system and its autopoietic nature. The argument advanced by Habermas is that the law provides an essential bridge between the lifeworld and the systems of society. Through this understanding he introduces the argument that lay normativity should be influential in shaping the kind of law and political decision making that operates in modern complex societies. Precisely how that can be achieved while remaining attached to the theory of discourse ethics becomes problematic for Habermas. The political public sphere has been an enduring conception of his critical theory over many decades and it remains an important idea in politics when considering how the politics of civil society and the lifeworld articulates with a societal structure of autonomous autopoietic systems. The chapter closes by bringing into the analysis the important role played by the modern mass media system in creating and structuring public opinion formation. Chapter 5 turns attention to the relationship between system and human emotion. The work of Elias on the history of human nature which he outlines in his theory of the civilising process is brought back in to the analysis. The value of Elias’s theory is that it chronicles the way in which self-control and empathy for the “other” has developed as an integral aspect of the pacification of modern society. The sociological analyses offered by David Riesman on “other directedness”, Stefan Mestrovic on “postemotionalism” and Arlie Hochschild on “emotion work” are used to examine the impact of social systems on the control and display of human emotion in the field of professional social work. The chapter ends with a discussion of the role played by the legal system in rescuing social work from its practice paradoxes. Chapter 6 draws the analysis to a close by considering the virtues which historically have shaped philosophical debate about the welfare state and its purpose. Welfare state theory, particularly in the post-1945 period of social and economic reconstruction, has tended to return to consider the “first principles” of enlightenment political economy and philosophy to find a language to describe the modern welfare state. Consistent with this approach, Richard Titmuss, often presented as the “doyen” of British social policy, captured what was distinctive about the British welfare system by using the idea and imagery of a “gift relationship”. This enlightened notion of a gift to a stranger without any expectation of reciprocity was described fully in his comparative study of

16

Introduction

blood donation in the USA and the UK. The thrust of what is argued in this chapter is that in considering the place of compassion and altruism in modern societies, only the welfare system can provide an organised and sustained display of compassion and altruism because it does not have to rely on the random presence of virtuous individuals. While compassion and altruism are undoubtedly qualities engendered in the social lifeworld, and important aspects of the inter-relationship between people in their communities and in society at large, the enabling effect of a welfare system which embodies compassionate principles in the design of social policy is very important. Chapter 7 draws out the main themes of the analysis. However, it was written at a time when British society was being torn apart by the Brexit debate. At the time this book is being sent to the publisher, Theresa May had secured a delay for Brexit from the EU until the 31 October 2019 and engaged in fruitless discussions with the Labour Party to find a compromised “way forward”. The Government of Boris Johnson seems intent on working towards a “no deal” exit from the EU. An opportunity to leave the reader with an illustration of what Luhmann would have described as the de-differentiation of the political system has been grasped. As the book closes, the Brexit debacle is described in terms that Luhmann might have understood.

CHAPTER ONE SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY AND THE CHALLENGES OF WELFARE POLICY TODAY

The central aim of this chapter and the one that follows is to outline some sociological concepts key to understanding Luhmann’s systems theory in a little more detail, but more than that, to suggest how they can be helpful in understanding the interactions which the individual may have with the bureaucratic systems of present-day society. The complex problems emerging in all modern societies in the fields of politics, law and social welfare, particularly in the West, need to be understood with some measure of realism and appreciation of the limits of human agency in changing the way the institutions and organisations of society operate. I believe Luhmann’s systems theory can provide a level of pragmatic understanding lacking in many fields of contemporary sociological theory considered more mainstream or possibly relevant, if popularity is the measure of relevance. Whilst this chapter will concentrate on the systems level of the analysis through discussion of Luhmann’s key ideas, part 2 of the book will focus more specifically on the social lifeworld through the work of Habermas. However, inevitably there will be glimpses of that part of the argument in the first part of the book because the purpose is to use the work of Luhmann constructively with other theorists, especially Habermas and Elias.

The Semantics of the Enlightenment and Luhmann’s Anti-Humanism Beyond his substantive interest in setting out a detailed account of how social systems are structured, operate and develop, Luhmann had an additional interest in the relationship between social structures and semantics. In this project he describes how the language used in society to describe itself changes as social structures change. In some circumstances there is a lag between societal change and the language generally employed to describe that transformation while in other circumstances the

18

Chapter One

semantics of the time act as the forerunner for change.1 For example, in what seems a very untypical book for Luhmann to have written, Love as Passion (1986), he points to the ways in which the semantics used throughout society to express romantic emotions brings about change in intimate relationships. In some senses this is similar to Foucault’s use of discourse to focus on the transformative power of language and narrative: the more people that talk more often about a phenomenon in the same way can have a significant effect on how an institution or a social practice is popularly perceived because language makes things visible by naming them. Semantics can, therefore, lead rather than fall behind social revolution. Historically, the semantics of love gradually emerged in a significant way in the Victorian period, producing a system of connectivity between two people based on emotion rather than on economics or social status, as was common in the 18th and early19th century. However, Luhmann makes this observation too. In other cases it (semantics) constitutes ideas, concepts, or words that became obsolete a long time ago and thus obscures the radicalism of structural change (for instance, the continuation of the concept of societas civilis, or, civil society until the end of the eighteenth century, or, if one should take the semantics seriously, until today)…These and other tricks can lead to an overestimation of continuity and an underestimation of change, especially to the eighteenth century. (Luhmann, 1986, 8)

Applying Luhmann’s understanding of the social role played by language to the world of politics and social policy raises some interesting issues. The way the policy agenda of contemporary welfare politics is depicted points to the continuing use of enlightenment language to describe the purpose and expectations about the present-day welfare state. Irrespective of when we date the origins of the welfare state, the lexicon of social policy concepts, principles and values has barely changed since the 17th century. It remains a mixture of punitive conservative rhetoric and liberal wishful thinking. We talk about the institutionalising of social solidarity and altruism of the modern welfare state as if the principles of universalism and social justice continue to shape contemporary social policies. Meanwhile we conveniently overlook the influence of concepts and principles which have their origin in the Elizabethan Poor Law Act of 1601, especially the emphasis on “correcting” indolent behaviour. The principles of just deserts, less eligibility (whereby relief should not be at a 1

The mechanism whereby society gains a sense of itself as a totality is through the mass media system, particularly through the conduit of public opinion formation. This will be described more fully in chapter 4.

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higher level than the earnings of the lowest paid productive worker) and so on, are generally accepted to be “moral principles” which remain current even though we now live in an austere post-industrial society scarred by precarious employment patterns beyond the ability of the individual to control. Despite the structural changes to economy and society of the past 70 years, the language of the enlightenment, which talks of social citizenship, compassion and human dignity for all, continues to flourish, vying with anti-modern conservativism anchored in neo-liberal free market economics which seeks to undermine state welfare provision. In the words of Luhmann quoted above “these and other tricks can lead to an overestimation of continuity and an underestimation of change”. The semantics of the enlightenment is fundamentally anthropocentric in that it places human beings at the centre of all that is creative in society. Moeller (2012), discussing Luhmann’s “radical anti-humanism”, laments that the reception of his systems theory in North America has been less than enthusiastic because of the continuing widespread acceptance of the principles and values of the “old European Enlightenment tradition” expressed daily through the frequent citing of the American Declaration of Independence in schools, in government offices and political forums: declarations which proclaim that it is self-evident that all men are created equal with inherent and unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness . Moeller (2012, 20) suggests that enlightenment values in the American context are nothing more than “harking back to the puritan individualism of European Protocapitalism”. There appears, therefore, to be a very limited appetite in America for a sociological perspective which seems to eliminate people from social analysis. The rejection of humanism in his sociological project is crucial to understanding Luhmann’s work but it needs to be explained more fully and it does not mean accepting the nonexistence of people, their bodies or their consciousness. The term used in clinical psychology for an inability to indentify and describe emotions in the self is alexithymia. Stenner (2004) discusses whether this term could be applied to Luhmann’s systems theory, partly because there is an absence of “messy” human beings displaying emotions or being driven to action by moral and ethical principles. The rejection of enlightenment values which centred on the individual and issues of their happiness, liberty and personal fulfilment is not an ideological stance taken by Luhmann but rather a logical necessity if the complexities of modern society are to be explained. Following Talcott Parsons, Luhmann argued that the social is not reducible to biological, psychological or cultural facts.

20

Chapter One One of Luhmann’s main concerns was to avoid the mistake of attempting to ground, legitimate, explain and understand social systems by way of psychological arguments about the essence of the human being…this was the principal mistake of the Enlightenment, which strove to deduce the nature of society from the logic of supposedly essential human rationality. (Stenner, 2004, 182)

Stenner goes on to recognise that Luhmann wanted to develop a scientific understanding of the evolution of society “in terms of an internal logic proper to social systems themselves, not psychic systems”. The difficulty that this presents for many is that the human body, the person, the individual, seems to disappear into a post-human world of autonomous social systems. It appears at first glance to be a social world of impersonal communications where human agency has no place. That is not the view taken in this book. Luhmann does not so much ignore human beings as recognise the particular difficulty they present for social analysis because of their complexity as the bearers of three autopoietic systems: the biological (body), the psychic (consciousness) and the social (communication) (see Moeller, 2006, 79-98). As a sociologist he acknowledges, but leaves aside, the biological system of human beings and instead focuses on the coupling between the human being’s psychic system and the social systems with which they interact and exist as system and environment for each other. Luhmann acknowledged that psychic systems are a necessary precondition of social systems, or put another way, without people social systems would not exist and without social systems people would not exist. However, that relationship between human beings and social systems places human beings outside the social systems they interact with. As Peter Gilgen, Luhmann’s translator observes: …Luhmann’s insistence on placing human beings in the environment of social systems (rather than inside them) should not be taken as a sign of misanthropic or anti-human tendencies on the part of systems theory…On the contrary, human beings…are better off if their processes are not determined by society. The alternative would be the total social engineering of bodies and psyches, which is not only unrealistic but also undesirable. (Luhmann, 2013, xi)

Francis Halsall (2012) offers a particularly positive reading of Luhmann’s perspective consistent with that described above. He observes that “the body can migrate between different systems”, creating “noise” and complexity which social systems must quieten. Halsall’s fundamental argument is that rather than being absent from social systems, human

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beings have a transcendent status which finds them operating both in and across different social systems. Human beings as the bearers of psychic systems, to use Luhmann’s terminology, construct the realities of the social systems they encounter inside their psychic system and engage in “sensemaking”2 as they attempt to reduce the complexity in those environments on a daily basis. As was alluded to in the introduction in reference to the film “I, Daniel Blake”, the central character Daniel draws on his own socio-cultural “toolkit” to make sense of the benefits system in terms that he can understand. This is not the generalised culture loathed by Luhmann, which floats across society and somehow embeds itself in the political, educational, media and artistic institutions of society, but a reference to a phenomenology of the lived experience which an individual learns from his social lifeworld; the common sense of fairness acquired from his everyday experiences at work and living in his community; existing outside the social systems he interacts with but making demands of them (irritating them) as he negotiates his journey between one system and another (see Swidler, 1986; Duncan, 1999; Charlesworth, 2000). However, even though we are focusing on Daniel Blake, the key to understanding Luhmann’s view of the place of the human being in systems theory is to acknowledge that human beings are not the central agents of social systems, creating them, steering them and transforming them, and as such their sociological significance is decentred and the individual as the bearer of a psychic system becomes another system of society structurally coupling with the many social sub-systems within society (Luhmann, 1992). This particularly unusual idea is described well by King and Thornhill (2005) Luhmann proposes the concept of structural coupling, first, to account for the continuing relationship between people, as conscious (or psychic) systems and social systems, consisting of communications. Although people clearly do not constitute social systems, they exist in the environment of these systems just as social systems exist in the environment of conscious systems…There is no causal relationship between the two; society does not cause consciousness to occur, neither do people consciously create and manage society…The relationship between the two is rather one of constant irritation with the one reacting to the other, but always on its own terms (italics added) (King and Thornhill, 2005, 32-33) 2

The term ‘sensemaking’ is one which organisational theorist Karl Weick employed to describe the interactional relationships and processes at the microlevel of organisational research. This work will be discussed more fully in chapter 3 and 4 .

22

Chapter One

Luhmann’s perspective, therefore, does not exclude people from sociological analysis but focuses more precisely on the processes of their engagement in society and the limits imposed on the individual by the logic of the social sub-systems of society. I will return to this problem complex in Luhmann’s sociological theory in chapter 3 where I will discuss the role of human beings as agents who create “irritation” for the welfare system both as clients of the system and as employees inside street-level bureaucracies.

The Differentiation of Society and Human Rights To underline the place of the individual in Luhmann’s systems theory, we must acknowledge the pivotal importance he placed on the development of human rights in the evolution of modernity and the differentiated society. However, as with all of Luhmann’s words, it is important to understand how precisely he intends them to be interpreted in the context of his systems perspective. For example, it would be wrong for anyone to buy a copy of Luhmann’s Love as Passion thinking it was a manual about intimate relationships or a guide to romantic feelings. It is a book about the changing function of romantic semantics in the context of social structural change. Similarly his discussion of human rights must be understood first in terms of the functional purpose served by them historically in terms of the differentiation of modern society, and second in terms of their function for the individual negotiating their relationships with the many social subsystems created by the evolution of society into a more complex differentiated structure of organisational sub-systems. The structural principle underpinning the organisation of social formations changed over time from primitive simple social structures to the complex arrangement of social systems today. Pre-Modern societies, for example, were organised around clans, families or tribes and Luhmann, as with many other sociologists and anthropologists, described this structure as segmentary differentiation: there was little or no interdependence between clans and families and they tended to accept what Durkheim called a central and all-powerful deity and value system, or strong collective conscience. There was no political organisation and their rules and laws were derived from archaic religion based on myths and magic. In the middle ages societies were organised around systems of hierarchical or stratificatory differentiation: the feudal nexus was one where movement between strata was impossible and stability was maintained by a system of reciprocal duties and obligations which were considered to have been established by God rather than Man. Modern

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differentiated societies contain elements of past social formations in that stratificatory and segmentary principles adhere inside particular function systems, such as the hierarchical relationships within work organisations and the differentiation into segments with the occurrence of separate legal jurisdictions between regions as can be found in the distinctions between Scottish and English law. However, significantly in modern differentiated societies function systems are not hierarchically ranked because, as Luhmann observed, “no subsystem can take the place of another because no subsystem can be a functional equivalent for any other” (Luhmann (1990b, 432). The feature of modernity which distinguishes it as a type of society from past social formations for Luhmann is that modern society is a differentiated society consisting of separate function systems3, each with its own unique view of its environment and institutional spheres of interest; law, politics, economics, science, religion, art, media and so on are embedded in their own differentiated function system which is constituted by its autonomous source of authority derived from and maintained by the distinct boundaries that differentiate each system from its environment; the other function systems. Willke (1986) provides a useful summary of the key features of the evolving relationship between societal structure, the state and legal forms in Table 1 and adds an additional development to capture the growing complexities being created by the relentless progress of globalism. His conception of organised differentiation based on reflexive law and systemic discursive rationality signposts an emerging problem of how to control (or live in) an increasingly complex world social system. That is a very big question beyond the scope of this book but I will discuss the discourse theory of law advanced by Habermas in Part 2 of the book which has affinities with this notion of “reflexive law” and, of course, his continuing interest in, and arguments supporting, the embedding of a discursive rationality to underpin law and democracy in complex modern societies.

3

Luhmann placed the word function in front of social systems to convey the understanding that each large social system evolved with particular spheres of interest and functions in modern society (see Moeller, 2006, 24-26).

Chapter One

24

Table 1 Co-Evolution of Societal Structure, Role of State and Legal Form Structural Principle of Society

Role of the State

Legal Form

Type of Rationality

Segmentary Differentiation

_

Archaic, Religious

Magic, Reciprocity

Stratificatory Differentiation

Repressive State

Customary Natural Law

Material Substantial

Functional Differentiation

Liberal State

Secular Positive Law

Formal Procedural

Organised Differentiation

Welfare State

Reflexive Law

Systemic Discursive

Source: H. Willke “Three Types of Legal Structure” in G. Teubner (1986) (editor) Dilemmas of Law in the Welfare State, European University Institute, De Gruyter, p291

The emergence of human rights in the evolution of society is considered by Luhmann to have been complementary to the evolution of a differentiated society. Indeed, they are part of the same historical process; as the societal structure evolves into separate function sub-systems of society, the institutionalising of fundamental freedoms becomes a mechanism for ensuring the stability of the differentiated structure and protecting it against the propensity to de-differentiation. Clear examples of this are the right to religious freedom, freedom of conscience and ultimately freedoms relating to speech and opinions. Human Rights shield the individual from the abuse of their freedoms and ensure that the free movement of human beings between the social systems of society protects the differentiated societal structure. Rights, are, in the words of Verschraegen (2002), “pre-legal as a social institution, as a self-protecting

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device of society…law protects and stabilises them” but he observes “this should not obscure the fact that fundamental freedoms and human rights are first and foremost institutionalised expectations which underlie the legal system” (263). The way human beings came to regard each other changed in parallel with social structural transformation, as I will elaborate below in relation to Norbert Elias’s theory of the civilising process. However, with respect to the specific issue of the relationship between human rights and the differentiated structure of society, Luhmann (1996) drew attention to the separation of what he called the “body and soul from the body” in the 18th century which resulted in the psychic coming to be understood as a complex entity separate from the body. A clear example of what this meant in medicine is provided by Jewson (1976). He argued that the way in which the “sick person” was conceptualised in medical cosmology4 between the 18th and 19th century changed markedly. Jewson (1976) describes the movement from what he calls “bedside medicine”, where the whole person was treated and the body and mind were considered indivisible, through to the development of “hospital medicine” in the first half of the 19th century where the distinction between body and mind in medicine manifested itself in the emergence of psychiatry as a specialised branch of medicine. Modern medicine has seen the “disappearance of the sick man” almost entirely from medical cosmology in “laboratory medicine” where the object of diagnosis is no longer the whole person but their cell complex. This analysis is complementary to that advanced by Luhmann, and the widespread acceptance in society in the period covered by Jewson, that “the culture of the body thereby lost its value as an indication of psychic processes” (Luhmann, 1996, 247). Historically, we can appreciate that there was a point when science and medicine recognised that the human being was more complex than had been commonly understood and was the bearer of three autopoietic systems: the biological, the psychic and the social. The delineation of distinct branches of scientific and medical knowledge emerged to focus on the biological and physiological aspects of human beings while the social sciences, particularly psychology, emerged to develop a scientific understanding of the individual psyche. In the words of Halsall (2012) “this brings forth a historically specific and autonomous subject with an inner life, agency and 4

The notion of cosmology in medicine refers to the attempt to circumscribe the essential nature of the universe of medicine by defining the essential questions and answers to be followed by medical practitioners. It is very similar to Thomas Kuhn’s concept of a paradigm in science as outlined in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, third edition, University of Chicago Press, 1996.

26

Chapter One

human rights” (p15). However, what Luhmann adds to this development is an attempt to apply a scientific theory of society which grapples with its incredible complexity beyond the theoretical and conceptual vocabulary of classical sociology, and which identifies the connection between the psychic systems of human beings with the complex social systems with which they interact. Human Rights in this analysis are not matters of ethics or indeed a creation of human rights law. They are a mechanism for protecting the differentiated institutional systems of modern complex society, and that includes the autonomy of the social individual as the bearer of a psychic system structurally coupled to its social environment; all the social function sub-systems of society. It is the movement of bodies as thinking, conscious beings between and inside the social systems of society that is recognised, necessitating a mechanism of securing unfettered access to the plurality of social systems in order to make the differentiated society work. In past social formations people were not the bearers of human rights. In the middle ages the individual possessed obligations and reciprocal duties throughout their life but not protected rights or freedoms. The central thesis of systems theory is that, with the formation of a functionally differentiated society, this order (stratificatory structure of the feudal nexus) had to be abandoned. Social differentiation can no longer be based on dividing ‘whole persons’ into distinct groups. It is no longer groups of people that are being differentiated but types of communication. It is obviously impossible to distribute people over systems for religion, the economy, science, education and politics, so that every individual lives in one and only one of them. (Verschraegen, 2002, 266)

When Verschraegen refers to “types of communication” in this quote he is using Luhmann terminology to refer to the differentiated interaction and structural coupling between the social systems of a complex modern society: legal systems communicate about law; scientific systems communicate about truth and falsity in research and scientific discovery, political systems communicate about policy and statutory law and, importantly, human beings communicate about their sensemaking of the many and varied issues and actions impacting on them as they live their lives in and surrounded by the many function sub-systems of society. This pluralistic structure of institutions and function systems came to replace the rigid social structures of the past. Individuals were entitled to freedoms and claims to participate in economic, political, legal, educational and religious activities and relationships rather than being confined to strong all-inclusive social groups. The human being was free to adopt multiple

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identities and, as suggested by Halsall (2012), migrate between and in different social systems.

Civilising and De-civilising Tendencies in the Differentiated Society The societal structure described in Luhmann’s work (Luhmann, 1982) as the differentiated society, and in particular his observations on human beings and their structural coupling with the social systems of society, can be rounded out if we examine Norbert Elias’s developmental description of a more stable, solidaristic and pacified social order over time from the 8th century to the present-day. Elias’s theory of the civilising process connects long-term changes in political, social and psychological relationships as social formations pass from segmentary to stratificatory to differentiated societal structures. Of particular interest to us here is the relationship between what Elias called the processes of socio-genesis and psycho-genesis (the transformation of social and commercial relationships which simultaneously changed the way people came to regard each other at a deep-seated psychological level). The processes of socio-genesis in Elias’s theory were evolutionary rather than socially constructed, and so his historical analysis is quite compatible with that offered by Luhmann. The pacification of society by the centralising of political and military power within a territorial space, first by taming warring tribalism and second by the elimination of competing monarchical powers in the middle ages, consolidated power in a single and dominant state authority. This led to the unplanned growth of a complex economic division of labour and social exchanges as people adjusted to living less violent and fearful lives. Societies became organised around legality, secularism, science, education and, importantly, increasing functional democratisation: the gradual incorporation of all social classes into the burgeoning proto-capitalist society from the 17th century onwards. This process encouraged the development of denser networks of interdependence between all social classes and the inexorable weakening of status distinctions between superior and inferior social groupings. The lengthening chains of interdependence led to more people and social categories associating with each other and influencing each other’s tastes, behaviour and social mores. Transformations occurred in culture and etiquette and a societal structure of increasing complexity and institutional differentiation became established. Parallel with the processes of socio-genesis were the processes of psycho-genesis. The structural coupling between social systems and

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Chapter One

psychic systems, in Luhmann’s terminology, can also be seen clearly as a central theme of Elias’ theory of the civilising process. Over time there has been a transference of the control of social behaviour from being a matter of external force, as it was in periods of segmentary and stratificatory differentiation, to being a matter of internal or self-control which becomes embedded in a second nature in the psychic systems of human beings living in modern complex differentiated societies of the West. The concept of psycho-genesis captures the processes that develop within people: the transformation in their feelings of aggression and predisposition to violence, the internalisation of self-control, the growth of empathy for others and their increased sensitivity to cruelty. Elias’s understanding of the connections between political, social and psychological processes is helpful in thinking about the ways in which the system structures of a society are imprinted inside the psychic systems carried by people in their daily lives. Elias’s theory is in my view complementary to Habermas’s concept of the social lifeworld: a space that is separate from the economic, legal and political systems of society; a space where social interdependence between individuals, families and communities generates meanings and a lay morality which is situationally embedded in the everyday experiences and practices of ordinary lives. I will revisit these themes in chapters five and six. The theories of both Luhmann and Elias contain a paradox very similar in nature. For Luhmann, the separation of function systems is essential to maintain a stable social order founded on the rule of law and democratic political institutions that can deliver statutory laws and social policy unfettered by social conflict and disorder. While Luhmann may have been pragmatic about what constituted a democratic society in its detail, he did argue that whatever form democracy may take it should be based on the principles and structures of a differentiated society (see King and Thornhill, 2005, 82-86). The issue of paradox for Luhmann is, as alluded to in the introduction, that a wide range of social, economic and political problems originating in other function systems have come increasingly to be defined as problems of the welfare sub-system. His observations on the welfare state encapsulate this problem when he describes it as being “like the attempt to inflate cows in order to get more milk” (Luhmann, 2000, 215 quoted in Albert, 2016). …the problems to be solved are insolvable as they reflect the functionalstructural differentiation of society within the political system…It is with this redefinition of insolvable problems into politically solvable problems that the welfare state secures its own autopoiesis. It is guaranteed that there is always something to do. (Luhmann, 2000, 216 quoted in Albert, 2016)

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For Elias, the civilising process has brought about the pacification of societies in the West in the sense that the levels of interpersonal violence and cruelty of earlier periods in history have largely been eliminated and, that generally, today populations of Western societies are more interdependent, solidaristic and overall more empathetic to the other (see Mucchielli, 2010; Mares, 2009). However, Elias was alive to the possibility that the stability of modernity can be undermined by what he describes as de-civilising tendencies which set in motion a course toward functional de-democratisation and de-pacification of modern society. It is precisely these tendencies which present the welfare state with its greatest challenges in present-day Britain (see Rodger 2008). Indeed it is the problem complex described by Eliasian process sociology as de-civilising which best describes the conditions for the onset of de-differentiation: the re-emergence of interpersonal violence as a means of problem solving in the hidden drug economies of the large towns and cities throughout modern Europe and the eroding boundaries between social policy and criminal justice policy. Such social problems generate system “noise” which can in some circumstances lead to injudicious policy responses which compromise system differentiation5. The inability of function systems to cope with the increased complexities created by the economic malaise of modern global society can lead to an issue of corroding system boundaries and the politicisation of decision making. This issue can be seen clearly in societies where the boundaries between political and legal institutions are weak; we might point to Russia as a society where this is evident. In Western countries a great deal of the “irritation” and “system noise” troubling function systems is created by populations of disaffected and marginalised people struggling to cope with austerity, receding welfare support and now the uncertainties of Brexit and what it will deliver; greater prosperity or further social division? In Luhmann’s terms, the increasing number of demands on the political system can lead to chaotic and unstable structural couplings between function systems which cannot deliver efficient or even legitimate decisions. However, again there is a clear similarity between the theories of Luhmann and Elias in their descriptions of how modern societies have typically tried to resolve the problem of de-differentiation and de5

A clear example of this problem in late 20th century British history was the introduction of internment in Northern Ireland in 1971 by the Special Powers Act at a time of particularly high levels of sectarian violence which were perceived to be undermining the social order. The removal of the judiciary from decisions about imprisonment is a clear example of de-differentiation of function systems; legal process is displaced by political fiat.

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civilising processes; both theories highlight the importance of inclusivity. Luhmann argues that democratisation is the natural process by which modern differentiated societies deal with the increasing complexity of their external and internal environments: by increasing their internal organisational complexity the system allows more “communications” from its environment to be recognised and admitted allowing the demands of populations to be absorbed and processed. The function systems of the modern world “learn” to import only those communications from their environments which are compatible with their ongoing efficiency and functioning. The evolution of the welfare state is a prime example of increasing demands being made of the political system by the inclusion of more people from the margins of society to the centre. That process is described by Elias as functional democratisation: the gradual incorporation of all social classes into society, the market economy and the political system accompanying the development of denser networks of interdependence. As societies have industrialised, people of all social classes and social statuses have increasingly come to live near to each other in complex urban centres where their sense of interdependence grew. This led to the upsurge in public health movements throughout 19th century Europe as urban populations came to recognise that it was in the interests of all social classes to be protected from dangerous water bearing diseases caused by insanitary sewage systems. For example, De Swaan (1988) drawing on Elias’s theory, has argued that a growing sense of solidarity was stimulated by the threats of contagion experienced collectively in the rapidly growing cities of the 19th century. This led to strategies to deal with public health issues and poverty. The growth of the welfare state, and strategies for full employment in the second half of the 20th century, consolidated the sense of social interdependence evolving in industrial societies. The enlargement of citizenship, to include what T.H. Marshall (1950) called “social citizenship”, consolidated rights of access to a range of services and benefits such as education, social insurance and health care that gave populations substantive use powers to exercise the rights that they had won and achieved between the late 19th and mid 20th century, a point alluded to in the introduction. These developments described by Elias are the same as those described by Luhmann, albeit using a slightly different conceptual vocabulary. They describe the growth of the social state to accommodate the increasing demands being placed on it by political opinion formation and calls for legislative action in the 19th century. With reference to Luhmann’s quote relating to the increasing tendency to look to the welfare state to resolve problems originating in

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other function systems, the issues of disease, public behaviour regarding disposal of human waste and so on, were politicised and seen as issues that could only be resolved by state action. The internal complexity of the state from thereon increased to allow further communications from its environment relating to public health and the well-being of populations to be admitted into the welfare system in order to quieten the “noise” of the democratic process. Table 2 sets out the key similarities between two theorists who would typically be regarded as advancing antithetical arguments. Table 2 The Differentiated Society and the Civilising Process: Key Features and Sociological Tendencies The Differentiated Society The Civilising Process The evolution of autopoietic The gradual pacification of lawless function systems in law, politics, tribalism and monarchical power science, economy and religion, centres by military force within a based on autopoietic selfdefined territorial space stimulates reproducing processes and the evolution of peaceful nation sustaining principles, come to building. define modernity. The evolution of human rights, Over time functional attaching to the “free individual”, democratisation sets in as modern facilitates the movement of human societies become increasingly more beings between and in the plurality inclusive and complex: more and of autopoietic function systems more people come to have a securing the differentiated structure functional use for each other as of modern society. social networks of interdependence become denser. The structural coupling of the Contrasts between social classes psychic system and social system diminish in tastes and behaviour; enables a rational sociological mutual identification between understanding of the connectivity individuals and peoples develop; between social systems and the cruelty and aggression decline, individual. The differentiated especially to children and animals; institutional structures of modernity inter-personal violence declines as a provide stability in expectations for means of resolving disputes. A populations regarding the working second nature evolves as of law and economic markets. individuals acquire self-control and empathy for the other.

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De-differentiation of Society A process of politicisation sets in as increasing numbers of decisions are taken by the executive of government at the centre of the political system; autonomous centres of power and authority lying in the legal, parliamentary and mass media systems are undermined as system boundaries are eroded. Key problems relate to “government overload”, “fiscal crisis” and “legitimation” problems

De-civilising Processes The levels of social and political division between people and social groups deepen in a society characterised by growing economic inequality. Functional dedemocratisation sets in as advanced forms of marginality, ghettoisation and racism lead to increased intolerance and inter-personal violence and incivility. Key problems relate to depacification of marginal communities and harsher criminal justice policies and punishments.

The Social Policy Context of British Social Welfare The reality of present-day British society is that the levels of social integration of the past, what Wouters (2007) refers to as the “harmonious inequality” of the period from the Victorian era to mid-20th century, have become attenuated. Discussion of the “double crisis of the welfare state” and the “divisive welfare state” (Taylor-Gooby, 2017 and 2016) speaks of a new level of uncertainty and turmoil. Gamble (2016) asks the key question, can the welfare state survive? And Standing (2011) has drawn attention to “the precariat” who he describes as “a multitude of insecure people, living bits-and-pieces lives in and out of short-term jobs”. This literature discusses the welfare state in terms of its engagement with intractable policy problems rather than as a bearer of enlightenment values. It is a literature which highlights the paradox of modern welfare in a very stark and clear way. In the context of the ongoing uncertainties surrounding the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, Taylor-Gooby (2017) sets out the nature of the problems facing the British welfare system concisely: the UK has become a relatively low tax, low labour cost, high employment and weak trade unions economy which lags behind its main European competitors in productivity. Austerity and low levels of public investment in both infrastructure and public services have left people feeling poorer, and when people feel poorer that focuses attention and political pressure on the welfare system. Specifically, in relation to the core policy areas of the welfare state of achieving adequate living standards, the UK is falling

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behind our European neighbours with respect to levels of poverty and overall the levels of inequality; both have been increasing. … the UK welfare state faces serious long-term challenges both from globalisation and labour market change and from population ageing. Current policy directions are failing to address those problems, but deepen social divisions and bear most heavily on the most vulnerable groups, leading to higher poverty, particularly among low-paid people who fail to benefit from recent changes. They contribute to disillusion with the political elite among this group and a perception that the more open markets championed by the EU damage their interests. (Taylor-Gooby, 2017, 823-824)

The welfare landscape in the UK since the onset of the financial crisis is being shaped by the political choice to pursue a policy of austerity in the period after 2010 and, significantly, by the decision to hold a referendum on EU membership with little apparent planning for the consequences of a decision by the public that was not expected. The continuing shrinkage of the welfare budget at a time when the economic and policy choices confronting government are becoming more difficult to resolve reveals clearly that the complexity of the global economic environment means that political and economic steering by governments is largely ineffectual. The economic future of the UK outside the EU cannot be predicted at the time of writing. The health of an economic system is determined by a wide range of factors that cannot be controlled or steered in a simple direct way. What can be controlled by governments is the distribution of state resources through the adjustment of welfare benefits and taxation and the regulation of employment and working conditions by law. However, the influence of such measures is indirect because governments and politicians can formulate policy and enact laws but they cannot interpret them or ensure that they are implemented in the way originally desired. For example, governments probably do not intend to worsen the living conditions of children by policy choice and the expectation is that they typically have some regard for what impacts most on the population’s living standards. While economic management was relatively straight forward when the causes of hardship and destitution were old age and unemployment, it is more complicated when poor people are in work. Today it is low paid employment and benefit cuts which are the main causes of the rise in poverty rates. Recent statistics provided by the Department for Work and Pensions indicates that 67 percent of poor

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children are growing up in a family where at least one person works.6 There are now 4.1 million children living in poverty in the UK.7 Following the 2016 budget, Taylor-Gooby (2017) observed that analysis by the Institute of Fiscal Studies noted that the biggest cut to incomes, 6 percent over the period to 2020, will impact differentially on the poorest three deciles. With respect to the problem of an ageing population, there is now a recognised crisis in care provision. Spending on health and social care is under pressure. It is not only those over 65 who are caring for a loved one whose numbers are rising (1.7 million in 2016) but also those over 85.8 There are now over 9 million carers looking after a spouse or loved one with complex care needs. Local authorities have seen their budgets cut severely at a time when the Care Home industry is finding it increasingly more difficult to trade profitably because of the £160 million cut from the care budgets in the period 2010-2015 (Age UK, 2017). Meanwhile the widespread recognition that an ageing population needs an integrated health and social care system has not resulted in substantive measures to bring this reform about: the need to transfer cash from the NHS to social care in an almost ad hoc manner continues to rise from 2 percent of the total budget for social care in 2006/07 to 16 percent in 2016. The British welfare state is now deviating markedly from the policy stance that it has adopted since its modern inception in post-1945. Any pretence that the welfare system continues to embed enlightenment social values was jettisoned by the Conservative-led coalition in 2010 with an explicit objective of achieving permanent cuts in welfare spending. This strategy has been reinforced in the policy choices followed by the May governments from July 2016 onwards.

Concluding Comments The welfare debate today in all Western countries is illuminating because it reveals in a very clear way the limited steering power of political 6

Households Below Average Income, Statistics on the number and percentage of people living in low income households for financial years 1994/95 to 2016/17, Department for Work and Pensions, 2018 7 Households Below Average Income, Statistics on the number and percentage of people living in low income households for financial years 1994/95 to 2016/17,. Department for Work and Pensions, 2018 8 Briefing: Health and Care of Older People in England 2017, Age UK, February 2017 (https://www.basw.co.uk/resources/briefing-health-and-care-older-peopleengland)

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systems in relationship to their global economic environments. Luhmann was surely correct when he argued that the political system cannot steer, or indeed control, the economic system within a nation state because we live in a global society. Not only are there competing sources of power and legitimate authority within a nation state between political and legal systems and institutions but globalism multiplies the number of such centres of competing power and authority. The thrust of what has been argued here in relation to Luhmann’s autopoietic systems perspective is that sociological analysis has tended to attribute far too much efficacy and control to the actions of human agency. Indeed, the image created by economic advisors is one where the inner core of government personnel (political, economic, legal and so on) stand in front of an array of levers deep in discussion about what particular levers to pull in order to “steer” the economy and society in the right direction. However, politicians and government advisors often discover the disappointing truth that the levers at their disposal to pull frequently do not have the effect expected. While they wish to project the illusion that they are controlling complex socioeconomic systems, in reality what they are attempting to control is not systems but the private behaviours and perceptions of citizens in the public interest, depending on what at any given point in history is regarded as being in the public interest. For example, in 2010 the Conservative-led Coalition government in the wake of the global financial crisis chose to define the public interest in economic policy not as one of politically controlling the unregulated behaviour of bankers but rather the adoption of austerity in public expenditure policy. It was expedient to explain the financial crisis as a by-product of over dependence by the British population on high levels of public expenditure, and in particular a supposedly profligate welfare state, rather than the mismanagement of the financial services sector by greedy bankers globally. The policy debate was about regulating behaviours other than those of the bankers9. The particularly British solution to this problem was to be “The Big Society” project which was embraced by former Prime Minister David Cameron. If ever a politician hid personal interest behind a principle then Cameron did through advocacy of the “Big Society”. The core theme of the policy was to present the path to downsizing of the welfare state as one which would not lead to “state retrenchment” but rather to a “smart state” (see Bishop and Green, 2011). What the policy did was to bring together a 9

The only real exception being the pillorying of the symbolic “villain” Sir Fred Goodwin, CEO of the Royal Bank of Scotland, who was largely portrayed as not typical of those working in the banking system. Goodwin had his 2004 knighthood annulled by the Queen in February 2012.

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number of issues surrounding the crisis management of the economy in a context of recession. First, the Conservative wing of the coalition adopted a narrative which was more positive in tone about the third sector than had been commonly used in the past when the charitable sector was largely seen as lacking entrepreneurial spirit and too dependent upon state grants and hand-outs. The role of the third sector under the heading of the “Big Society” was to augment state welfare programmes by entering into a relationship of partnership with private capital and the state. Second, in a barely hidden agenda at the time which sought after large and lasting cuts in the welfare budget, the narrative extolled the virtues of localism and self-help to encourage armies of local volunteers to emerge from their slumber to keep libraries, children’s play schemes and other sundry volunteer projects alive following severe local government funding cuts. The reality of the policy was, in short, to inveigle a combination of the big players in the third sector and community volunteering, marshalled by local government, into picking-up the slack in social policy left by a retreating welfare state. The attraction to the Cameron part of the coalition was that it would be “headline” grabbing and distract attention away from the austerity programme which had been embarked on without any real control over its likely trajectory, and to the Liberal part of the coalition it would champion localism which had been a perennial favourite of the party’s activists. Chapter 2 will discuss the economic and political implications of this episode in British social policy drawing on Luhmann’s systems theory and Habermas’s discussion of colonisation.

CHAPTER TWO THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM AND THE COLONISATION OF THE THIRD SECTOR: THE ROLE OF FINANCIALISATION AND NEO-PHILANTHROPY

Introduction It is important to appreciate the ways in which interaction between the welfare system and the social lifeworld (expressed in this chapter through third sector charitable organisations) is predicated on the logic of system imperatives. Third sector organisations seeking funding must “communicate” with the welfare state in ways which the public expenditure system can read and understand in accordance with its system code. In the case of the public expenditure arm of government, or indeed sources of private funding from the capital markets, communication must be structured by the medium of money while the operational premises of charitable organisations, especially those addressing social problems which lie beyond the statutory obligations of the state, is caritas1 . The “Big Society” project which was a major policy theme of the coalition years between 2010 and 2015 started a serious debate about the future relationship between the welfare state and the third sector. Following the Conservative election win in 2015, welfare policy had two strands revolving around the concept of the responsibilisation of citizenship; financialisation and active citizenship which will be the focus of this chapter.

1

Caritas is the Latin name for altruistic love. In modern times it denotes an empathetic, other-regarding sense of caring for others. It is often this sense of caring about other people’s plight that stimulates volunteers to engage in third sector work but more significantly it is often the underlying principle that shapes the mission of charitable organisations, particularly in those areas of social problems that the statutory services ignore.

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The welfare state has been in a process of stripping down its social commitments and obligations to individuals and families relentlessly for several decades (see Rodger, 2000). The global financial crisis from 2008 onwards intensified that re-appraisal of the Beveridge model and its relevance in the modern era. What has followed in government since the economic crash is a heightened awareness of the internationalisation of the western economies and a sense that financial forces which appear divorced from the real economy often appear to be beyond the political regulation of nation states: the inter-dependency between centres of economic decision-making means that no one jurisdiction regulates financial markets or international trade. Consistent with Luhmann’s observations about the differentiated character of modern societies, and by extension a differentiated world system, David Harvey (2011) observes that in the midst of the global financial crisis senior economists at the International Monetary Fund did not fully understand the ‘systemic risks’ of free market capitalism. …we sort of know vaguely what systemic risk is and what factors might relate to it. But to argue that it is a well-developed science at this point is overstating the fact…In a formal paper published in the summer of 2010, the IMF described the study of systemic risk as ‘in its infancy’. (See Harvey, 2011, 261).

Consequently, all governments throughout the global economic system have been grappling with the problem of how to regain “steering control” over economic problems which have largely taken on a semi-autonomous character. In the face of these global forces Western governments are tending to do two related things. First, in order to respond to the economic malaise that surrounds them, governments throughout Europe are drastically reducing their high levels of social expenditure by devising ways to re-privatise the world of welfare (see Fraser, 1989; Levitas, 2012). One very visible way in which this has been developing in the UK is in the field of pensions. A second, perhaps less visible policy focus has been on what, for want of a better description, can be called a “civil society strategy”. Under this banner governments have engaged in policy strategies to promote the idea of the active citizen who, in addition to being required to adopt a greater sense of readiness to seek and accept work rather than rely on welfare benefits, is also being encouraged to embrace volunteering and engagement in third sector work. These processes have been aided by the phenomenon that is being described as the financialisation of society: while the fairly rapid growth of the private pension industry is quite explicitly taking over from the state in the

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provision of occupational pensions in areas such as universities and other public sector occupations, less visible is the development of “philanthrocapitalism” when the focus shifts to the third sector. It is these policy strategies that are creating the macro level context which frames the complex and changing connections between the welfare system and the social lifeworld.

Financialisation A concise introductory description of the concept of “financialisation” is provided by Gerald Epstein. Financialisaton refers to the increasing importance of financial markets, financial motives, financial institutions and financial elites in the operation of the economy and its governing institutions, both at the national and international level. (Quoted in Palley, 2007, 3)

In an attempt to explain the growing importance of financial institutions in modern society, Giovanni Arrighi (2010) developed the theory of “long centuries”. The core of his argument revolves around an endemic contradiction of capitalism, that of managing its recurring problems of finding reinvestment for accumulated profits towards the end of a cycle of accumulation: over time there is a limit to the profitable expansion of trade and production because markets eventually become satiated and, ultimately, intensified competition leads to declining profitability for all players in the market system. At that stage capitalists seek alternative sources of profitability by retaining a larger proportion of their incoming cash flows in liquid form which they increasingly invest in financial rather than industrial enterprises. This cyclical theory of the world economy from 1500 to the present identifies four world powers which gave rise to “hegemonic capitalist formations” each succeeding the other (Genoa, the Netherlands, Britain and the USA). Without considering too much detail of Arrighi’s broad historical analysis, the case of the transition of economic hegemony from Britain to the US, encapsulated by Arrighi’s “long twentieth century” section of his thesis, illustrates the main issues arising in the modern era (see Arrighi, 2010, 219-222 for a concise definition of the term long centuries). First, at the height of empire, British industrial capitalism was able to expand production and trade to all corners of the globe. When the opportunities for productive investment in innovative manufacturing and goods began to wane in the early 20th century then the great international banks and financial institutions became established as a source of power alongside the entrepreneurs and capitalist

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industrialists of the 19th century by developing novel financial products which resolved the accumulation problem. A similar process occurred throughout the 20th century when two world wars largely crippled British imperial power and international economic hegemony transferred to the USA which had financed the costs of war. Throughout the 20th century British economic power was challenged and ultimately replaced by that of the US. So, the pattern is clear, each economic power entered the world of financialisation when production and trade reached saturation point and profitability declined in the real economy of manufacturing, innovation and industrial and market growth. Accumulations of un-invested capital subsequently hunted for investment outlets beyond the real economy. Market niches were created for financial intermediaries to divert money away from productive and employment creating activities and into financial activities that could generate a good return on capital often divorced from the real economy. This can involve a form of financial serfdom in which financial expansion leads to “accumulation by dispossession” through accelerating processes of de-industrialisation and asset stripping as the economy and society comes to be driven by financial rather than productive markets. The fundamental problem that results from this is that the change of phase from production to financial services has led to a sustained period of de-industrialisation and social dislocation in the English-speaking countries and the European Union from the 1980s onward. In short there have been phases of expansion, consolidation and contraction in world cycles of accumulation. The political economy of the contraction phase is what is of particular interest when trying to understand and explain the growing significance of financialisation in the contemporary period. The way in which the modern economy works has changed. The firewall between conventional banking and investment banking was removed allowing banks to engage in more speculative investment activities in their own right without having to use financial intermediaries, although it has now been partially reinstated in the British banking system as a measure to avoid future banking failures. In the period leading to the financial crisis of 2008, banks that once only dealt with savings and loans to households, now engaged in speculative investments on the financial markets to increase their profitability. Surplus capital from stagnating industrial pursuits similarly began to be re-directed away from investment in innovation and manufacturing in the ‘real economy’ and towards the realm of “fictitious capital”: trading in speculative claims which may only exist on paper, or engagement in a contract that derives its value from the performance of an underlying asset which has little or no connection to the

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real economy of production and economic growth. Debt became valued as a saleable commodity which could be packaged and sold on the financial markets2. In an interesting contemporary commentary on modern financialisation, Marianna Mazzucato (2018b) describes the influence of Milton Friedman, and the neo-liberalism embraced by Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US throughout the 1980s, on the shift in global economic theory. Freidman argued that the primary responsibility of the senior managers of a corporation was to their shareholders and consequently it should be shareholder value that should be the primary focus of the organisation’s activities and measure of its economic worth. This, Mazzucato argues, has led to an economy of “value-extraction” rather than “value creation”; an observation in line with Arrighi’s thesis. For example, a widespread practice is to use resources to maintain high share values even if it means asset closures, redundancies and restructuring programmes timed to please the equity markets. The stress placed on maintaining shareholder value above all else provides an incentive for corporate boards to engage in financialisation practices such as share “buy back”. This means that rather than investing accumulated profits on innovation geared to future productive growth and employment, the corporation buys back its own shares, so reducing the number of shares circulating on the markets and raising their value at the same time. Executive pay based on the share values of the company will automatically rise. In this way, value is extracted from the world of productive investment by means of financial transactions rather than on innovation, marketing or productivity. Private asset holders, whether they are owners of empty mansions in London, valuable tradable debts, bonds or stocks, have become dominant over the entrepreneur. A circuit of financial accumulation has been created in the modern economy which is not hindered by or undermined by the real economy (see Mazzucato, 2018a, 32-34). The welfare system is drawn into this new world of financial transactions. The individual and the social lifeworld have become entangled in an inexorable process leading to the financialisation of 2

The subprime mortgage in the USA in the period leading up to the 2008 financial crash is the classic example of packaged debt. The very title refers to lending to those with a low credit score in order to be able to charge interest rates well above the rates offered to prime mortgage holders. The failure of very poor mortgage holders to maintain regular repayments on those debts ultimately led to major losses and failure of large financial institutions holding trillions of dollars worth of defaulting assets.

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society. The modern welfare system originally embedded the principles of equality and universalism in a project aiming to collectivise the common risks of old age, death and disability. This was achieved by the creation of a national health service and establishing the principle of national insurance as a way of paying for social welfare services. For three decades after its inception in the modern era, the welfare state in western European countries thrived in a context of full employment, relatively high economic growth and a young age structure. Today it is faced with circumstances which are the opposite of those favourable operative conditions: demographically the population is ageing, economic growth is low compared with the boom years of the 1950s and 60s and, with an ageing population, has come new risks in the sphere of social care. An increasing number of young people live precarious lives with insecure employment, low wages and without secure housing tenancies. In responding to these challenges, governments of all hues have engaged in pension reform. In a context of shrinking public expenditure budgets and increasing demand on pension funding by an ageing population, people are being required to work for longer in order to square the funding circle3. However, more significantly, there has been a shift to encouraging capitalised retirement-income institutions to replace the public sector in the provision of pensions. Rather than a three-way contract between the individual, the employer and the state, in which each contributes a portion into the individual’s future pension pot, now increasingly the individual establishes a private contractual relationship with a private pensions company based on an offer of “what you save is what you get”. Without undertaking this additional expenditure from current salary most workers would not be able to secure and maintain a good quality of living on retirement if they only relied on a state pension, even one supplemented with other state benefits. It is a system where the individual relies on the ebbs and flows of the financial markets for their future retirement security rather than the solidaristic principles upon which the state makes an active contribution to the management of future pension pots of the population. We now have the automatic enrolment of lower paid workers into workplace pension schemes. In the field of housing Help to Buy seeks to encourage younger workers to buy their own homes despite the dispiriting evidence that for most young people that is an aspiration that recedes into 3

Pension arrangements provided by the state in most countries in the world are unfunded, with benefits paid directly from current workers' contributions and taxes. An ageing population means that the ratio of young workers to older pension recipients is projected to be only 2.1 by 2050 The Economist, June 2008 (https://www.economist.com/search?q=Pensions).

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the distance for every year they struggle to get any where near the sums required to buy a house in the more affluent regions of the UK. The scheme also tends to push up house prices. A critical observation of these developments in the field of welfare has been made by Berry (2015) The implication of financial inclusion policies for citizenship is quite clear. It intensifies ‘responsibilisation of citizenship…Our right to a pension or housing have been significantly diluted…The state may appear to be supporting our capacity to shoulder this burden through policies such as automatic enrolment and Help to Buy, but in practice it is merely facilitating greater exposure to associated financial risks to serve its overriding objective of securing economic growth at all costs. (Berry, 2015)

A jaundiced view of the financialisation of pensions might liken the process to a “ponzi scheme” in which the pension holder bears all the risks while the investor intermediary takes very few: by allowing the financial institutions to invest their pension pot on the financial markets, with all the hazard that entails for the integrity of their capital sum, the pension holder receives a return which often is insufficient to maintain a good quality of life in retirement while the financial institutions siphon off sizeable fees which frequently seem to be disproportionate. To bolster public acceptance of the shrinking welfare state, a prominent theme in policy strategies has been to replace the language of social rights with that of the “responsibilisation of the citizen”: governments proclaim loudly and frequently that the individual has a duty to embrace activeness in seeking work, in saving to buy their own house while also being responsible for their future well-being by allocating resources for a future pension from current income even on low earnings.

The Active Citizen and the Civil Society Strategy In order to promote the principle of “responsibilisation of the citizen”, governments of all political outlooks throughout Europe have largely abandoned a structural causative view of social and economic problems in favour of the more convenient notion that a solution to societal dislocation can be found in people discovering what Villadsen (2007) calls their “freedom as self-transgression”. Governments appear to find it easier to formulate social policy which targets behavioural problems: it is the inner weaknesses and behavioural dispositions of people that must be overcome by forms of social policy intervention that foster self-help and “active citizenship”. Behind many social policy initiatives, including those under the banner of the Big Society launched in 2010, is the assumption that

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what inhibits people from integrating into work and community is attitude as much as opportunities. In other words, it is too much dependence on a “profligate” welfare system that undermines the ability of people to enterprise their lives. By embracing localism and the idea of active citizenship it is presumed that people can re-discover the power of welfare mutualism to solve commonly experienced social problems. While global economic constraints are often invoked politically to explain why governments must adopt an enabling rather than steering role in society, the re-discovery of a vibrant civil society is typically presented as the only solution to the dependency culture engendered by an overly generous welfare system. The key actors who will deliver a solution to the policy impasse created by the increasing demand for social support at a time of global financial meltdown is the voluntary sector and what has been called the “new philanthropists” (Handy, 2006). In the UK, as highlighted at the end of chapter 1, this took the form of the Big Society initiative in the period between 2010 and 2016. While at first sight this policy framework is anchored in the language of emancipation; promising frustrated “active citizens” an opportunity to rediscover “phillic association” in a society populated by caring benefactors and heroic voluntary services (see Norman, 2010), its actual objective is the creation of a smaller social state (see Smith, 2010). The Conservative government in the UK has consistently argued that a bourgeoning role for the third sector in providing strategic welfare services is an inevitable outgrowth of a bloated public sector and an overly expensive welfare system which is presumed to hinder economic growth and international competitiveness. The evidence for the view that the welfare state and the public sector more broadly undermine economic performance is weak. The social reproductive sector of the economy heals, educates and funds building of infrastructure which underpins economic growth and is a necessary part of a complex modern society (see Stiglitz, 2013; Doogan, 2009; Mazzucato, 2018a). The policy thinking underpinning the Big Society project was that the organised forces of patronage were to be given a new strategic role in the complex world of welfare, particularly in hardto-reach service provision. The Theresa May government at the time of writing has not quite picked up the mantle left by David Cameron, partly because it is so preoccupied with Brexit, but the initiative to draw on “civil society” as an organising theme around which to encourage “Big Society” type of activities remains in place and in February 2018 Tracey Crouch, then Minister for Sport and Civil Society, launched a 12-week public consultation of the Conservative government’s “civil society strategy”

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which was initially announced in late 20174. The consultation has been split into four themes: our civil society, people, partnerships and places and closed in May 20185. Early indications suggest that the charities sector welcome the renewal of the strategy begun under the coalition government in 2010 evidenced by the positive comments at the launch of the initiative by Karl Wilding, director of public policy and volunteering at NCVO, and Sir John Low, chief executive of the Charities Aid Foundation. Little of substance has emerged at the time of writing. The presence of neo-philanthropy as a source of funding for a wide range of welfare activities also remains in place. Big Society Capital was established at the time when the Big Society project was being promoted and has continued to act as a broker channelling money to a broad range of social investment activities. The idea of social investment goes back to 2000 when Gordon Brown was Chancellor and is likely to ebb and flow like the markets with changing fortunes of the economy and the political expediency of the immediate situation. A feature of modern times is the emergence of a group of the super rich who are willing to get involved in third sector projects.

The New Philanthropists as the Conscience of New Capitalism The burgeoning economic and political influence of the financial sector in modern societies is creating new forms of connectivity between the welfare system and social lifeworld. The vast sums of money acquired by the key players in the financial system has led to the development of philanthrocapitalism and what could be described as the neo-philanthropic 4 Tracey Crouch (Under Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport) made a parliamentary statement outlining the strategy on the 16th November 2017. She stated that ‘this strategy will provide an opportunity to explore ways to build new partnerships within and between sectors and communities, so that we can better mobilise resources and expertise and find practical new solutions to the problems we face. It will reaffirm the value that government places on civil society… Civil Society in England is broad. It encompasses the work of individuals, charities, youth organisations and communities. Civil Society is increasingly diverse, with growing numbers of social enterprises, mission led businesses and public service mutuals as well as many more private businesses and investors that want to make a meaningful contribution’. 5 See more at: https://www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/charities-minister-launchesconsultation-on-civil-society-strategy.html#sthash.aIn27nqy.dpuf (accessed 1 July 2018)

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turn in contemporary social policy (see Bishop and Green, 2010). The new vision of neo-philanthropy is encapsulated by Philip Blond (2010) who argues that modern Britain needs “a new power of civil association” and powerful “new civil companies” that are allowed to flourish within a “civil state”. It is the unique combination of “economic equity” with “social conservatism” which is to be encouraged. Handy provides one of the clearest descriptions of the “new philanthropist”; who they are and what motivates them to become involved in charitable work. He observes in relation to the fact that “giving away money has never been so fashionable among the rich and famous” (Handy, 2007, 1): Philanthropy has almost become the new status symbol. To have your own foundation or wing of a building named after you can be an outward and respectable mark of success…they know how to get things done…they are hands-on, pioneering and entrepreneurial, their resources dedicated to their own causes. (Handy, 2007, 9)

The “new philanthropists” tend to be a mixture of those who have made their millions, and many their billions, in the financial world of hedge funds, investment banking and other city activities but others are what are described as entrepreneurs who have started businesses and acquired their wealth from working in the real economy. Handy (2007) suggests that they are the first genuinely entrepreneurial class since the Victorian age because they have acquired their wealth through enterprise and business acumen. This contrasts with what he describes as the “salaried clan” of the public sector and the large corporations who have dominated economic and public life in Britain for the last century. Being an entrepreneur in the period from the 1980s onward, or a technocrat who has been able to acquire large equity holdings in global companies of which they have been a senior manager, has allowed many to acquire vast wealth on the back of the “new capitalism” of the global age. There is an ideological purpose behind this philanthropic activity. In the context of a competitive global world, and increasing anxieties in government and society about the efficiency of capitalism and neo-liberal market principles to continue to deliver rising incomes and a good level of well-being, the “new philanthropists” are, according to Handy and others such as Philip Blond, important. Not only does their entrepreneurial flair enrich the whole area of social enterprise but, by using the money that they made by their business acumen to improve the lot of others, they provide a social justification for the free enterprise system that it has often lacked. (Handy, 2007, 10)

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The “new philanthropists” however are not all extremely rich, and many donate relatively modest sums of money for their particular causes, but what is too often overlooked when discussion of these charitable activities is considered is their growing significance in reshaping welfare relationships. Daly (2011) makes a number of interesting observations regarding the changing relationships forming today between these very wealthy donors and the recipients of their charity. She distinguishes donor-centred from donor-controlled relationships with the former typically based on a wealthy individual answering a plea for support and normally receiving public recognition in return; the latter is increasingly more common as wealthy donors initiate action to address an individual philanthropic project in which they set their own targets and control the nature of the charitable enterprise(s) they engage in. In order to develop this type of intervention many involved in philanthropy, together with government, have sponsored the growth in philanthropic networks and exchanges. The emergence of “giving circles” such as the Network for Social Change (NSC) and the Funding Network bring together people of relatively modest wealth to become involved in the practice of donating and giving. The only commitment required by the NSC of individuals is that they must donate a minimum of £3,000 per annum. While New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) acts as a consultancy and think tank aimed at promoting and developing philanthropy through research, advice about tax efficient use of wealth and trusts and as an effective broker or exchange to reconcile charitable resources with potential recipients. Using social relations theory, which examines the social location of donors and recipients, Daly argues that “the philanthropic environment promotes and facilitates one-way, inherently unequal relationships between donors and recipients” with all that entails for power and control over resources (Daly, 2011, 1081). …wealthy philanthropists have gained greater legitimacy as nongovernmental actors in areas of public policy. As hyperagents, they have the ability to shape key aspects of citizens’ social and economic welfare…. structures and systems which facilitate the vast accumulation of wealth but at the same time widen the gap in the crudest sense between rich and poor are also legitimised. (Daly, 2011, 1081)

Angela Eikenberry (2009), using the language of Habermas, has drawn attention to the explicit colonisation of everyday life by the market and the promotion of consumer identities over citizen identities. Philanthropy and social entrepreneurship have now to become what Luhmann would describe as “structurally coupled” to the market. While the pressure for

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voluntary and charitable organisations to adopt market approaches to sustainability is expected in the USA; that is increasingly the pressure that is being encouraged in the UK too. The introduction of payment-by-results in a wide range of policy settings facilitates a more explicitly commercial orientation among many of the larger third sector charities. The intention is that charitable organisations will be inveigled into commercial relationships with government and philanthropists through engaging in “social investment or impact bonds” (SIB) which is technically described as outcome based commissioning: social investors (commercial investors, private philanthropists or foundations) are required to cover the upfront capital costs to set up and deliver a social or public service. The service is set up to achieve measurable outcomes established by the commissioning authority, for example, a local authority or a central government department. The investor is repaid only if those outcomes are achieved. There will be an agreed return on the initial capital investment included in the contract agreed between a Local Authority or government department and the philanthropic investor or commercial organisation providing the funding (technically SIBs are not bonds in the usual sense; there is no guaranteed rate of return. SIBs are contingent on performance). Areas of policy where SIBs have been employed include drug rehabilitation, the rehabilitation of offenders and other problem behaviours which tend to lie on the edge of statutory commitments. (see Mulgan et. al, 2011; Rodger, 2012). The type of intervention offered by the wealthy philanthropists is varied, individualistic in its focus and ultimately about shaping personal incentives and behavioural dispositions. The extent to which this movement will change the basis of the welfare contract in the OECD countries in the future remains unclear but Villadsen (2007) has identified what he calls “the rise of neo-philanthropy” in Denmark and suggests that it is influencing policy thinking throughout Europe. As commitment to the idea of the welfare state struggles to remain relevant in a sea of neo-liberal orthodoxy, behaviourist lenses are evident even in social democratic Denmark. Villadsen observes: Social determinants and other background conditions have increasingly receded into the background, leaving at centre stage a quest for mobilising the client’s inner resources, their genuine will power, and even their socalled innate ‘positive core’…The key social policy goal, then, becomes one of assisting clients in transgressing what might be termed ‘their internal intellectual self-constraint’. (Villadsen. 2007, 309)

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This echoes the world of 19th century philanthropy. Poverty is overcome by developing moral resilience and privileging “spiritual nourishment” over material assistance. Self-help and charitable giving are considered the best way to overcome the de-humanising effect of social dependence. And, of course, the acquisition of great wealth through “new capitalism” has created strata of people who link the world of international financial and business capital to the third sector in a very individualistic and direct way as will be discussed below.

The Colonisation of the Social Lifeworld The theories of both Luhmann and Habermas allow us to see these relationships in a more critical way. The neo-philanthropic turn in social policy is primarily about the structural coupling of organised philanthropy to the economic and political welfare systems in an attempt to steer nonstate social policy in what is popularly called civil society, but the preference here is to understand it more broadly as the social lifeworld because that concept embraces both formal and informal aspects of caring relationships which are effected by processes of “colonisation” which will be described below (see Outhwaite, 1996). If the wealth created by “new capitalism”6 is to be re-directed to the world of social need in the era of austerity then it requires to be coordinated by government in ways that can contribute to reducing state commitments. David Cameron (2009) recognised this when he launched the idea of the Big Society and argued that what was required was not “state retrenchment” but a “smart, strategic state”: the kind of combination of compassionate conservatism and innovative thinking about civil society that Bishop and Green (2011 and 2010), Jesse Norman (2010) and Philip Blond (2010) have written about. This was a political approach that would enable the charitable and voluntary sector to maximise their resources and income by allowing the third sector to embrace social entrepreneurship and so make it more commercially viable while yielding profit for those who invest in social projects. It was less about grants and funding of the voluntary sector and more about capturing the neo-philanthropic mood; ultimately it was about governance of the big players in the third sector by aligning them to funding networks other than the state and devolving 6

A convenient short hand term to capture the internationalisation of capital and capital markets in a global world and the accompanying forces which are unleashed by globalisation leading to labour market flexibility with its short term, casualised and episodic contracts.

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political and economic responsibility while retaining some semblance of steering control by government. The key issue was, of course, whether that type of involvement by philanthrocapitalists would, in Habermas’s terms, “colonise” and transform the character of the charitable enterprise. Colonisation as a concept is deceptively simple, especially when used to describe relationships between policy actors in the third sector and the state. By drawing on Luhmann and Habermas together it is hoped that some of its complexity can be made clear. Habermas (1987) describes colonisation as the “penetration of economic and administrative rationality” into areas of the social lifeworld unaccustomed to such strictures. This is an inevitable by-product of the inter-systemic communication which results from the structural coupling of two systems operating with distinctive communication codes or media. In the context of relationships between social enterprise and the third sector, power and money will subordinate caritas as a medium of communicative interaction and a process of colonisation will cumulatively transform the ethos of the third sector participants. Describing third sector relationships with neo-philanthropy in this way suggests that the social and culturally integrative practices of charitable organisations can be compromised by social entrepreneurialism. The conditions for what Messner and Rosenfeld (2001) call institutional anomie can be created: the institutions of the social lifeworld become incapable of controlling the world of “new capitalism” as profitability becomes the sole criterion by which value, worth, and indeed social support, is measured. With respect to the “Big Society Project” of the Cameron era, the superficial political commentary at the time focused on the issue of restoring a lost vibrancy to a democratic “civil society” with little critical attention given to the more substantive issues surrounding the absorption and subordination of that public activism to narrow market principles by processes that convert the caritas that lubricates the voluntary system of action into something more akin to social enterprise and economic management. The view being expressed here is that while Luhmann’s central concepts and analysis of the interplay and “communication” between sub-systems in modern society is very insightful, so too is Habermas’s analysis of the colonisation of the social lifeworld which offers a particularly insightful description of what is currently happening to the charitable sector of care in modern society. In order to understand the colonisation issue more fully, we need to appreciate the way in which the different social sub-systems in society have distinctive codes unique to their sphere of interest. Table 5 sets out the key systems of relevance for the discussion here. However, it is important to note that in this context,

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the suggestion is being made that the economic system and the financial system should be understood in terms of their evolving differences. Since Luhmann’s death in 1998, the global economies have transformed to such an extent that now it is possible to detect clear distinctions between the epistemologies and cultures of classical economic practices and financialisation. The financial sector is evolving into a distinctive sub-system of the economic system with distinctive forms of functioning and connectivity with other social systems. Table 3 Summary of the Key Structural Elements in Social Systems System

Function

Efficacy

Law

Elimination of contingency of norm expectations

Regulation of conflicts

Politics

Making binding decisions possible

Economy Financial

Code

Programme

Medium

Legal/ Illegal

Laws, constitutions

Legal dominion

Practical application of collectively binding decisions

Govern/ Oppose

Programmes of parties & ideologies

Power

Reduction of shortages

Satisfaction of needs

Pay/Not -pay

Budgets

Money

Creating abstract monetary values

Facilitate investor transactions

Profit Value/ Deficit Value

Stock exchanges, financial investment markets

Stock values

In drawing out the distinctions between neo-liberal economics and financialisation, Davis and Walsh (2017), for example, remark that “financiers create and deal with multiple capital equivalents that are ignored by economists” and that they focus on “market transactions and liquidity, not production/consumption, traditional supply/demand factors” (Davis and Walsh, 2017, 34). The stability of the financial sector, however, is not as yet assured. Writing online Servaas Storm (2018) observes:

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As Storm observes, it is precisely the need to turn financiers into a domesticated and benign force in society that neo-philanthropy, or philanthrocapitalism, has been designed. However, in structurally coupling financiers to the third sector, whether that is through a direct intervention by a wealthy individual or an organisation engaged in social entrepreneurship, the key problem for the third sector is how to limit, manage and resist the colonisation of its mission by operational codes drawn from an alien system. Table 3 sets out in summary form the key features of the main social systems. The suggestion here is that the system code which structures financial markets is not payment or non-payment, which determines the nature of a conventional market relationship in the “real economy”, but rather profit value or deficit value: the financial markets deal in abstract values that are effectively representative of a “thing-like” commodity. Those who possess assets which are recognised as of a high value can, of course, access large sums of money and capital to use in the conventional economy simply by cashing-in their stock. The problem is that the monetary values attached to many stocks are volatile by the very fact that their worth is measured by fluctuating estimates which are often divorced from the real economy. While this impacts on increasing numbers of ordinary people who rely on financial intermediaries to invest their pension capital, it is less problematic for the neo-philanthropists who convert their abstract wealth into monetary capital to engage in social investment activities (see Table4). The question at that point becomes more of a cultural issue for the third sector; will social investors disregard the values and practices of the charitable sector’s primary mission in favour of a singularly commercial association?

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Table 4 Comparing System Attributes of the State Welfare System, Neo-Philanthropy and the Third Sector SubSystem State Welfare System

Function

Efficacy

Code

Programme

Medium

Provide Safety Net

Meet statutory social need

Eligible/ Ineligible

Fiscal and Welfare Benefits

Power

Social enterprise

Social investment and sustain ongoing activity

Meeting need beyond statutory boundaries

Donor approved/ Not Donor approved

Social investment

Wealth

Third Sector

Providing residual services not provided by the state

Meeting social needs beyond statutory provision

Eligible/ Ineligible based on unmet social need

Active citizenship and volunteering

Caritas

The non-state sector of social welfare is complex and, beyond agencies such as the National Council of Voluntary Organisations and the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations with their varieties of planning and advice arms, there has not been a broad governmental framework for coordinating the philanthropic and voluntary action until the launch of the Big Society initiative. Ongoing attempts in government to develop a “civil society strategy” may perpetuate and further develop the coordination of the third sector into a sustainable system in its own right. There now appears to be a division emerging between the smaller scale activities focused on “localism” and the bigger players whose size and capacity is capable of emerging into a distinctive functional system of philanthropy which can periodically become structurally coupled to the political welfare system and take over many strategic roles from the state. Age UK is a prime example of a growing charity which grew out of the merger between Age Concern and Help the Aged and offers a wide range of services for elderly people. The necessity for all levels of the third sector being able to articulate with the wider social welfare field, including both government departments and philanthropic wealth, is crucial today. Organisational flexibility may be the way in which sustainability and survival will be

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achieved. As Villadsen (2011) observes, the perennial issue for many of those working in the voluntary sector has been how to prevent the state from “invading” their territory: bureaucratising operations by the imposition of administrative controls, budgetary constraints and levels of professionalisation that make voluntary organisations appear as state outposts. This “competition paradigm” for describing state-voluntary organisation relations is being ideologically re-constructed as a “cooperative paradigm” by the language of the civil society strategy. However, this may be overly simplistic. Table 5 sets out the distinctive communication codes which maintain the operational distinctiveness of the political welfare system, the voluntary and charitable sector and the emerging force of neo-philanthropy. In order for a system to communicate with another system it must establish what Moeller (2006, 39) calls “stable links of irritation”: the voluntary sector cannot rely on altruism as a source of sustaining social and personal support. The sector must communicate with the political welfare system in terms of offering a distinctive service beyond statutory commitments but which is framed in terms which the political welfare system, or the social investment sub-system which funds it, can “read”. Often this means projecting themselves less as charitable bodies to government and more as enterprising organisations that are economically and financially efficient recipients of both grants and social investment funding. Charitable organisations must become what Villadsen (2008) calls “polyphonic organisations” in that they must simultaneously adopt a plurality of communication codes consistent with their broad and changing role in society and the world of welfare. Table 5 attempts to illustrate this principle by suggesting that the way the charitable arm of the third sector system communicates with the political welfare system and social investment agencies is to draw on a different set of codes compared with those that shape communicative interaction with clients. Indeed, when voluntary organisations are forced to make “pitches”, or presentations, to gatherings of philanthropic donors at network exchange meetings they will often have to demonstrate command of a wide range of codes that speak to both caritas and the economic code predicated on money and its efficient use.

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Table 5 Polyphonic Communication Codes and Third Sector Organisations Clients Direction of State, Commercial Communication & Social Investors Legal Code: organisation either meets/does not meet the legal requirements relating to health & safety; audit; insurance; equality & diversity Economic Code: organisation either possesses/does not possess sufficient capital to create a charitable foundation. Ideological Code: organisation either shares/does not share political & policy principles of government and/or social investment agency. {Funding organisations award grants mindful of the need to ensure that they are run appropriately – the example of Kids Club is a case where serious questions were raised

O R G

Communication with government departments and philanthropic funding organisations

Communication with clients seeking care and assistance from the charitable organisation A N I

{Charitable organisations are varied in terms of their client groups and the complexities of their public facing relationships. It is becoming apparent today that increasingly charitable organisations must be capable of reconciling their mission to offer empathy, understanding and material support to people in need while also having a ‘hard nosed’ sense of what is affordable, achievable and appropriate.} Welfare Code: deserving/undeserving for support by meeting key profiling criteria set by the charity and/or philanthropist. Philanthropy Code: meets the criteria of need/does not meet the criteria of need determined by donor or donor organisation. Pedagogical Code: the client demonstrates capacity to learn & benefit/does not support or service.

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regarding the stewardship of its director Camila Batmanghelidjh & whether oversight of its function met legal & financial best practice standards}

Chapter Two

S A T

Non-Statutory Code: the client’s needs are not being met by the statutory authorities/the client’s needs are being met by the statutory authorities

I O N

Concluding Comments This chapter has considered the growing significance of what has been described as the financialisation of society in order to provide a macro level context to explain changing welfare relationships forming within modern society. Financialisation is impacting on the social lifeworld, as we have defined it here, in terms of the privatising of welfare which is primarily aimed at changing the way the population sees the world of welfare; it is the responsibilisation of citizenship which government is seeking. It is accomplishing this goal first by requiring people to make arrangements for their own pension futures. This is happening through the transfer of pensions from the public sector to the capitalised retirementincome institutions which have grown as the economy has become dominated by financial rather than industrial enterprise. The promotion of financial products tied to retirement in an ageing society is part of this social policy strategy. The second strand to the responsibilisation of citizenship is the “civil society strategy” which has as its objective the inveigling of the third sector into playing a more prominent role in providing social intervention in key settings which fall outside the responsibility of the statutory services. The worlds of charity and community are evolving distinctive social welfare roles in modern society. Drawing on the theoretical framework established in chapter one, I have highlighted the inherent problems that can arise with the structural coupling of both the welfare state and the social enterprise system to the third sector. Each system possesses its own operational code which structures interaction with its environments. What is clear is that in terms

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of Luhmann’s systems framework, and Habermas’s conception of the normative importance of the social lifeworld, the state, economy and the third sector draw on quite distinct functional languages. The desperation felt by people seeking help from the charitable sector is not formulated in terms of meeting strict eligibility criteria but rather communicating through the display of their visceral anguish and pleas for help because their social need cannot or will not be met by the state. However, in order for the charitable sector to build a sustainable infrastructure of services, it is increasingly being forced to consider “professionalising” its organisational system; embracing philanthrocapitalism and through that possibly engaging with the wider world of financialisation to ensure resources are made available for ongoing operational purposes. The encounter between the citizen in need and the street-level gateways to charitable support may be changing along with the ideological complexion of many of the big players in the third sector as they enter partnerships with both government and private sector capital to fund social services. The social entrepreneurial investment by private capital in third sector activities through the use of social impact bonds, for example, is now an established arrangement (see Mulgan, Reeder, Aylott and Bo’sher, 2011; Shaw, Gordon, Harvey and MacLean, 2011; Pharoah, 2012). The following chapter focuses attention on the interactional encounter between the welfare system and the citizen inside the front-line offices which implement social policies. The research on street-level bureaucracy has uncovered some of the detail which structures the crucial interaction between those employed as advisers and those seeking advice.

CHAPTER THREE STREET-LEVEL BUREAUCRACY AND WELFARE ORGANISATIONS

Introduction: Systems Theory and Street-Level Bureaucracies This chapter must start with two related theoretical clarifications. First, Hugh Baxter (2011), commenting on a criticism made by Habermas of Luhmann’s autopoietic theory, specifically that it presents a “totalising” view of systems, argues that despite this tendency in Luhmann’s theory he did in fact distinguish between core and peripheral elements, or parts, of systems. With respect to the political system, Luhmann recognised the necessity of distinguishing between the executive, parliamentary and policy implementation levels of the system. The legal system similarly has core and peripheral areas between the courts, which he sees as being the centre of the legal system, while the legislature lies at the periphery. The particular issue of relevance for the analysis at this point is that the way in which a social system operates, and makes selections from its environment, will not be unified or simply an operation of the system as a whole, but will reflect the selections being made at different social sites within the system. Luhmann, therefore, identifies institutions, agents and organisations as social sites where a social system can interact with its situational environments and make selections from those local environments which, in the case of the welfare system, can lead to “slippage” between the formal policy being formulated at the centre (the executive and parliamentary arms of government formulating legislation) and the implementation of that policy by local officials who interpret its prescriptions in the light of the real world issues presented to them. In Baxter’s words “Luhmann draws on a more conventional sort of social theory that speaks not just of systems and their elements but also institutions” (Baxter, 2011, 187). The importance of establishing this particular theoretical observation lies in being able to draw in analyses of street-level bureaucracies as sites where the welfare system encounters the

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social lifeworld. Luhmann neglected this crucial interaction even though he stressed the importance of differentiating between policy formulation and policy implementation; a key feature of his perspective. A second theoretical clarification can be made relating to the structural coupling of the welfare system to the human beings, or as Luhmann might have phrased it psychic systems, who as active agents are part of the welfare system’s environment. A fundamental premise of Luhmann’s theory is that systems can only survive and autopoietically regenerate if they are able to make “sense” of the complexity of their environments: systems must be able to absorb and process communications aimed at them from outside. Those environments not only include those who make claims on the welfare system as clients but also those who are employed as advisers and whose work practices as functionaries of the system can enhance or detract from the system’s efficiency and survival. As was argued in chapter 1, human beings have a transcendent status migrating between different systems, each attempting to reduce the complexities of the environments they encounter and structurally coupling with other systems, both social and psychic, in a meaningful way: they engage in sensemaking. It is for this reason that we must recognise that psychic systems are autopoietic in the same way as social systems and, again referring the reader back to chapter 1, psychic systems are a necessary precondition of social systems: without people social systems would not exist and without social systems people would not exist. In coming to terms with the challenging idea that social systems and psychic systems are autopoietic, we should acknowledge the crucial role played by people aiming communications at the social systems they encounter and with which they are structurally coupled. Individuals as workers or clients create irritation, noise and, drawing on the language of Gunther Teubner (1997), sometimes creating order from music. Teubner (1997) suggests that we must understand social systems as being more “open” and potentially discursive than the notion of transitory disturbances suggested by the use of the concept structural coupling in Luhmann’s later theory. What we should understand by this latter observation is that often the people who work inside organisations, or street-level bureaucracies, create informal structures (relationships, practices and grammars for interpreting events) which enables them to adjust to novel and ambiguous circumstances which are not anticipated. They can compensate for system failures by using their discretion to overcome the inflexibilities that formal structures create. So, we can say that street-level bureaucrats not only aim “noise” at the social systems within which they work, they can often aim “soothing music” at the system; creating order, increased learning capacity

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and, ultimately, more efficient practices that stabilise the social system. Luhmann’s “more conventional theory”, referred to by Baxter, alludes to his early work on organisational systems before his theory took an autopoietic turn. Importantly his earlier writing focused on the role performed by both formal and informal structures in reducing complexity inside organisations; guiding the “selective behaviour of the system” (see Seidl and Mormann, 2015, 125-157). That work remains valuable in my view and should be used in conjunction with his later writing which focused on the self-reproducing character of social systems. Social systems are constituted by both formal and informal structures which embed the sensemaking and discursive practices that Teubner alludes to above. Street-level bureaucracies provide one of the key sites where these issues emerge in a clear way.

Michael Lipsky’s Perspective on Street-Level Bureaucracy The original work by Michael Lipsky (1969 and 2010) on street-level bureaucracy, and the subsequent work stimulated by his original research provides a useful way of examining the interface between the welfare officer whose job is to interpret and implement social policy and the welfare client seeking social support from the welfare system. The concept of street-level bureaucracy refers to the many and varied sites where public service is provided to citizens. In Lipsky’s original research (Lipsky, 1969) he focused on lawyers, teachers, lower court judges and policemen as well as the many advisors and administrators working in local social welfare offices in the US. The concept describes all public facing service provision and today that can mean street-level bureaucrats will work in private, not-for profit, as well as mixed public-private settings delivering a service to the public. There are, however, common working conditions and job expectations that link the many different work roles encompassed by the term street-level bureaucrat. First Lipsky acknowledged that in all cases, whether it was a teacher, lawyer, police officer or welfare adviser delivering a service, they all worked in circumstances where strict budgetary constraints operated and resources were generally described as being inadequate. Second, in many cases, if not all, there was a potential for physical or psychological threat because the worker’s authority was regularly challenged by those who were being “processed”. And, third, expectations about the job were often ambiguous, contradictory and contained idealised and unattainable objectives about outcomes and system goals. However, a key factor uncovered by Lipsky was that the street-level bureaucrat works in situations where they have

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some measure of independence from direct scrutiny by management, consequently, they are able to exercise some measure of discretionary decision-making. Prior to Lipsky the conceptual orthodoxy in organisational theory was to understand complex administrative systems in terms of management hierarchies and control: the primary problem was always deemed to be about matters of compliance and the identification of gaps in system efficiency. Rules, regulatory practices and clear objectives were assumed to be the default functioning position of how administrative systems actually worked. This was a top-down model of policy making. However, Lipsky asked a different set of questions of the many street-level bureaucracies that delivered public sector policy. He did not ask what a system should do but what it did do and why. He offered a bottom-up perspective of how policy making occurs in the world of implementation and suggested in his introduction to the original edition of his seminal text (Lipsky, 1980), very much in line with Luhmann’ thoughts on the policy process, that “policy making does not simply end once a policy is set” (Lipsky, 1980, x). It was in the “crowded offices” and the “daily encounters of street-level workers” where public policy is actually made. This simple tilt of the researcher’s lens revealed a quite different reality of complex organisational behaviour which continues to reverberate today. Perhaps the single most distinctive aspect of Lipsky’s theory is the importance placed on “authorised” discretion to the functioning of organisational systems. While a formal policy established a framework, which structures front-line bureaucratic behaviour, it did not determine that behaviour in all its aspects. His perspective treated deviations from formal policy implementation not as random departures from its constraints but rather as the exercise of discretion which is patterned and systematic and clearly reflective of a strategy to deal with the everyday problems that are only uncovered when a policy is actually delivered at street-level.

The Client-Processing Mentality The core of Lipsky’s theory of street-level bureaucracy can be found in his focused discussion of what he calls the “client-processing mentality” (Lipsky, 1980 140-156). In discussing the key relationship between welfare bureaucrat and client, he clearly establishes the underlying premise of his view that in order to understand work behaviour then it is essential to start by examining the working conditions which frame that behaviour. While broad societal influences will shape attitudes and

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prejudices, they cannot explain the particular administrative practices used by street-level bureaucrats to manage their workloads and deal with the generality of individual clients. The data gathered by Lipsky in the original edition of his book (Lipsky, 1980) emphasised that “street-level bureaucrats often enter public service with some interest in client-oriented work, embrace professional orientations that call for altruistic behaviour toward clients, and continually interact with clients, thus regularly confronting client characteristics and concerns” (Lipsky, 1980, 144). Further, the evidence pointed to an ongoing acceptance of key work objectives set by management even though the nature of their work situation allowed them a significant amount of discretion to modify those system objectives. The street-level bureaucrat appeared to accept the limitations placed on their discretion because it provided a framework within which they were able to “rationalise ambiguities and contradictory objectives by developing their own conceptions of public service” (Lipsky, 1980, 144). And in the preface to the revised version of his book (Lipsky, 2010), he again seeks to clarify that most teachers, policemen, welfare advisers and so on that he has studied over three decades actually report that they enjoyed their job despite the constraints and the sometimespunishing workloads. The particular issue, therefore, that Lipsky uncovered was not the subversive bureaucrat seeking to undermine efforts to provide a fair and equitable service, or indeed the prejudiced bureaucratic automaton mindlessly processing information without any regard for the clients before them, but for the first time in organisational theory he described how the street-level bureaucrat rationalises work practices in order to achieve something approximating an efficient outcome for both adviser and client. One way in which the advisers negotiated their work role was to adopt their own “simpler” concept of the job. This private conception of the occupational task was fashioned from the ongoing attempt to reconcile a self-identity as someone who wants to make a difference in life and help others in difficult circumstances while working in conditions characterised by high workloads, limited resources and, often, dispirited, unmotivated and sometimes downright awkward clients. One common example where the exercise of an adviser’s private conception of their job might reveal itself as bias, unfairness or discrimination, occurred in circumstances where a street-level bureaucrat made a “superior effort” for some clients because they had demonstrated a positive attitude to what the adviser was asking of them. The responsiveness of the client ignited an equally affirmative reaction from the adviser because their self-concept as someone making a constructive contribution and “changing lives” was

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reinforced. The willingness of the client to accept and implement the advice from the adviser would be rewarded by an especially energetic and active street-level bureaucrat fighting their corner. Lipsky described these private conceptions of service as “adaptive responses” which effectively solve performance issues for the individual street-level bureaucrat. They are held rigidly and “not open for discussion” and, Lipsky observed, “the patterns of practice developed by individual workers often only make sense in the private conception of the job held by the worker, while supervisors and the public still expect allegiance to a more complex set of goals” (2010, 145). The interesting phenomenon which sometimes arose in the office was that the private conceptions become shared both with other workers and management leading to their adoption as a “shared view” of how best to manage people-processing. An associate of Lipsky, Jeffrey Prottas (1979), distils many of the key features of what has become known as “people processing” in street-level bureaucracies in his study of housing managers and non-medical admission clerks in hospitals. Prottas conceptualises the street-level bureaucrat as a boundary actor whose primary task is to convert a member of the public into a client. Their work role requires them to straddle the world of the bureaucratic system that employs them while interacting with the member of the public in a precise way to select only that information about their situation and their life which is pertinent to their encounter with the bureaucracy, or at least that is the formal perception of their occupational task. Prottas (1979) identifies a number of rules which frame the street-level work task and which can lead to its flexible interpretation. First, he starts by identifying “core rules” which “represent the standard and unavoidable tools used in bringing clients into the procedures of the agency” (Prottas, 92). In a welfare system these rules determine eligibility and the street-level bureaucrat acts as a gatekeeper to the system. Second, he identified “lesser rules” which are identified as those which can be routinely ignored in times of excessive pressure: noncompliance is almost routine because there is recognition that to follow them rigidly would compromise the delivery of “core services”. Indeed, he rightly refers to the classic trade union strategy of the “work to rule” in industrial disputes to emphasise to management that rigid adherence to the rule book can be inefficient and counterproductive. Third is, of course, the rules surrounding the use of discretion which allows the adviser in a welfare bureaucracy to manage the information at their disposal in order to deal with clients’ behaviour in its many and varied forms. In Prottas’s study this occasionally meant that an adviser sometimes withheld information about a little-known benefit if the client’s behaviour was irksome or

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uncooperative. All organisations rely on the tacit understanding that workers will exercise discretion from time to time in order that the system operates efficiently. The discretionary world of the front line bureaucrat uncovered by Lipsky has generated many subsequent enquiries into the micro world of the public office and the interactions between street-level bureaucrats and the public, and between the street level bureaucrats themselves (I will discuss that aspect of the office interaction below, particularly in relation to Karl Weick’s organisational theory) (see Hupe, Hill and Buffet, 2016). What is striking about this research is the synergy between Lipsky’s work on street-level bureaucrats and the sociological analyses of anomie, labelling and social interactionism in 1960s and 70s deviance theory. Robert Merton’s (1957) analysis of the relationship between social structure and anomie is particularly pertinent. His characterisation of the “ritualist” in the work place who adheres unwaveringly to the principles and goals prescribed by the bureaucratic organisation is presented as a deviant “type”; one who is too rigid in their ways to be creative and interpretative in making decisions independently of the rule book. By contrast the “innovator” is the ideal street-level bureaucrat; one who accepts the aims set by the organisation but is creative in the means used to achieve the goals and performance targets. He may have been a deviant but Merton casts the “innovator” as someone who nevertheless achieves success for the organisation. Lipsky’s street-level bureaucrat is an “innovator” rather than a “deviant”. Lipsky’s perspective on street-level bureaucracy also draws on social interactionism. The focus was on the uncovering of the taken-for-granted social order which makes social interaction within the office about administrative practices possible. His approach echoed the phenomenological turn in sociological theory of the late 1960s and 70s; asking questions about what constituted normality and deviance in the work place. It should be acknowledged that the active reduction of complexity by the social actor engaged in sensemaking in the workplace reflects not only the sociological thinking at the time of his research but also shares elements of the creativity of people, psychic systems, in Luhmann’s work.

Applying Lipsky’s Perspective Perhaps a good example of how the underlying social constructionist perspective found in Lipsky’s original research has influenced more contemporary work on street-level bureaucrats can be found in Rosenthal

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and Pecci’s (2006) study of the social construction of clients in Jobcentre Plus offices1. Many of the typical behavioural issues which stimulate staff to categorise their clients, such as client aggression, gratitude, social status, age, body language and demeanour, can become embedded in typologies which are used to stereotype. The categorising of people in front-line offices has been explained by psychologists Corter and Gluck (1992) as a “basic cognitive function” which is commonly used and survives because it has a useful role in predicting the features of what they call “instances”: rendering the complexities of objects, people and circumstances meaningful to the observer. The particular sociological problem which is addressed by Rosenthal and Pecci is whether the “ethos” of active job placement in Jobcentre Plus offices encourages advisers to categorise clients in terms of whether they exhibit “job readiness” or display sufficient levels of eagerness to engage with the office’s “personalised and flexible” service. While the study did not explicitly address issues of gender and racial unfairness in the treatment of clients, it is clear that there are serious questions raised about the implications of work practices which involve informal “categorisation” processes. Issues of equality and dignity of those supposedly being helped by the service is always problematic in such situations. This remains a paradoxical feature of the welfare system where the formal presentation of services as “supportive and people centred” is undermined by a sometimes-bleak reality created by a lack of resources, and discriminatory work practices, which actually undercut the supportive ethos of a welfare system. While the study by Rosenthal and Pecci found many examples of front office practices which were the same or similar to those found by Lipsky, the conclusions of the study are interesting about the extent to which categorising clients was almost unthinking and a taken-for-granted routine of the job. They found that the “data strongly indicate that clients are categorised quickly (my emphasis) and largely on the basis of body language and demeanour in the initial interview with the adviser” (2006, 1652). The comments offered by the advisers suggest that they have a fairly fixed notion about what they are looking for: “within 30 seconds you can tell where people are coming from” and “quite honestly, within five minutes you can tell” and “I have experience. I can tell from their mannerisms, from their body language, how they sit in the chair, their language and how they speak” (2006, 1652). However, the fragility of 1

A development created under the New Labour governments of the early 2000s in what has become know as activation policy whereby the welfare system actively seeks to place claimants in work rather than passively managing their unemployment.

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these embedded notions about reading people from their body language is revealed by one street-level bureaucrat who admits that sometimes advisers are too quick to make judgements. “It is quite easy to make the wrong judgement from the way they walk in and sit in the chair…It is difficult but you have to try not to prejudge them” (2006, 1652). Clients were quickly categorised in terms of the office’s “core categories”: job readiness; interactional style; gratitude; and capacity for aggression. This process of differentiation and typing was based solely on body language and the first interview. It is described by Rosenthal and Pecci as “automatic processing” and is similar to the notion of “core rules” described by Prottas (1979). It is only when the interaction moves to what is described as “controlled processing” that more detailed information about the client is acknowledged but even at that stage it was found that advisers were responding to “repeated exposure to stimulus cues” and in practice those who had been working in the service for a long time largely undertook “automatic processing” most of the time. The sensemaking process among the street-level bureaucrats relied on pre-labelling which once applied was never abandoned. The ethos of Jobcentre Plus reflected wider conventional views about unemployment and the view that any evidence of unwillingness to take up an opportunity for employment, or indeed to attempt to explain why that might be so, would be interpreted as someone who was trying to avoid work. A not unrelated finding is described by Anna Kortweg (2003) in her study of poor single mothers in the United States. The context for her research was the introduction of compulsory Job Clubs with the passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act 1996 (PRWORA). The Job Clubs ostensibly were established to promote both paid work and marriage because prior to the introduction of PRWORA single mothers were able to claim benefits for themselves and their children through Aid to Families with Dependent Children without having to jump through additional bureaucratic hoops other than establish need for herself and her children. The compulsory Job Clubs operated with a clear moral ethos: paid work was a moral choice that all poor mothers should make regardless of their family situation and that parenting skills were marketable which all single mothers should use to earn a living rather than leave under-utilised at home caring for their children. Discursive strategies were used by the street-level bureaucrats to present the welfare state negatively and the married citizen-worker positively. This is a singularly American example, and the welfare issues that are identified by Kortweg are unlikely to be those found in most European countries. What it does reveal is the general acceptance by advisers of the received wisdom

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of the time that many welfare claimants can be labelled into two camps, those ready for work and those seeking to avoid work. The framework of welfare law was used as a structure within which to organise the streetlevel bureaucrat’s approach to “people processing”, and when appropriate cues were detected, discretion would be used to advance an ideological and partisan message to the client consistent with the organisation’s mission of encouraging mothers to work. Labelling clients is ubiquitous in public service processes. Lipsky’s study found it everywhere in his original research in the 1970s and 80s and contemporary research continues to uncover it in all street-level bureaucracies today, although the way discretionary power is used may reflect the changing socio-political contexts of present-day societies. For example, front-line workers inside reformed local government offices have developed a new range of “coping strategies” described as “civic entrepreneurship”: the idea of civic entrepreneurs was developed by Charlie Leadbetter and talks of “developing a vision of improved public services and harnessing new ideas and new partners to develop innovative solutions to local problems” (see Leadbetter, 1997; Durose, 2011). This idea moves the study of street-level bureaucracy on to a new level which resonates with the discussion of a civil society strategy discussed in chapter 2. Local government budgets cuts at a time when there is increasing demand for local services has, apparently, stimulated many street-level bureaucrats and public service managers to engage in innovative ways of getting essential services delivered by engaging with the public through “big society” type activities. Another area of development has been the comparative study of streetlevel bureaucracies. For example, Ulmestig and Marston (2015) have undertaken comparative research of services for the young unemployed in Sweden and Australia. They found that despite the distinctive social policy ethos and profiles of the countries studied, street-level bureaucrats displayed more similarities than differences in their discretionary use of discipline with the young unemployed. And Kallio and Kouvo (2015) provide an interesting study of social assistance in Finland. They were interested in contrasting attitudes to “deservingness” by comparing the attitudes of the general public with social workers, Deacons of the Church of Finland and benefit officials of the country’s Social Security Institution. The conclusion of the study was that the officials of the Social Security Institution (the official street-level bureaucrats of the state) took a more critical and less positive stance on the matter of client deservingness than the other street-level bureaucrats. This suggested that there were factors inside “professional” welfare offices which were distinctive; perhaps work

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inside “professional bureaucracies” adheres more frequently to system imperatives while other street-level workers are more person-centred. The range of settings where the street-level bureaucrat becomes the focus of research continues today to provide ever more descriptions of discretionary power in hospitals, law enforcement, teaching, social work and, interestingly, in information technology where the phenomenon of the “screen-level bureaucrat” has emerged as a new and important dimension of the contemporary people-processing industry (see Hupe, Hill and Buffat, 2016; Carausan, 2015; Bovens and Zourdis, 2002). What is lacking in the studies of street-level bureaucracies is an understanding of the sensemaking processes as recursive: building towards the constant regeneration of the autopoiesis of the office system. As argued above, we can choose to understand the interaction between people in street-level service offices better, and the processes of categorisation which takes place there, if we understand people-processing less about random prejudices and coping strategies and instead conceptualise individuals as psychic systems striving to cope with meanings that occur as an integral part of being functionaries inside an autopoietic bureaucratic system. This has a value because it draws our attention to the natural mechanisms which autopoietic systems employ to render complex and ambiguous social environments more knowable and secure. That is precisely what the street-level bureaucrat and the client are doing in their recursive interactional relationship. The classic research on street-level bureaucracy focuses our attention on the many ways in which working conditions shape the operational logic of a bureaucratic system. However, while much of the work of Lipsky and his associates has provided invaluable insight into the front-line offices which deliver public policies directly to the public, they were not entirely clear at a theoretical level about what it was they were uncovering. They had no conception at that time of the public service system as an autopoietic entity. The street-level bureaucrat, and the discretionary interpretation of the rules governing the people processing routines, is part of the social system’s environment. The rules governing the regulations, budget management and working protocols are an integral part of an autopoietic system which is structurally coupled to the many psychic systems (individuals) who work on those structures, adhering to their constraints, sometimes avoiding them by adopting alternative discretionary work practices. These are the relationships which effectively construct the bureaucracy or organisation as an autopoietic system performing a distinctive function within an environment of differentiated systems, institutions and organisations. In the welfare context, without meeting the eligibility criteria established in

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law and administrative practice the system would be unable to make “sense” of the communications from clients because only people in need as defined by the welfare system can be processed by the personnel of the welfare system. The formal structures of the system aid the street-levelbureaucrat to make appropriate “selections” or decisions about clients. The adviser cannot arbitrarily offer welfare support to people that they think “ought” to be given support when the regulations governing eligibility indicate otherwise, or reject someone who meets all the criteria of eligibility simply because the adviser holds to a racist view about who is “deserving” of support, without routinely eroding the system’s boundaries. This observation requires further clarification.

Karl Weick’s Theory of Sensemaking in Complex Organisations Karl Weick’s description of sensemaking in organisations shares many of the epistemological premises of Luhmann’s theory. For example, Luhmann distinguishes between information, utterance and understanding. Communication for Luhmann is a purely social phenomenon which is not about what is communicated or how and why it was communicated, or indeed what the intended meaning of the communication may be, but what the “understood meaning” is: understanding is an emergent property of social interaction. In an organisational context of a street-level office, meaning is determined retrospectively by people (advisers and clients) engaging in a discussion to acquire a shared meaning of a communication. Each individual may hold to a different meaning which might influence ensuing communications whereby acceptance of the original communication is possible but so too is rejection because a shared and agreed understanding cannot be achieved: individual meanings must be shared and common meaning acquired intersubjectively for an agreed understanding to emerge. Karl Weick’s organisational theory shares the phenomenological viewpoint illustrated by Luhmann: or more precisely Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodological precept that the social actor’s social reality is organised intersubjectively. Also, consistent with the research of Lipsky, the situational context within which communication takes place makes meaning “situationally conditioned”. In a front-line office dealing with welfare benefit claimants, each adviser through time will come to share an understanding of the rules determining eligibility for benefits; the appropriate protocols governing procedures to be followed converting an unemployed individual into a

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client and so on. However, when a new benefit is introduced, such as Universal Credit (UC), understanding of its beneficence may be varied among both the public and the Work and Pension front line office staff because it is new and because it is more difficult to understand. The benefit rolls together a number of previously separate benefit payments into one single monthly household payment with the objective of simplifying the benefits system and making it easier for claimants to move in to work while still retaining some benefits. Leaving aside the view that UC was designed for the 1980s and 90s because of its overwhelming focus on worklessness rather than on today’s labour market problem of endemic low pay in an economy with historically high levels of employment, there are a number of difficulties which street-level bureaucrats have had to deal with. First at a macro-level there have been multibillion-pound cuts to the budget impacting directly on the amount of money that claimants receive. Second, the IT system has performed badly and the full introduction of the technology has been delayed until 2022-2023, five years behind schedule. Third, the single monthly household payment has uncovered an increasing number of domestic abuse cases whereby mothers and children have been left abandoned without money by male partners who misappropriate the single monthly sum paid into a single bank account (Work and Pensions Select Committee, July 2018). Patrick Butler (2018), writing in The Guardian, sums up the problems concisely. While it began life intending to be more generous to most claimants, it is now, as a result of cuts, significantly less generous, leaving many claimants worse off when they move on to it than they were under legacy benefits. Added to that are design flaws and administrative glitches that put poorer claimants especially at heightened risk of hunger, debt and rent arrears, ill-health and homelessness. (The Guardian, 25 January, 2018)

In such a context, clients will present with complicated and novel problems for which there may not be readily available solutions. The types of issues confronting the front line staff in their face to face interaction with claimants is that the switch to UC has jarring implications for how many families and households live: a report published by the Resolution Foundation, based on data of bank transactions, has observed that 58 per cent of new claimants moving on to UC from employment were paid either weekly or fortnightly while the designers of UC justify paying the benefit monthly in arrears because they maintain that such a method “reflects the pattern of working life” (See Brewer, Finch and Tomlinson, 2017). There were calls by the Work and Pensions Select Committee in July 2018 to split the monthly payment to reflect the realities of modern

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life where partners are taxed individually and often have separate bank accounts (see footnote 2 below). The seven day waiting time for a claim to be accepted in a system in which it will take a month to determine entitlement seemed unjustified. While many people are now being designated as self-employed, they must negotiate the phenomenon of the Minimum Income Floor (MIF is an assumed level of earnings based on what an employed person would expect to receive in similar circumstances). MIF is not aligned with the tax system and creates issues for claimants in presenting accurate predictive information about their income for UC calculation purposes. And the decision to shift responsibility to the low paid tenant to arrange rent payments each month, rather than continue with a system in which housing benefit is paid directly to landlords, seems to have been designed to maximise the claimant’s insecurity and risk of rent arrears and possible eviction. The system is faced with “noise” and “irritation”. The routine dilemmas facing Work and Pensions staff have increased because the system’s environment has been de-stabilised and equilibrium lost. Not only are the search for solutions creating problems for staff but also their own sense of professional identity, working in an organisational context which is subject to widespread criticism and, in some cases, loathing by politicians and the public2. The complexity of dealing with an increasingly large and growing claimant group continues to undermine the functioning of a major government welfare department. The organisational theory of Karl Weick (1995) rounds out the types of analyses of street-level offices presented by Lipsky and offers a useful analytical template to describe front line bureaucratic offices such as those grappling with how best to deal with the introduction of a new benefit. First, Weick argues that sensemaking is “grounded in identity construction”. As suggested above, understanding is an emergent property of social interaction. Lipsky described the ways in which advisers adopted 2

Speaking at Kennington Park Jobcentre on the 11 January 2019, Amber Rudd (Work & Pensions Secretary) acknowledged that Universal Credit was neither compassionate nor fair. Whilst at the time of writing most of the problems with Universal Credit described here remain, Rudd signalled a change of direction from the Work and Pensions department on the day that four single mothers won a high Court case calling for a Judicial Review of how payments are calculated. Payments will in future be paid to the main household carer; in circumstances where it is required rent will be paid directly to landlords; she also announced the scrapping of plans to extend a two-child benefits cap to families with children born before 2017; and that there would be a delay in the roll-out timetable with the full roll-out now expected to be 2023.

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a simpler conception of their job, one which would support their selfimage as someone who makes a positive and worthwhile contribution for good when confronted by the chaos and complexities of their job. Those identities were formed and re-formed through processes of interaction with clients and others, including the image projected by the organisation they worked for. Weick similarly points to examples where workers self-image can be affected by the organisations they work for. He describes an interesting case where a tension arose inside an organisation when its employees’ sense of working for a “good” company was undermined when the corporation’s identity suffered a major public relations faux pas (see Dutton and Dukerich, 1991). Commonly employees form selfconcepts and personal identities partly based on how they think others view the organisations they work for. This is precisely what Dutton and Dukerich found in their study of the New York Port Authority. The New York Port Authority had projected an image “of a professional, altruistic, can-do agency that acted like a family while delivering a quality service” (Weick, 1995, 21). When the Port Authority received negative publicity over the way it was treating homeless people occupying its facilities, many employees reported feeling more negatively about the Port Authority and disassociated themselves from many of its actions towards homeless people. The creation of paradox and ambiguity where there had been certainty leads to reappraisal of meaning. People will test their interpretation of events intersubjectively with colleagues and others in pursuit of a shared understanding. The process they engage with will be retrospective, social, ongoing and, importantly, based on plausibility rather than accuracy: people work towards discovering a framework within which to place their interpretations of events. Interpretation and sensemaking are not treated as being the same by Weick: Sensemaking involves authoring as well as interpretation, creation as well as discovery…sensemaking is about the ways people construct what they interpret. Interpretation assumes a frame of meaning is already in place and that one simply needs to connect a new cue to an existing frame. It also assumes that one recognises a need for interpretation. Where there is no frame, or where there is no obvious connection between cues and frame and one has to be created, there is sensemaking. (Quoted in Maitlis and Christianson, 2014, 109)

Interpretation is an “acceptable and approximate translation” which is shared by a community of people and opinion through their mutual interaction. Sensemaking is the placing of that interpretation into frameworks which build towards the construction of patterning to

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surprising and unforeseen events in order to make them comprehensible, predictable and a plausible understanding which everyone can endorse. By extension, we can hypothesise that the observations described by Dutton and Dukerich (1991) will apply to many street-level bureaucrats working in front line benefits offices today in an anti-welfare culture which promotes austerity as a solution to public finances. Grappling with how best to deal with UC clients experiencing a new benefit which is difficult to understand and which seems designed to challenge their already difficult lives further, advisers must confront the paradox of the welfare state in a very stark way. Dutton and Dukerich (1991) encapsulate the key issue confronting the members of an organisation when they discuss the relationship between an organisation’s image and an individual member’s identity. An organisation’s image matters greatly to its members because it represents members best guesses at what characteristics others are likely to ascribe to them because of their organisational affiliation. An organisation’s image is directly related to the level of collective selfesteem derivable from organisational membership…This close link between an individual’s character and an organisation’s image implies that individuals are personally motivated to preserve a positive organisational image and repair a negative one through association and disassociation with action on issues. (Dutton and Dukerich, 1991, 548)

These observations point to the active way in which we should expect street-level bureaucrats to develop informal structures to mitigate the worst effects of policy implementation when confronted by people who have difficult problems and are looking for innovative solutions. Reflecting on the issues raised by UC, it is not difficult to imagine that being an employee of the Department for Work and Pensions will present many identity challenges to advisers as they engage in sensemaking about unstable circumstances evolving within the welfare system as a whole as a new “universal remedy” for welfare payments is gradually introduced to replace everything that had previously existed. Front line staff and managers may feel uncomfortable about the protocols they must follow regarding waiting times and payment intervals while being mindful of the wider debate in society about the suitability of the new policy in the current labour market conditions. Meanwhile in order to deal effectively with clients who seek advice about a complicated benefit, they must discover new strategies of how best to deal with the daily occupational pressures which result. On matters of discretion and innovation in service practice, the system must ultimately evolve a shared understanding of how public image deficits can be made more acceptable and how and who can

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authorise deviations from the centrally directed policy. The problem of discretionary action will gradually move back from the front line and up to higher levels of management in the system. The regulations governing the implementation process will require “interpretation” but matters of funding will ultimately be determined by the Treasury. Local deviation from centrally directed principles will be severely circumscribed3. Key questions for the local management at street-level considering action which deviates from the formal policy might depend on whether “wiggle room” can be found in the regulations allowing the exercise of discretion; can waiting times be shortened for practical purposes; can faster payments be made; can fortnightly rather than monthly payments be authorised; and can the treatment of those defined as being self-employed be made less discriminatory by allowing them to report their income annually in arrears as they would do to the tax system? Resolving the issues raised by these questions is probably beyond the pay grade of the front-line office staff, including local and regional management. The system as a whole must evolve ways of functioning which can generate public confidence in its ability to deliver a service which is, in the words of the National Audit Office, “fit for purpose”. In responding to the many policy setbacks that have been identified, the benefit system must articulate with other function systems within the broad political system. For example, the emerging problem of domestic abuse resulting from a monthly household payment to a single bank account which, in some circumstances, is controlled by an abusive partner, can best be resolved through the structural coupling of the benefit system with social work departments, housing departments and the health and social care system. Eventually an autopoietic social system or organisation will evolve workable answers to such questions or otherwise risk the dedifferentiation of the boundaries between the welfare sub-system and the executive of government lying at the heart of the state. What is at risk in such circumstances is that the learning capacity embedded in the welfare bureaucracy, the specialised operational practice knowledge, which has been built up over long periods will be replaced by expedient political decision making which could have the effect of undermining the principles 3

On the 1 February 2019, Sky News uncovered what was described as a “deflection script” which was issued “officially” to all staff instructing them to divert claimants online rather than address their concerns on the phone. There was no allowance made for those many poor claimants who did not have access to the internet at home: attempts by claimants and those working as their advocates to access the internet in the Work and Pensions Offices were prevented by staff from doing so.

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which the policy is attempting to promote. To an extent this problem has already arisen because of the hurried timetable for introducing the new benefit. Welfare is a sub-system of the wider political system and is highly politicised. Government ministers have been supporting the new benefit with “faint praise” aware of the hostile reception it is receiving in benefit offices and Parliament. Former Work and Pensions Minister Esther McVey, who resigned in November 2018 over her disagreements with Prime Minister Theresa May’s over Brexit, while still in office was reprimanded by both the Controller of the National Audit Office (NAO), Sir Amyas Morse, and Parliament for misleading (lying to) Parliament about the implementation of UC: failing to acknowledge that the NAO report criticised its design, cost and speed of introduction before its readiness for purpose had been assured. The reader will recall the discussion in chapter 1 of de-differentiation in Luhmann’s theory. This problem relates to the tendency in modern societies for issues arising in other function systems to find their way to the centre of the welfare subsystem of the state. This is clearly occurring in British politics. There is an ongoing process whereby matters of housing, access to employment, health and social care are being brought together in an unprecedented way in pursuit of a “universal remedy” for social welfare which seems misaligned with the socio-economic conditions existing towards the end of the second decade of the 21st century. Rather than being implemented with pragmatism and professionalism about what realistically can be achieved by the policy, UC is being driven by an ideological and partisan fervour by a government desperate to get the policy implemented regardless of its efficacy or relevance. How can such complexity and overwhelming concentration of demands on the system be processed?4

4

Whilst the problems identified with Universal Credit remain, at the time of writing in January 2019 Amber Rudd, who replaced Esther McVey as Work and Pensions Secretary, announced a delay in requesting Parliament to transfer a further 3 million claimants to UC, probably until 2023. In addition, she announced that the number of direct payments to households to cover rent payments will be increased and the plans to extend a two-child benefits cap to families with children born before 2017 will be scrapped. Ms Rudd also recognised claims by charities that the current one payment per household system "penalises women". Advocacy groups such as Refuge and Women's Aid have argued that the system can mean victims of domestic violence are denied access to benefits by their partners.

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Recursivity in the theories of Weick and Luhmann In complex organisational systems there are likely to be multiple competing accounts and possible strategic actions circulating in relation to a sensemaking process. Maitlis and Christianson (1991, 98-99) have suggested that Weick’s theory of sensemaking is, by today’s standards, a rather politically naive theory because there is an absence of the tensions, conflicts and power plays liable to be found in modern organisational systems surrounding any unpredicted event or strategic change. Lipsky likewise failed to bring out the politics of the front-line office in his original research. However, Maitlis and Christianson (1991) have observed that a great deal of research on sensemaking after Weick has focused on making the power struggles inside organisations visible in an attempt to “convey the tussles and tensions of organisational sensemaking, as different parties campaign and compete to shape meanings of and in the organisation, gain acceptance for a preferred account, or subvert the status quo” (1991, 98). Further, they argue that insufficient attention has been given to “the social, cultural, economic and political forces that shape what groups will notice, how they can act, with whom they interact, and the kinds of environments that can be collectively enacted” (1991, 98). Researching sensemaking inside organisations tends to contain the theoretical focus on the actions and interactional processes which occasionally disrupt the taken-for-granted routines of the system without reference to the wider environment outside the organisation. In restricting his focus on the social construction of meanings inside the organisation, Weick describes the recursive processes which occur by the interlocking behaviour of people collectively making sense of their work and work environment in an ongoing way. Organisations are seen as “processoriented”; fluid environments where there is no “ultimate values” or “common will” binding people together. Understandings are made and remade in a contingent way; shaped by the work conditions framing the occupational activities of the organisation. The key concept used by Weick to capture this recursive system is loose coupling: people interact over interpretative meanings suddenly, occasionally, neglibly, indirectly and eventually (Weick, 1982 and 2001, 380-401). He is describing a flowing processual context within which politics and power can flourish but it is also one in which internal system noise can be disruptive and ultimately problematic for an organisational system’s functional efficiency. Despite his inattention to the wider political and policy contexts framing the operations of organisational systems, Weick’s perspective is valuable because he highlights the ways in which the identity and the autopoietic

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character of the system is shaped by ongoing recursive interaction between psychic systems (the employees) and social systems (the formal and informal structures of the organisation); the people who work inside the organisation engage with the structures created by the organisational system such as budgets, regulations, legally binding protocols and informal grammars of how best to manage the system in its real world context. What is insufficiently emphasised is the fact that organisations typically function as both a differentiated autopoietic system while also being cognitively open to their environments; it is this second aspects of organisational systems which is missing in Weick’s theory of sensemaking in organisations. So, what is missing in Weick’s analysis, and which is added by Luhmann’s work, is an understanding of the autopoiesis of a larger subsystem of political institutions of the state which structurally couple with sub-systems and shape organisational behaviour through legal and policy instruments binding society together. The welfare system is structurally coupled to the larger political and legal systems of society as well as to other subsystems of the state such as the health service. This wider systemic structure of the state is coordinated but not actually steered from inside the executive of government and consequently is highly politicised. The coordination of sensemaking at a micro level, inside local sites of the welfare system, can only be achieved by means of strict budgetary controls, a framework of law which covers both occupational and administrative practice and limited devolution of authority down the hierarchical chain of management. Luhmann conceptualises autopoiesis as a product of recursive interaction in which the formal and informal structures of the system become interwoven: the formal structures of the larger political and legal systems, which govern the administrative practices and legal duties of the organisation and its employees, bind activities in various local sites of the system over time and space. Budgets, formal legal and administrative guidance to advisers and protocols governing face to face relationships with the public, or, increasingly, online interaction with the public in what has become known as “screen-level bureaucracy”, shape the activities of the office but are in turn effected by the activities and tasks undertaken by the individuals in processes of sensemaking. Giddens formulated this notion in his theory of structuration quite well by observing that “the structural properties of social systems are both medium and outcome of the practices they recursively organise” (Giddens, 1984, 25). While Weick’s perspective is invaluable in understanding the micro level sensemaking interactions between the street-level bureaucrats and their

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clients, Luhmann’s perspective connects that recursive activity to the wider financial, legal and administrative structures that bind and connect the micro and macro levels of whole sub-systems. The importance of temporality in autopoietic theory is another facet of system operations stressed by Luhmann: events always have a “before” and an “after”. Once an event has taken place, or as Weick would say “enacted”, it is irreversible because it has happened and cannot be undone. For example, actions which are executed by the individuals within the organisational system once completed cannot be undone whether that be overspending their budget, behaving in a brusque manner with clients or authorising payments to claimants which are not strictly permitted by the regulations. The phenomena which constrain activity in the bureaucracy front-line office, such as budgets and legal prescriptions which frame regulations and behavioural protocols, act as structures which Luhmann conceptualises as being reversible because once they are in place they structure activity for a delimited period going forward until they are changed or amended. Bakken and Hernes (2003) illustrate this particular matter well. ...structure and process, although existing in different temporalities, interact with and influence one another. Structure is formative of process, as budgets put limits on what can be done…process, in the sense of events over time, give substance to structure, as structure is adjusted through processes of learning…because budgets are formative for activities, they also take part in the logic of the budget, which means that activities will again reinforce its logic. (Bakken and Hernes, 2003, 68)

We should add “future orientation” as a feature of recursive relationships: past and present temporal orientations provide a context for future activities. Indeed, the politics of organisational systems often revolve around which future policy trajectory will be selected from a range of complex choices. The location of the political conflict will, of course, vary from one type of organisational system to another. In public sector systems the politics will take place upstream and at the heart of what Habermas has described as the political public sphere and Luhmann calls the public opinion and mass media system. I will return to this particular issue in Chapter 4 when considering how issues raised in the social lifeworld can penetrate and influence the social systems of society.

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Concluding Comment While the research on street-level bureaucrats has contributed to the greater understanding of the policy implementation process, and has achieved a great deal in describing the encounter between the welfare state and the individual citizen at the micro level of society, it has tended to trap sociological analysis in the world of front-line offices and the processes of sensemaking which lubricates activity there. The organisational theory of Karl Weick provides a very useful template for analysing the intricacies of interaction inside street-level bureaucracies but it has relatively little to say about processes of decision making. Indeed, a significant difference between Karl Weick and Niklas Luhmann is that the former maintains that organisations are primarily about sensemaking whereas the latter argued that organisations are primarily about decision making; about reducing the complexity of their environments in order to make communicative selections which are compatible with the systems autopoiesis. Towards the end of this chapter I have argued that by bringing Luhmann back in to the analysis we can see the broader possibilities of theorising street-level bureaucracy as a local site of a much larger welfare sub-system which is structurally coupled to the political system. Sensemaking in street-level bureaucracies which are part of the public sector is inherently political. The case of Universal Credit implementation clearly illustrates this observation. By adopting Luhmann’s autopoietic theory we can begin to see how links can be made between the macro world of national politics and governance and the micro world of the citizen’s encounter with the state through local benefit offices. Part 2 of the book will approach the relationship between system and social lifeworld from the opposite direction to that discussed in part one of the book. The focus changes to consider how the influence of the public can be effective in changing and resisting the welfare system. The relationship between the welfare system and the political public sphere will be more in evidence. However, a brief word can be made at this point about a social and organisational phenomenon which sociologist Arlie Hochschild (2003) calls “emotion work”. Chapter 5 will partly return to the site of street-level bureaucracies to discuss the impact of social systems and complex welfare agencies on social work practice. Attention will be paid to the emotional labour required of employees working in settings which interact directly with the public about caring matters. The purpose of focusing on normativity and emotionalism in part two of the book is to examine the ways in which the social system penetrates and shapes the psychic systems of the social actor.

PART TWO THE SOCIAL LIFEWORLD IN A SOCIETY OF AUTOPOIETIC SYSTEMS

CHAPTER FOUR THE BRIDGE BETWEEN LIFEWORLD AND SYSTEM

Introduction Luhmann’s theoretical perspective is grounded in the importance he attaches to functional distinction in modern society; a perspective which led him to reject the concept of civil society and Habermas’s variant of it as the social lifeworld. He did so because he found an absence of a coordinating code that would characterise it as a distinctive autopoietic system. However, the distance between his view and that of Habermas on the role of public opinion and the political public sphere may not be too far apart. Habermas’s view of the political public sphere and civil society is primarily concerned with the possibilities of an engaged and reasoning public discourse being able to influence processes of policy formation and law making. At the heart of that idea is the crucial role played by free and open discourse about social, political, legal and welfare issues shaping public opinion formation in civil society. Now Luhmann effectively reconceptualised the notion of civil society and the public sphere as integral parts of the mass media system which acts as a conduit aiming complicating “noise” at the social systems of society via its medium of operation which is public opinion (See Moeller, 2006; King and Thornhill, 2005). It is clear that irrespective of Luhmann’s jaundiced view of the concept of a political public sphere, his perspective allows for the emergence of a distinctive social sub-system in modern society structured by the medium of public opinion in ways which are not entirely incompatible with Habermas’s concept of the political public sphere, albeit that they embrace quite different normative positions on democracy in complex societies. Luhmann defined Habermas’s conception of democracy as making a principle out of frustration because the complexity of modern society cannot be controlled by individuals or decision making processes organised around consensus seeking rational discourse, and Habermas countered that beyond the “iron cage” of system imperatives is

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the “taken-for-granted assumption that validity claims implicit in every administrative and social action could, in principle, be made good or discursively redeemed in a rational discourse beyond manipulation” (Pusey,1987, 102). Civil society forms an environment to the social systems of society where political opinion formation takes place; pushing against the “colonisation” of the lifeworld by the forces of neo-liberalism while influencing policy agendas and ultimately the content of legislation. Luhmann may have thought such processes were unhelpful and antiquated for the optimising of efficient decision making but he and Habermas may have been describing the same activities but drawing different conclusions about their efficacy. There are clear lines of convergence between the two theorists, although that should not be overstated. Habermas’s work has been continually focused on what he comprehends as the democratic deficit existing in complex modern societies. Whatever virtues he has come to see in system concepts there remains a concern about the inherent conservatism of Luhmann’s systems theory. For example, Habermas rejects Luhmann’s argument that human rights, social values and morality should only be admitted into sociological analysis to the extent that they can be seen clearly to have a function for complexity reduction and the ongoing maintenance of social systems. Habermas cannot accept the concept of ethically neutral law, politics or policy, particularly in a complex global society driven by neo-liberal economic principles. And a major difference between the theorists emerged from their early debate surrounding the concept of meaning in social theory. The notion of “meaning” in Luhmann’s systems theory is, as has been discussed in part one of the book, understood in terms of its function of selection: what is meaningful in systems theory is simply what is compatible with a systems capacity to make sense of what is selected. Habermas, however, argued that “meaning” should be understood in terms of the intersubjective dialogue between people, formed into publics, who seek to reach agreement about matters that will shape and influence the functions of the social systems of society. Habermas has accused Luhmann’s autopoietic theory of being “autistic”, “encapsulated in its own shell” and “unintelligible to other social systems”. This, however, is an unfair reading of Luhmann’s theory. The contrast between Luhmann’s commitment to autopoietic theory and Habermas’s focus on intersubjective dialogical processes within the political public sphere does not mean, in my view, that they present insurmountable problems of theoretical compatibility. It is only by decentering the role of human beings in sociological analysis that we can

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grasp the autopoietic character of social systems and appreciate the prescient insights of Luhmann’s admittedly abstract view of modern complex societies, but one which resonates with how modern society actually works. It is the autopoiesis of social systems which Habermas acknowledges confront us as a fact in society. And Luhmann’s theory allows for human beings, taking the form of psychic systems in the environments of social systems, engaging in public political activities which “irritate” those systems and which necessitate internal systemic adjustments to “quieten” the “noise” in order to meet the demands aimed at them from outside. The fact that welfare claimants may sometimes present as a “nuisance” to street-level bureaucrats, use social media to criticise, petition and mobilise to demand social change, and make films such a as “I, Daniel Blake”, means that they cannot be ignored as an element in the sociological jigsaw that Luhmann was assembling. An important point to highlight about autopoietic social systems, and one alluded to briefly in chapter 3, is that while they are “operatively closed” they are also “cognitively open” to their environments. Gunther Teubner (1992), who has championed Luhmann’s autopoietic systems theory, argues that while autopoietic social systems only select “meaning” from their environments which are compatible with their own operations, what that means in reality is that interaction, for example, between the political system and the legal system, may begin with “irritation” and “noise” across system boundaries but eventually through structural coupling (stable and routine recursive interaction established between the two systems) that “noise” is converted into “soothing music” which stabilises social order in ways that people can support and accept. The autopoietic system internally adapts to the “irritation” aimed at it from its environment (the political public sphere) and increases its internal functional complexity in ways that enable the “noise” to be “understood”. It legitimises its operations by demonstrating to the public the effectiveness of its own processes. Teubner makes it possible to see a productive accommodation between autopoietic systems theory and Habermas’s discourse theory when he conceptualises relations between social systems as grounded in “interdiscursivity”. It is through the ordinary language of the political public sphere that normative positions are expressed and moral principles are first established in society. When that understanding is aimed at the political and legal systems in an organised and sustained way it is first received as “irritation” before it is re-worked into the language that is meaningful for legislative action and law. It is this process which incorporates the voices of civil society in lawmaking. Habermas augments Luhmann’s perspective by creating a conceptual

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space allowing us to bring psychic systems, or human beings, to the foreground of systems theory and providing them with a political and sociological anchor in the idea of a political public sphere through which they act on and against the social systems of society.

Habermas’s Discourse Theory of Law While historically Habermas and Luhmann have been presented as adversaries, the view expressed by Baxter (2011), and others such as Gray (2014), is that between the publication of the original German edition of The Theory of Communicative Action Vol.2 in 1981 (see Habermas, 1987) and Between Facts and Norms (BFN) in 1992 (see Habermas, 1997), Habermas came to accept Luhmann’s conception of autopoietic systems to a large extent. He acknowledged that people confront the law, and the legal system, as a fact with its own autonomy and political importance in integrating complex social orders. Indeed Baxter (2011, pp180-189) argues that Habermas’s discourse theory of law needs to draw on Luhmann’s autopoietic systems theory to rescue it from its contradictions and opaqueness. For example, Habermas’s earlier analysis in The Theory of Communicative Action tended to see the relationship between system and lifeworld almost entirely in terms of the domination of the latter by the former. In The Theory of Communicative Action colonisation of the social lifeworld was not only accomplished by the penetration of the lifeworld by money and power but also by law, or more precisely “juridification” (the imposition of legal and bureaucratic language, authority and validation of relationships which hitherto had been beyond the gaze of law). Juridification as a form of instrumental reason embedded in positive law was understood to be saturating the relationships of the social lifeworld to such an extent that there remained little space for communicative reason to flourish. Nigel Dodd summarises Habermas’s earlier position concisely when he suggests that the notion of colonisation was a rather blunt instrument for analysing the system/lifeworld relationship: By employing the distinction between instrumental and communicative reason to explain the problem of integration in modern society…Habermas goes too far…he replicates precisely the mode of functionalist reasoning that he seeks to avoid…his account of the relationship between the system and the lifeworld is unilinear…it is invariably the system which shapes the lifeworld. The lifeworld does not appear to shape the system. (Dodd, 2005, 121)

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With respect to the role of law in modern society, this unilinear view is limited. While the law does penetrate the social lifeworld, regulating and integrating all aspects of social, economic and familial life into the institutions of a capitalist market economy, it is also a mechanism for protecting the social lifeworld from the full and unfettered impact of economic and market forces by providing a broad structure of law which underpins the welfare state: securing rights of access to support services, providing clear legal guidance on defining eligibility and entitlement in the fields of employment, benefits, housing and health. This view is one which Habermas has come to acknowledge in BFN: the duality of law speaks to a tension between “facticity and validity” which is both coercive and freedom-securing (Habermas, 1997, 28-41). The pivotal difference between Habermas and Luhmann revolves around the place of normativity in legal process. Law in the positivist model does not draw on any extra-legal foundations to justify its deliberations. Morality, religion or metaphysical viewpoints have no place in the legal argumentation process or adjudication in isolation from legal precedence. As observed earlier in the book, the key question for Luhmann is not whether an act is moral but whether it is legal. Luhmann maintained that it is the consistency of the legal principles operative within a system of law which provides stability in commercial and inter-personal relationships and makes social life predictable. In this way law legitimises its own operations while integrating society. It is a classic autopoietic social system. However, while Habermas partly accepts the positivist school of legal reasoning because, as has already been alluded to, he recognises that law is a fact which confronts everyone in society, he rejects the idea that law is disconnected from the social lifeworld. He offers his discourse theory which is a cumulative product of his thinking on the public sphere, discourse ethics and the emancipatory potential of a vigorous social lifeworld. Put concisely Habermas’s theory is that: The legitimacy of law ultimately depends on a communicative arrangement: as participants in rational discourse, consociates under law must be able to examine whether a contested norm meets with, or could meet with, the agreement of all those possibly affected. (Quoted in ModakTruran, 1997, 474)

Unlike Luhmann, Habermas argues that law must be legitimised by people external to the legal system. Without an anchor in the approval of those subject to its strictures the law cannot claim to be legitimate: citizens may adhere to the legal proscriptions established by the law mindful that

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sanctions will be applied to those who violate it, but adherence merely to avoid punishment is quite different from acceptance of law because it is considered by the citizen to be right. Law without legitimation from those to whom it applies becomes indistinguishable from merely being the exercise of authority. In developing his discourse theory, Habermas suggests that law mediates between the ordinary language of the lifeworld and the specialised languages of administrative power and money: it functions as a “transformer” and a “hinge” taking messages from the public sphere and reworks them into a form which has meaning (is comprehensible) to the special codes that structure activity in the economic, administrative and political systems. This is the language of Luhmann’s systems theory and is quite different from the thinking presented in volume two of The Theory of Communicative Action. Habermas in BFN clearly distinguishes the legal system from the political system and rather than conceptualising relationships between system and lifeworld as one of domination of the lifeworld by the colonising forces of the system, he introduces a model of the circulation of power. Baxter summarises the changed model very clearly: The leading principle…is that the state’s exercise of ‘administrative power’ must be linked to citizens’ articulation of communicative power in the political public sphere. And thus, rather than see the role of the political public sphere as the production of ‘mass loyalty’…Habermas now sees the political public sphere as normatively influencing the course of official decisions and a productive law. (Baxter, 2011, 154)

The model of the circulation of power allows for the internal differentiation of administrative levels of the political and legal systems; distinctions are made between centre and periphery levels and so again, as with the discussion of street-level bureaucracy in chapter 3, we can conceptualise the interface between system and lifeworld through the engagement of street-level agencies in the processes of translating messages from the public sphere to the core legal and political centres. While the courts of law lie at the centre of the legal system, populated by Judges, Barristers and Solicitors, the periphery is populated by para-legal personnel, academic lawyers and legal journalists who interface with the citizen through citizen advice centres, solicitors offices, the mass media and other sites where the legal system and the social lifeworld come together. It is a differentiated legal system that connects, or in Luhmann’s terms becomes structurally coupled to, the political system. In a British context, the centre of the political system incorporates senior law officers

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who advise government and Parliament about all legal matters relating to the operation of a legal state1. The periphery of both systems structurally couple with the political public sphere and civil society (see Table 6). Para-legal advisers, legal academics and journalists combine with political party activists, local councillors and lobbyists situated at the peripheries of the legal and political systems and carry “messages”, or opinions and demands expressed through public meetings, polling and lobbying, from the political public sphere and civil society to the centres of policy formation, lawmaking and legal adjudication. Interestingly, the concept of the political public sphere takes on a distinctive function in the circulation of power model: it filters, synthesises, bundles, acts as a sounding board and provides an early warning sensor.

1

The Attorney-General, the Solicitor-General and the Advocate-General for Scotland could be seen as representing the legal system inside the core of the political system.

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Table 6 Diagrammatic Illustration of Possible Relationships in the Model of the Circulation of Power Centre of Political System Parliament Executive of Government Attorney General Solicitor General

Political Periphery Constituencies Offices Party Activists Local Government Lobbyists

Centre of Legal System Law Courts Judges Barristers Solicitors

Legal Periphery Law Centres Para-Legals Law Academics Journalists

Political Public Sphere Political Mass Media Social Media Think Tanks Online Petitioning Public Opinion Polling Public Demonstrations

SOCIAL POLICY

Civil Society Trade Unions Volunteer Groups Churches Public Meetings Third Sector Organisations

LAW

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The Political Public Sphere Habermas’s original analysis of the bourgeois public sphere in the nineteenth century was able to at least identify the possibility that for a moment in history the propertied bourgeoisie were able to institutionalise a space in their café society for unfettered discussion and debate about matters that affected them generally as a social class rather than as particular individuals (Habermas, 1992). Freed from the will of Kings and divine authority, they were able to come to a collective understanding of their common will or interests. It was the moment and the principle that Habermas was identifying in his analysis of the bourgeois public sphere rather than the notion that it represented an authentic example of a functioning democratic polity that we might recognise in terms of the realties of present-day society. The model of the circulation of power is the by-product of his continuing attachment to the idea that a genuine democratic process can only be actualised if the conditions exist for participants to engage in open dialogue about public matters free from coercion. However important it is to understand the philosophical premises of what the social lifeworld is capable of representing through citizen action in a democratic political public sphere, Habermas’s model can only be given substance by examining the phenomenology of everyday life and the way it is shaped by both social media and the mass media system. At the heart of the concept of the political public sphere in Habermas’s work is a search for institutional mechanisms to secure the illusory promise of an “ideal speech situation”: a space guaranteed in law where argument can take place without being undermined by power and where authentic participatory democratic access to the means of modern communication is possible. This objective cannot be achieved in present-day society while the concept of the public is either tied to particular social and political groups, or worse, a unitary conception of “the public” or the “citizenry” prevails. Negt and Kluge (1993), for example, developed Habermas’s analysis of the public sphere by suggesting that in translating the concept into terms which will articulate with the socio-political realities of society today, there needs to be recognition of the multiple oppositional public spheres which form to engage in public conversations and debates as part of the political policy process. They coined the term “counter publics” but they are specifically concerned with recognising the phenomenon of the “proletarian public sphere” which is conceived as an institutional space which can secure dialogue about working class experience without compromise, ridicule or attack from those inside the corporate owned

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institutions of the modern mass media. Indeed, the complexities of the modern mass media system, and the emergence of multiple public spheres, may have created the conditions whereby Habermas’s ideal model of public debate and consensus seeking political processes is impossible to achieve. Sayer (2011) observes that for Habermas “rationality is basically procedural and discursive, identified by how it deals with disagreements internal to argument rather than by its relationship to the world” (2011, 93). Political and policy debates in society can rarely be won by agreement between discussants about the better argument. Systematically distorted communication, which Habermas identifies as a key feature of modern society, is characterised not by consensus seeking argument but by “eristic arguments”: political actors who engage in public political debate are primarily interested in winning. With respect to the issue of what is truthful in consensual debate, it is clear from the recent Brexit debate in the UK that many people can be “persuaded” that a policy statement is true, such as the now infamous side of a bus claim that exit from the EU will result in an immediate £350 million a week boost for the NHS, when rational reflection might have suggested to millions of British referendum voters that it was false. Livingstone and Lunt (2013) suggest that an alternative, and a more pragmatic, model of a democratic public sphere could be one which shifts the focus from consensus seeking rational debate to questions of access for diverse public voices. Access and voice remain priorities but the underlying model of argumentation (negotiation versus critical discussion) and the underlying functions of the dialogue (compromise versus consensus) are changed…Access and participation programmes should, according to this view, be evaluated in terms of how well they express a diversity of public voices and challenge established power to recognise the complexities of everyday life. (Livingstone and Lunt, 2013)

Following Negt and Kluge’s critical observations, the potency of Habermas’s analysis of law and politics is weakened without understanding two important problem areas which relate to how the morality of the social lifeworld might infuse the policy process. First, in a modern complex society with a multicultural population which is socially and economically divided, it is difficult to imagine how anything approximating a political public sphere secured in the principles of Habermas’s discourse ethics could be realised. What this might mean is that there would have to be an understanding of what Sayer (2000) has referred to as lay morality: the formation of everyday understandings of what constitutes natural justice which are fashioned from people’s routine daily existence and which tend to reflect their particular community and

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work interests with little regard for the generalised interests of society as a whole. A key question posed by the circulation of power model is how does lay morality feed in to the wider policy process? Visibility of the national political and policy debate is through the organs of the mass media system and less through active engagement in trade unions, political parties and social movements. So, second, we need to understand the ways in which the mass media system, and its modern appendage in social media, interacts with the social lifeworld. The development of the mass media system was always viewed as being highly problematic by sociologists concerned about the pacifying and massification effects it has on the political and moral consciousness of populations (see Strinati, 1995). While the mass broadcasting media have posed particular difficulties for a social theory based on imagining and realising open and free debate as the cornerstone of participatory democracy, the emergence of a society dominated by social media adds to the complexities of a modern version of the political public sphere. However, one chooses to describe the operation and effects of social media, facilitating a consensus based societal conversation about social and economic policy is likely to be a misleading depiction.

Lay Morality and the Social Lifeworld When discussion turns to lay morality, E.P. Thompson’s classic analysis of the crowd in 18th century England captures a key aspect of what the concept reveals about working class normativity (Thompson, 1971). The moral economy of the crowd was a phenomenon which was sui generis; it existed as a normative force independently of the individual views about right and wrong in a social community. It had a collective life which was anchored in the everyday understanding among “common people” about what was fair and just in accordance with custom and tradition. The equilibrium between the common people and the gentry regarding economic conduct, specifically price controls over food, was finely balanced. An obligation to work and behave in a deferential manner was exchanged for security over the supply and pricing of the means of life. When the old feudal order began to break down and the new emerging capitalist economic order introduced market principles, the 18th century crowd did not accept the inevitability of the weakening of traditional economic relationships. Gotz (2015) observes that the “consumer regime” of the time “drew on Edwardian and Tudor heritage” and the new economic principles of a market society were “opaque” to the common people who drew on their lay morality of customary entitlement to justify

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food riots. The social norms of the day defended the food riots because the gentry abandoned their paternalist contract. In extending Thompson’s use of the concept of moral economy to contemporary societies, it is possible to see the tensions between system and lifeworld in Habermas’s writing as a reflection of the uneasy relationship between “law makers and law takers”. The model of the circulation of power in BFN is an attempt to think more pragmatically about how lay normativity can influence law, policy and politics. However, Sayer (2011) suggests that Habermas once had a grasp of the significance of lay normativity but his later work on discourse and language lost sight of the importance of retaining an understanding of the moral universe of everyday life. The most important questions people tend to face in their everyday lives are normative ones of what is good or bad about what is happening, including how others are treating them, and of how to act, and what to do best. The presence of this concern may be evident in fleeting encounters and mundane conversations…as well as in momentous decisions such as whether to have children, change job, or what to do about a relationship which has gone bad…They are matters of practical reason, about how to act, and quite different from the empirical and theoretical questions asked by social science. (Sayer, 2011, 1-2)

In coming to terms with what lay morality is, Sayer argues that it is visceral, embodied and learnt through social interaction. It reflects the history, culture and material conditions of a social community or region. Beyond simply fellow feeling for others, it expresses empathy for others and being able to put oneself in someone else’s place. However, a crucial aspect of lay morality is that invariably it reflects the individual’s interpretation of the world in terms of what matters to that particular individual observer. We could say that the psychic system of the individual actively works on the world and society she lives in by sorting and prioritising the multiple moral commitments which confront her everyday in order to reduce the complexity of the moral choices in her social environment. Sanghera (2015) argues that “morality is always interpreted through available cultural resources and human qualities” (2015, 8). While we can acknowledge that everyday normativity shapes and influences people’s lives, and that in attempting to understand this phenomenon we need to move beyond the typical sociological practice of reducing explanation to the influence of social values and social norms which somehow float above and effect social relationships, we should avoid an overly sanguine view about the political strength of lay morality in the complexities of the real world. In fragmented and divided communities

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today, many experiencing de-industrialisation, high unemployment and a deteriorating urban fabric, we should not expect to find heroic proclamations of solidarity. People make sense of their world in terms of the social and institutional supports and media messages made available to them. Often what they conclude is not particularly solidaristic nor indeed charitable. Morris (2016) provides an interesting discussion of welfare reform in terms of the moral economy of austerity. While many in the UK and elsewhere initially applied what might be regarded as a common sense approach to understanding the financial crisis in the period 2008-2010, primarily blaming bankers and corporate greed for the perilous position many western economies were placed in, they were perhaps less prepared to make sense of why ordinary citizens rather than wealthy bankers appeared to be punished for the excesses of the financial crash by the introduction of a medium to long term programme of public expenditure cuts to social services. In order to aid public understanding of the new economic strategy, a new moral paradigm was, of course, provided by those who wished to rescue neo-liberalism from the critical fall-out of discredited financial practices. The preface to the austerity strategy in economic and social policy was re-assurance from government ministers that “we are all in this together”. However, what followed was a call for welfare reform which was a euphemism for the implementation of an ideological strategy, well embedded in Conservative Party thinking, to reduce the size and breadth of state commitments to social welfare and public services. A point I have already discussed in chapter 2. The ideological and political objective set by the Conservative-led coalition government in 2010 was to frame the idea of welfare reform as a moral duty. In a number of speeches delivered by Prime Minister David Cameron in the period 2009-2014, the primary theme was the ending of Britain’s welfare culture. The key objective of these speeches was to establish a new moral vocabulary relating both to the needs of the economy and the place of welfare in a modern society. The citizen was invited to think differently about both. The speeches juxtaposed quite discrete social problems to suggest a moral connection: the costs of social security placed alongside the notion of welfare fraud; the problems of welfare dependency placed alongside family breakdown, addiction and irresponsible debt; hard working taxpayers alongside too many people free-loading on benefits from a bloated welfare state. A culture of dependency was to be replaced with a culture of responsibility and the rights-based principles which underpin 80 per cent of the benefits delivered by the welfare state were to be challenged. The introduction of

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Universal Credit, discussed in chapter three, is the culmination of this ideological journey to transform what is popularly understood to be a welfare benefit system based on rights to entitlement into what is becoming a workfare benefit system based on residual support only. The message that was distributed was clear; there is a moral hazard attached to the provision of state welfare. Britain needs a “new moral economy” to change the way people think about themselves and the welfare state. Fairness in welfare should cease to be judged by social need and should instead be measured by what is fair to the taxpayer. The dominant narrative has been honed: the state welfare system rewards bad behaviour which has led to overspending by profligate Labour governments of the past who had a disregard for fiscal prudence. These factors, the argument concludes, mean that only an era of austerity can mend years of economic mismanagement. In the face of such an ideological assault by the UK government, which has accepted the EU and G7 orthodoxy of austerity economics, it is difficult for lay morality to be untouched by the force of an official assessment of current social and economic problems as being caused by behavioural rather than structural causes. The impact of this moral offensive on lay normativity is captured by a number of pieces of research on people living in poverty (Shildrick and MacDonald, 2013; Green, 2007). For example, Shildrick and MacDonald (2013) provide an insightful analysis of what they call “poverty talk” in a study of poor people in Middlesbrough in the period immediately after the financial crisis. It captures a sense of how those in social need feel about and explain their own and others poverty. The primary purpose of the research is to allow the poor to have a voice. Listening to “poverty talk” is, of course, precisely what should inform Habermas’s discourse theory of law because it cannot only be the voices of the educated middle classes who influence the content and direction of legislation and social policy. The difficult question being posed at this juncture is how the policy process can make coherent sense of what the poor actually say and think about their own poverty? A number of key issues arise from Shildrick and MacDonald’s research. First, many people who are poor do not describe their social situation in terms of being in poverty. They normalise their everyday hardship, describing it in terms of “managing”, “getting by” and “we are not on the breadline”. Many of the respondents in the Middlesbrough study stressed the “normality” of their lives. However, what may be a disturbing aspect of this view of poverty by many who experience it is the classic issue of

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horizontal comparison of their lives2 with what the authors of the research call a “nameless mass of others who were believed, variously, to be workshy, to claim benefits illegitimately and to be unable to manage and to engage in blameworthy consumption habits” (2013, 291). This criticism of others in poverty even extended to those on Disability Living Allowance who were seen as fraudulently getting benefit for being ill when “there’s nowt wrong wi’ them”. These are not known individuals who are being described but rather general descriptions of “others” garnered from the TV and the newspapers and reinforced by largely ill-informed community gossip. Poor people typically construct a self-identity of themselves by contrasting their discipline, orderly lives, desire to work and acceptance of low pay which is honestly earned, to the unruly lives of those who are work-shy, addicted and generally antisocial. Shildrick and MacDonald heard many “distancing narratives” in their Teesside research. Paradoxically, whilst young adults described graphically their own depressing episodes of worklessness and strong commitment to employment, they were often quick to suppose that others around them were work-shy and welfare dependent. (Shildrick and MacDonald, 2013, 291)

Mothers who struggle to maintain a clean and tidy house, ensuring that their children were provided with as much healthy food as the budget will allow, distance themselves from “others” who are perceived to have allowed their hardship to take away their dignity, honesty and social discipline. Summarising the attitudes expressed by many of the respondents in their research, Shildrick and MacDonald observe that “poverty in other people’s lives was usually viewed as a consequence of individual ineptitude or moral failure” (2013, 292). These social attitudes are a product of the distorted communication carried by a mass media system which penetrates into the lives of poor people with political messages which moralise to them, provides them with partial information about the wider social and economic conditions shaping their lives and, in terms of Luhmann’s conception of autopoietic psychic systems, aims “noise” at them which can lead to a contradictory consciousness: what they feel and experience about being poor clashes intellectually with what other people say about poverty and work. They are rendered impotent by 2

W.G. Runciman Relative Deprivation and Social Justice, (London: Pelican Books, 1972) was one of the first major studies of attitudes to social inequality which highlighted the tendency for people to compare themselves horizontally with people “like themselves” rather than vertically with those who were rich and powerful in society.

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their lack of education and limited access to the means to change the order of things; their voice cannot be heard in the political public sphere unless it is conveyed by others who represent them. Bourdieu (1984) captures this problem particularly well when he remarks. At best, they are at the mercy of their own spokesmen, whose role is to provide them with the means of repossessing their own experience…The dominant language discredits and destroys the spontaneous political discourse of the dominated. It leaves them only silence or a borrowed language, whose logic departs from that of popular usage but without becoming that of erudite usage, a deranged language. (Bourdieu, 1984, 462)

Writing about living through a poverty stricken childhood in Glasgow, Darren McGarvey (2018) reinforces Bourdieu when he makes an insightful observation about his own experience of attempting to set up a local group for some interest or other. He describes the “management of poverty process”; the usurping of local community activism by “leaders” who control and steer poor people in the “appropriate” ways to “enterprise their lives” in modern society: There is a big disconnect between the grand social engineering agenda of government and far simpler, unglamorous aspirations and needs of local people, many of whom are not fluent in the ways of jargon…The system is set up for working class people to be ‘engaged’ by ‘facilitators’ and ‘mentors’, who help them water down whatever they want to do in order that community aspirations align with those in positions of influence or power. (McGarvey, 2018, 49-50)

McGarvey goes on to talk about the establishing of boards and “Liaison Co-ordination” to oversee and effectively re-educate poor people in how best to become engaged in community activities. The particular issue raised here is that people, understood in autopoietic terms as psychic systems, incorporate “noise” from their surrounding world of community, work, mass media, culture and history which shapes their experience. They engage in sensemaking and selection of meaning from the complexity of their world by drawing on the understandings, dispositions and “sense” which their psychic system is able to “compute” or process in terms of what is already understood and what has already been experienced. Too often they are, as Bourdieu (1984) and McGarvey (2018) observe “at the mercy of their own spokesmen” (teachers, politicians, intellectuals, celebrities) who provide them with “the means to possess their own experience” by learning the appropriate “jargon” and “correct ways of seeing things”.

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Frank Parkin’s (1967) classic analysis of working-class conservatism can augment the insights of Bourdieu (1984) and McGarvey (1981). Written in a context when Conservative governments were being returned to office on the back of working class votes throughout the 1950s and early 60s, the popular explanation offered by political scientists for this apparent political deviance was the phenomenon of the deferential working class voter: he knew his place and assumed that his “betters” were more able to govern than those from the lower classes. The deferential voter of the 1950s held similar attitudes to those expressed in the Middlesbrough study towards “others” in the same economic position as themselves who typically voted Labour and supported the idea of a welfare state: they were not educated to lead and were typically described as being “work-shy trade unionists” who engaged in political agitation. How can we explain attitudes to politics and policy among those at the bottom of society which seem to go against their own material interests? Parkin turned the sociological problem upside down. Britain, then as now, is inherently a conservative society whose dominant institutions reinforce a conservative, class-based, pro-capitalist and anti-welfare message. I suggest that political deviance, examined from a national or societal level, is manifested not in working class Conservatism, but rather in electoral support for Socialism on the part of any social stratum…electoral support for Socialism will occur predominantly where individuals are involved in normative sub-systems which serve as ‘barriers’ to the dominant values of the society. (Parkin, 1967, 282)

Barriers in the context of Parkin’s analysis referred to the presence of strong industrial trade unions and work communities based on industrial manufacturing such as steel shipbuilding and mining. Such communities created a “proletarian public sphere” (see Negt and Kluge, 1993) in the labour and social clubs where people could congregate and discuss politics based on their reading of accessible popular newspapers which presented a politically left of centre point of view. Working class people also had strong representative voices defending working class interests in the workplace and in Parliament. With the strength of the Labour party and the large industrial trade unions, social policy, particularly relating to housing and social security, could be advanced. Today those “barriers” referred to by Parkin have been systematically dismantled by four decades of de-industrialisation and neo-liberalism which has weakened trade unionism to the point of extinction in the old steel and mining communities. The rise of the “gig economy”, and the upsurge of minimum wage retail and service jobs where there once was high paying industrial

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manufacturing employment, has left many working class areas in northern England, Wales and Scotland atomised and fragmented. In the absence of strong work and political barriers to the neo-liberal narrative permeating society today, the “proletarian public sphere” and the social lifeworld of the working-class community is exposed to the full onslaught of symbols, language, analyses, images and political rhetoric hostile to those wishing to challenge the dominant order.

The Mass Media System In order to understand what is happening today we need to bring Weick and Luhmann back into the analysis. As observed in chapter three, Weick (2001 and 1995) argues that “sensemaking is about the ways people construct what they interpret” and that “interpretation needs a frame of meaning in place”: essentially the psychic system selects from the complexity of competing messages and narratives in society only those that are compatible with the frame of meaning which is already present in the mind. Interpretation is about coming to a “plausible” understanding of events in terms of the individual’s knowledge and circumstances rather than a “scientific” or indeed a “rational” understanding (see Weick, 2011 and 1988). That frame which was once provided by the political filtering processes of the proletarian public sphere of the 1950s and 60s, which blocked the full force of the ultra-conservative description of British society in working class communities, is today incoherent and diluted among the cacophony of largely unregulated social media messages circulating. Meanwhile, the dominant political narratives using the mass media system of television, newspapers and radio have typically reinforced a neo-liberal and anti-welfare message which has gone largely unchallenged. Second, Luhmann’s theory of the mass media and public opinion offers an insight into the emerging complexity surrounding mass communication that has been created in the 21st century. Luhmann’s theory of the mass media encapsulates a discussion of the structural coupling of the mass media system with the political process as illustrated in Table 7. He plugs a gap in Habermas’s model of the political public sphere by providing crucial insight into how broadcasting and publishing media sit at the centre of civil society shaping the ways in which public opinion formation finds expression; typically pushing it towards the middle of the political spectrum.

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Table 7 The Structural Coupling of the Mass Media System to the Political Party System POLITICAL PARTY SYSTEM Party Central Office Annual Conference Policy Formation Constituency Action Canvassing

MASS MEDIA & SOCIAL MEDIA SYSTEM News Broadcasting Newspaper Editorials Political Blogs Interpreting Polling

Public Opinion Formation

Left…….Centre…….Right ELECTORATE Luhmann (2000) developed his theory of the mass media system toward the end of his life but it contains the same conceptual structures and autopoietic principles as employed in his analysis of other social systems. He made a number of key observations about the nature of the mass media system. First, the mass media system is not interactive with any other social system, or indeed with civil society and the political public sphere. The technology used to facilitate communications does not allow two-way communication. It is aimed at viewers, listeners and readers. Even those television and radio broadcasts which involve tapping in to the opinions of members of the public, is understood by Luhmann to be part of the production of the media event rather than a routine aspect of communication between structurally coupled systems (media system and psychic system). The concept of media technology in his theory includes telecommunications, internet streaming, satellite broadcasting, books,

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magazines, newspapers manufactured by a printing press, and all electronic and digital technology which allows copying, are understood as being the technology of the mass media system which forms the environment for the media system’s operations. …the technology of dissemination plays the same kind of role as that played by the medium of money in the differentiation of the economy: it merely constitutes a medium which makes formations of form possible. These formations in turn, unlike the medium itself, constitute the communicative operations which enable the differentiation and operational closure of the system. (Luhmann, 2000, 2)

What Luhmann is arguing here is simply that no interaction among “those co-present” can take place between sender and receiver. Further that the technology is merely the medium through which communication is made possible and it should not be understood as the factor which produces revolutions in communication; technological development only produces revolutions in technology. What people do with the technology is a sociological phenomenon not a technical issue. Luhmann is therefore asserting that technology cannot directly change society. Society changes itself by reacting to changes in its technological environment. This is clearly evident in the way people have responded to technology in terms of what it allows them to do or choose to do. While some technologies may be embraced widely, others gradually fade in their popularity together with the social habits associated with a technology (see Srivastava, 2005).

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Table 8 Luhmann’s Model of the Mass Media System Incorporating Social Media MASS MEDIA Construction of Public Opinion in a noninteractive mode

SOCIAL MEDIA Expression of Personal Opinion through usergenerated social networks

Media Code: Information/NonInformation

Media Code: Information/NonInformation

NEWS & DOCUMENTARIES Key function: establish societal memory

Influence indirect Key function to facilitate global interactive communication

ADVERTISING Key function: “use the lineation of surface to suggest depth” ENTERTAINMENT Key function: structural coupling of psychic systems to social systems

Facebook Myspace Instagram Twitter YouTube Blogspot Snapchat

TECHNOLOGY TVs, PCs, Internet, iPhones, Satellite

POLITICAL PUBLIC SPHERES in CIVIL SOCIETY

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As with other social systems, the modern mass media system is structured and driven by its operational code which is information/noninformation which determines what is and is not selected and what is deemed to be meaningful or not meaningful for inclusion in the various programme strands within the system (see Table 8). In contemporary society the mass media system confronts us with different models of individuality and accentuates, in a classically anthropocentric way, the centrality of human control and purpose in everything that happens. The news strand, for example, presents politics and politicians as agents in control who produce outcomes through their actions and policies. The advertising strand portrays a model of individuality in which people are calculating, and market orientated, who need variety and knowledge to determine what products to buy and what activities to pursue. The entertainment strand also offers us choices about what type of personalities we find attractive; biographies, fictional narratives, problems and aspirations which we can consider. The cognitive map provided by the fictional world of entertainment allows the psychic system to structurally couple with a wide variety of worlds and helps the individual to make selections from the fictional world for guidance in how to navigate the real world, or what is interpreted by others as a representation of the “real world”. While advertising and entertainment have undoubted effects on how people think and feel about world events, the production of news and documentaries connect the individual more immediately and directly to everyday events and social issues within the political public sphere and has, consequently, more impact on their attitudes and behaviour as actors in the political and policy processes. The news strand of the mass media system selects data from the complexity of events, personalities and issues in its environment to construct information for broadcast or publishing to the public; it only deals with public information and not private information. In constructing news and reports from the selected information, the media system systematically ignores other information which it has not selected; noninformation is the material which is deemed not for broadcast but it remains part of the chaotic complexity of the media’s environment (what is not broadcast is not known but it can be used by other media sources and then it provides an alternative knowledge). The selection process is shaped by factors relating to programming type and criteria of suitability but also the currency of the information. News broadcasting in particular is pressured to produce “new” information because information that has already been broadcast becomes non-information and uninteresting quickly. However, non-information can be re-cycled if a particular news

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item moves into the category of ongoing which requires analysis. Stuart Hall and his colleagues conceptualised this pressure process in an interesting way in their classic study of deviance and the media (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts, 1975). They argued that due to the pressures of time to get material out, the mass media system routinely taps in to what they called the primary definers of social and political reality such as politicians, economists, and other specialist academic commentators who are readily to hand and who are regarded as the experts used to set the news agenda and interpret it for the presumed audience. Newspapers in particular translate primary definitions into what they regard is the public idiom or language of their assumed audience: the tabloids typically present shallow accounts of events, accompanied by eye catching headlines and offer little analysis. The popular press interprets their role as getting things across to the public. Newspapers tend to be explicitly partisan, adopting definite viewpoints which are reflected in editorials and which typically exclude views contrary to the newspapers “editorial line” from entering the public domain of their readership. Broadcasting media, constrained by greater levels of regulation, are more balanced in their selections but nevertheless exercise editorial power over what will and will not be broadcast3. Digital technology has allowed the variety of channels and broadcasting outlets to expand. Luhmann died before he was able to incorporate the digital expansion into his analysis. However, it is clear that the upsurge of radio presenting styles which offer an aggressive political voice on the airwaves, invariably right of centre, and news channels such as Fox in America, which explicitly use partisan political criteria to select information for broadcast, reinforces and intensifies the problem of bias in mass media broadcasting which Habermas, the Frankfurt School and Noam Chomsky, to name only a few, would claim lead to distorted communication in the political public sphere (see Strinati, 1995). It is the acceleration of the speed required to discover, select and broadcast new information which exacerbates the complexity of information choices 3

An emerging source of transparent and trustworthy journalism is that which is based on what is referred to as ‘open source journalism’: it draws on information and data that is freely and already publically available on the internet. The website Bellingcat (https://www.bellingcat.com/), renowned as the source of information about the identities of the Russian suspects of the Salisbury poisonings, is one of the best known for this type of journalism. The methods of their investigations are made explicit to heighten the credibility of the website and the stories they publish. This type of journalism could transform the political public sphere in the years to come.

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shaping public opinion. It also leads to information which is geared to electoral politics rather than informing the public about broader and deeper issues of policy which may deviate too markedly from the centrist political assumptions of programme editors. The mass media system in Luhmann’s theory engages the psychic system of the individual, connecting it with society and the market. It is primarily concerned with its own autopoiesis by fuelling the need for new information and public opinion, which has nothing to do with human subjectivity or facilitating rational discourse about things that matter, and everything to do with is own autopoiesis. Moeller (2006) observes that public opinion is very efficient at perpetuating the mass media system. “It never grows tired; you can always connect it with itself” (2006, 138). The structural coupling of the mass media system with the political system has very direct effects on the nature of the political process, particularly electoral politics. Luhmann argued that the news strand of the mass media system forms a distinct sub-system external to politics but structurally coupled to both politics and the administrative sub-systems of the state. Politics deals with the symbolic level of decision making; allowing the argument and evidence of political interaction to culminate in the agreed premises on which binding decisions will be made. A key role in the production of legitimacy for the decision-making process will be performed by the mass media system through its medium of communication which is pre-eminently the organisation of “public opinion”. The mass media system creates societal memory (it allows society to reflect on itself and talk to itself) but it also constructs a series of “realities” about society and it does this through its currency which is public opinion: “today’s public opinion is the basis of tomorrow’s and the continuation of yesterday’s” (Moeller, 2006, 138). Moeller (2006), interpreting Luhmann on this point, describes public opinion as “the stuff with which society manufactures its general self-description” (2006, 139): it sets policy agendas; generates ideas about personal lives, what constitutes welfare dependency and welfare deservingness, and, of course, what is meant by the word Brexit, the value of immigration and the consequences for life in a post-Brexit society and so on. They are all formulated and disseminated through the organs of the mass media system which in modern times has been augmented by social media (Fuchs, 2014; Livingstone and Lunt, 2013). These notions are all discursive constructions that are not, as indicated above, reducible to human subjectivity or indeed rationality or truth (see Luhmann, 1990a: 203-218; Moeller, 2006: 138-139). The structural coupling of the political system and the mass media system compels the former to incorporate political and

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policy “irritation” into the political process because access to power and government is only obtained through the successful “reading” of public opinion; the currency of the mass media system as an autopoietic system. Luhmann (1990) argued, therefore, that the political parties must engage with public opinion and so they are forced to design social and economic policies that are risk averse and that offer the best chance of gaining and retaining electoral success (see Table 7). The development of social media is, perhaps, regarded as the emerging conduit for revitalising the political public sphere. In contrast with the mass media system, it represents the emerging interactional arm of the system. However, it poses particularly difficult issues about regulating what at first seems a global public sphere. Fuchs (2014) identifies what he calls the three antagonisms shaping contemporary social media. First the economic antagonism between users’ data and social media corporations profit interests. Second the political antagonism between users’ privacy and the surveillance-industrial complex which leads to the citizen’s desire for accountability of the powerful and the secrecy of power. Third the civil society antagonism between the creation of public spheres and the corporate and state colonisation of these spheres. (Fuchs, 2014, 89)

Fuchs argues that social media has “the potential to be a public sphere and lifeworld of communicative action, but that this sphere is limited by the steering media of political power and money” (2014, 89). However, there is another issue which might compromise the world of social media assuming a key role in revitalising the modern version of a political public sphere. It relates to the issue of “barriers” referred to earlier in relation to Parkin’s theory of political deviance, specifically the degree of exposure or protection afforded to individuals and social groups against manipulative and misleading information or news. Social media appears to disinhibit users and the internet allows volumes of uncorroborated facts, analyses and comment to circulate without challenge. It is not a structured and disciplined public sphere in any sense that might incorporate the discourse ethics set out by Habermas. It allows a wide variety of voices to participate without necessarily cultivating reason or consensus. Andrew Sayer (2017) captures the key difference between what we might call the political discourse of social media and Habermas’s model of the ideal speech situation. Political discourse, especially regarding topics of popular concern, is predominantly eristic – that is, conducted in order to gain victory over opponents and persuade others by any means that works, regardless of

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whether the arguments are logical or illogical, empirically supported or not. It is driven by self-interest rather than a desire to find the best accounts, explanations, and courses of action, and it is characteristically impatient. (Sayer, 2017, 156) .

Concluding Comments This chapter has discussed a range of issues which have their origins in Habermas’s early analysis of the public sphere and the social lifeworld. In developing his early analysis, I have suggested that Habermas came to recognise the autopoietic character of the legal system which confronts the individual as a fact, and also acts as a bridge between system and lifeworld by functioning as a translator of the normativity of the social lifeworld, or lay normativity as a I have called it here. In the words of Baxter (2011), law in the analysis advanced by Habermas in Between Facts and Norms “mediates between the ordinary language communication of the political public sphere and the specialised languages of (administrative) power and money” (Baxter, 2011, 153). In thinking about the application of Habermas’s theory of discourse and the lifeworld to the real world of politics, it has been observed that the complexity of modern society has been increased by the growth of the mass media system and social media which in their operation clearly undermine the prospects of finding an institutional space in present-day society where discourse ethics might shape rational debate and decision making about public policy. Indeed, the empirical research on the social attitudes of people living in poverty and economic hardship discussed in this chapter suggests that they reflect the partisan and confusing voices emanating from a chaotic mass and social media system rather than the lived experiences of their community. The distancing narratives used by respondents to separate themselves from nameless “others” who are deemed to be work-shy and fraudulently undermining the social security system, exposes intra-social class divisions which are shaped as much by “fake” news as reasoned argument. These views are reinforced by the easy and immediate access available to everyone to voice their opinions about everything without constraint. The uninhibited abuse allowed to circulate on social media and fuel misconceptions about politics and social policy only serves to reinforce social divisions. The political public sphere today lacks the controlled vibrancy and oppositional force for which Habermas and Negt and Kluge might have wished when they were initially writing about its democratic potential several decades ago. Chapter 5 will focus attention on the emotional rather than the rational or moral dimension of system-lifeworld relationships. The key issue to be

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discussed will be the process whereby emotion and empathy are disembedded from caring relationships in work settings which demand “emotion work”. System and lifeworld become entangled in such a way that the paradox of the welfare system is increasingly being exposed in child care, social work and the care of the elderly.

CHAPTER FIVE HUMAN EMOTION AND THE PARADOX OF SOCIAL WORK

Introduction This chapter will concentrate on the relationship between system and human emotion. There is an important reason why those using autopoietic systems theories should examine the emotional dimension of social life; psychic systems live in the environments of all the social systems of human society. People have an emotional dimension which is socially constructed and is not simply a biological residue of being human. The development of complex social systems shapes not only the cognitive fields of the human being but also, simultaneously, their feelings, passions, sentiments and fears1. It is the translation of these emotions into system “noise” which colours the way the psychic systems of people make sense of social reality and how they respond to the social organisations which impact on their lives. Emotion is both effected by the functioning of complex social systems and in turn effects those social organisations by creating demands on how they function. There is, of course, another reason why it is important to consider the place of human emotion in the relationship between the welfare system and the social lifeworld. The enlightenment ideas which have driven the popular view of the welfare state as a progressive project have been challenged in modern times because social policy often appears to be designed with cost cutting rather than social solidarity in mind: it is shaped by a bureaucratic rather than a caring ethos. Insecurity, fear and stigma are 1

Phelps (2006) discussing recent collaborative work between psychology and neuroscience comments ‘as our understanding of the cognitive neuroscience of emotion and cognition grows, it is increasingly apparent that the division of human behaviour into emotion and cognition is not as clear as previous philosophical and psychological investigations have suggested. The mechanisms of emotion and cognition appear to be intertwined at all stages of stimulus processing and their distinction can be difficult’ (p.46). Also see Calkins and Bell (2010).

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the emotions which claimants of the welfare system most often associate with the modern institutions of the welfare state. The social altruism associated with the early years of the mid-20th century welfare state appears to have given way to selfishness and social security has been replaced by the social precariousness of a low wage, gig economy. I have discussed the problems associated with the introduction of Universal Credit in earlier chapters. In this chapter the focus will be on the caring professions, specifically social work and social care. It is the paradoxical confusions which lie at the heart of social work practice which is of particular interest here. The key focus will be on the changing character of social sentiment, starting with a discussion of Norbert Elias’s seminal analysis of the civilising process, before turning attention to the more direct influence of system on human emotion discussed in the work of David Riesman (1971), Arlie Hochschild (2003) and Stjepan Mestrovic (1997).

Homines Aperti: The History of Human Nature Norbert Elias (1979, 1982 and 2010) incorporated an understanding of the emotional dimension of social and human development in the evolutionary processes leading from simple to more complex social structures; a development which he called “the civilising process”. Uniquely among 20th century sociological theorists, he tied together the political, social and psychological aspects of societal development and, rather than treat individuals as being in opposition to society, Elias saw them as being entwined in a historical process in which change in one evolves change in the other. As discussed in chapter 1, Elias treated the processes of state formation, socio-genesis and psycho-genesis as evolving into constantly changing figurations which no one individual, group or social class determined or steered. In that sense I argued earlier that there is a similarity between Luhmann and Elias in the way they understood the development of western societies and their pathway from simple social structures to increasingly more complex forms of social organisation based on differentiated function systems. Both theorists were alive to the political and socio-economic processes which can halt and possibly reverse this developmental process. So, I suggested that there is a possibility that processes of system de-differentiation can lead to decivilising tendencies, whereby inter-personal and state violence increases and intolerance of the “other” sets in. In Elias’s theory system and lifeworld are “structurally coupled” within malleable and constantly changing socio-political figurations.

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The interesting aspect of Elias’s theory of the civilising process is that he provides a history of human nature (Elias, 1979, 1982 and 2010). At the centre of this analysis is an historical description of the shift, both in society and sociological and philosophical thinking, from what he called homo clausus in which the individual is understood as the “I deprived of the us”, or the “closed-off individual” characteristic of feudal social structures, to homines aperti, or the open and mutually interdependent person characteristic of modern complex western societies. The balance between We and I change as state formation processes create the conditions which lead to pacification and, crucially, the emotional transformation of the individual in modern society into one who develops empathy for the other and an emotional repugnance of cruelty and violence. It is the development of what Elias called a “second nature” which places attention on the emotional dimension of human activity in modern societies. The more complex society becomes, the greater the necessity for people to attune their conduct to others. This process starts in childhood through family and community socialisation where personality formation begins: social interdependence builds empathy, consideration for the other and what might be called the “wiring up” of the psychic system creating a “second nature”2 which provides a cognitive and emotional layer of human comportment above the merely animalistic (see Calkin and Bell, 2010 for a discussion of the neuroscience dimension to these processes). Elias observes: What is decisive for a human being as he or she appears before us is neither the ‘id’ alone, nor the ‘ego’ or ‘superego’ alone, but always the relationship between various sets of psychic functions…It is these relationships within people between drives and effects that are controlled and socially instilled agencies that control them, whose structure changes 2

The idea of a second nature refers to a disposition to exercise self-constraint, to get-on with people rather than view them as a potential threat and to anticipate the feelings of others in advance of encountering them because social relationships in society are predictable and taken-for-granted. In an orderly society our emotional states are shaped by predictability, a sense of security and recognition by all of the gregarious nature of the human condition. This, however, does not mean that deviations from behavioural norms which accompany war, social disorder and natural catastrophes cannot happen and fundamentally test our second nature. Austerity and ever widening inequalities in wealth and life chances, leading to what Wacquant (2008) calls advanced marginality in contemporary western societies, is leading to an upsurge in violence and institutional anomie in many regions of Europe and North America.

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Chapter Five in the course of the civilising process, in accordance with the changing structure of the relationships between individual human beings in society at large…’consciousness’ becomes less permeable by drives, and drives become less permeable by ‘consciousness’…In simpler societies elementary impulses have an easier access to people’s reflections. (Elias quoted in Wouters, 2007, 202 from the 2000 American edition of the Civilising Process)

The balance between I first and We first reverses. These evolutionary processes take place over a long developmental time frame and are unplanned and unforeseen. They develop progressively and from the midpoint in the twentieth century onwards there has been a generalised tendency in contemporary western societies towards what Cas Wouters (2007) has called informalisation. A shift has occurred in the way etiquette and social regulation have been expressed from a disciplinary or formalising phase of the civilising process, where self-regulation is dominated by external social constraints from others, to the informalisation phase where an “emancipation of emotions” becomes apparent “as more people developed a type of self-regulation that is more ego-dominated, the prevailing tension shifted to the balance between conscience and consciousness, or, between superego and ego” (Wouters, 2007, 203). From the mid-point in the twentieth century there has been a speeding up of what Elias called functional democratisation in which more and more people came to be recognised as performing a useful function in society and were increasingly accorded admission to centres of power and cultural authority. Wouters describes this process in the following way. Some groups of people, formerly excluded, came to be recognised as fellow human beings, just as some impulses and emotions the humanity of which was denied, came to be acknowledged as such…it was a social as well as a psychical de-hierarchisation, opening up or levelling. (Wouters, 2007, 202)

This perspective on informalisation and the emancipation of emotions has been chronicled in a number of pieces of classic sociological research which is helpful in examining the relationship between system and human emotion.

Other Directedness and Synthetic Emotions David Riesman (1971) and his colleagues attempted to capture what they saw as the changing character types dominating post-war American society, specifically the period beginning in the 1950s when economic,

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cultural and social life in the post World War II era began to reveal what Wouters has called above the “emancipation of emotions” and “psychical de-hierarchisation”. While Riesman was at pains to qualify the distinction between types and persons in his typology, arguing that all societies have a mixture of all three of the types described in his scheme, he nevertheless suggests that the movement from one social formation to another brings about a predominance of one type over the others. The argument advanced by Riesman had foundations in a typology of character types which identified three historically grounded styles or varieties. Tradition-directed types, which dominated pre-industrial societies, were distinguished by adherence to rituals, routines and “doing things the way they were always done”. The social mores of the time allowed little to no individual deviation from prescribed social practices. This character type was shaped by societies that were organised around strong family and kinship relationships which acted as guardians of the traditions which lubricated their lives. Inner-directed types emerged as part of the developmental processes leading to industrial society. The rapid expansion in the mobility of people and their inventiveness, combined with the growth in the production of goods and capital accumulation as society modernised, led to changes in what Riesman calls “modes of conformity”. While he acknowledged a cultural variation between Protestant and Catholic countries, his argument is that generally “the source of direction for the individual is inner…implanted in early life” (Riesman, 1971, 15). The prescriptions of tradition were abandoned in favour of self-reliance and a willingness of the individual to take personal responsibility for overcoming the endless novel situations which confronted them in a rapidly transforming and industrialising society. The inner-directed person tackled the challenges of novelty and complexity by drawing on a rigid sense of mission which was acquired in early life from elders who fixed what Riesman calls an ‘inner gyroscope’ in their psychical structure. The most significant change for our purposes is the third character type described by Riesman as the other-directed type. Riesman looked to the lives of metropolitan middle-class Americans in the 1950s as the exemplar of the emerging other-directed type. They were the social class most involved in the burgeoning service and communication sectors of the economy; they were employed in the financial, advertising and retail services and primarily focused on consumption rather than production. This post-war generation became the participants in what economist J.K. Galbraith described as the “affluent society” (Galbraith, 1999). Riesman’s other-directed type was “corporate man” of the twentieth century revealing to all Americans their cultural future. He initially hesitated in

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over generalising about this type, recognising that there remained parts of American society in the 1950s and 60s which lived to a different rhythm compared with New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Today, however, it could be said that modern western societies meet most of the criteria that Riesman would have included in a description of other-directed behaviour. He observed: What is common to all the other-directed people is that their contemporaries are the source of direction for the individual-either those known to him or those with whom he is indirectly acquainted, through friends and through the mass media. This source is of course ‘internalised’ in the sense that dependence on it for guidance in life is implanted early. (Riesman, 1971, 21)

It is the process of “paying close attention” to what others are saying, doing and signalling that helps the other-directed type orientate their actions and select the criteria to construct their social goals. This understanding of the importance of the mass media in modern society was ahead of its time. As we saw in chapter 4, the growth of the internet and information technology, which is mobile and relatively cheap to own, has transformed how people communicate and the varieties of information they are exposed to. Other-directedness has developed and matured to such an extent today that the concept now requires an analytic overhaul because the processes that were only just becoming visible at the time of Riesman’s original research have transformed both the cognitive and emotional nature of social life in the modern age. Following Riesman’s lead, Mestrovic (1997) has argued that the otherdirected type has become so typical of modern western society that it has led to a new sociological phenomenon which he calls postemotional society. He interprets Riesman as identifying a troubling problem of modern differentiated society, that of the loss of emotion: the superficiality and immediacy of communications and fashions which characterised the emerging affluent social order of the 1950s and 60s, has matured into a society of the unemotional. Mestrovic, however, argues that this misdescribes the nature of what has happened. The complexities of a modern differentiated society, organised around autonomous function systems, has led to a disconnection between emotions and intellect3. For 3 The disconnection between ‘emotion’ and ‘intellect’ arises particularly in circumstances where the proximity of the individual to people, an issue or a social problem is distant. In line with Elias’s thesis, de-civilising tendencies emerge in circumstances of extreme social and spatial division. Wacquant (2008) calls this ‘advanced marginality’. We do not empathise with the Other because do not know

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Mestrovic, the maturation of other-directedness into postemotionalism has led not to unemotionalism but to “curdled indignation and being nice” (Mestrovic, 1997, xi). It is the phenomenon of “pre-packaged emotions” which characterises the postemotional society. Drawing on George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Mestrovic argues that it is not only the ideological and cognitive manipulation of social and political reality that occurs, as Orwell’s prescient novel pre-figured, but today it is also the “manipulation” of emotions. War is peace: “soldiering no longer makes use of machismo emotions pertaining to war; rather…the US Army is more than a job, it’s an adventure” (1997, xiii). Big brother is watching you: “there is no need for Big Brother to watch you when the power of the peer group is so much stronger than the power of the government” (1997, xiii). Newspeak becomes Entertainmentspeak: the difference between news and entertainment erodes. Newscasters must be “nice” and attract viewers and “the masses learn more about world events from psychodrama” (1997, xiii). Doublethink: “emotional cleansing” becomes the key objective of political presentation. “Once you are hooked, the rational arguments do not connect with the emotional appeal” (1997, xiii). Controlling emotional reactions controls how the past, present and future are viewed and understood. Today people’s engagement with a whole host of issues ranging from war, genocide, population displacement and famine to cheap third world labour producing luxury goods is, Mestrovic argues, at best on an intellectual level and rarely at an emotional level sufficient to prompt outrage and political action (see Rodger, 2003). The assumption must be that caring is all very well until it conflicts with material interest and personal lifestyle choices in the West. While the postemotional society thesis does capture the sense of the splitting of emotion from intellect that has become visible in many contemporary political, policy and cultural activities, its primary message is that the modernist project is struggling to maintain currency in societies which are increasingly grappling with a darker and ungenerous side of their political culture. The postemotional thesis applied to the debate between Luhmann and Habermas, or the distinction between system and lifeworld, resonates with what Mestrovic refers to as “modernity 1” and “modernity 2”: the former reflects a sociological vision of society which the Other except through second hand accounts which describe those we are unfamiliar with as a threat. More benignly we can often display support for needy causes because intellectually we acknowledge genuine need. However, the response may be at an intellectual level (it is what one should do and feel) rather than at an emotional or visceral level because we identify with those suffering. I will return to this issue in chapter 6.

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promotes stability, social order, functionalism and a gradualist view of progress in which “social life itself is made to run as if it were a machine” (Mestrovic, 1997, 78); the latter acknowledges the changing rhythms of complex differentiated social structures but asserts the necessity to criticise established institutions and political practices when stability becomes stagnation. The basic tension between these opposing views of modernity is that they seem to collapse into one particularly unpleasant figuration in which the outward display of “niceness”, optimism and orderly behaviour combines with the ascendency of selfishness. It is the disappearance of altruism which seems to be characteristic of the postemotional society. The idea of “two modernisms” discussed by Mestrovic frames the issue of paradox referred to at various points in this book. This is revealed inside welfare systems which are designed to offer care and support to vulnerable people but instead collapse into bureaucratic imperatives which are designed to deflect attention from their palpable failures to accomplish their mission. There is an additional conceptualisation of the emotional side of social and commercial life that should be brought in to the analysis. It is the ways in which the system (whether that be commercial, medical or caring) demands that the individual worker deploys their emotional reservoirs in order to enhance the delivery of an organisational service. Indeed, the more professional and middle class the occupation, the greater is the requirement that individual employees “sell their personality” and develop “high degrees of emotion and display management” (Hochschild, 1979 and 2003).

The Managed Heart Barrett (2006) from the perspective of cognitive psychology draws attention to an important observation about emotions. People believe that they know an emotion when they see it, and as a consequence assume that emotions are discrete events that can be recognized with some degree of accuracy, but scientists have yet to produce a set of clear and consistent criteria for indicating when an emotion is present and when it is not. I propose one solution to this paradox: people experience an emotion when they conceptualise an instance of affective feeling. In this view, the experience of emotion is an act of categorization, guided by embodied knowledge about emotion. The result is a model of emotion experience that has much in common with the social psychological literature on person perception and with literature on embodied conceptual knowledge as it has recently been applied to social psychology. (Barrett, 2006, 20)

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Arlie Hochschild (1979) provides the clearest outline of how the ideas suggested above become embedded into everyday work and social relationships. The gist of her argument can be presented diagrammatically in Table 9. Of particular interest for the discussion here are her observations on the emotional management system which primarily is geared towards successfully establishing the commercialisation of human feeling or what might be described as the commoditisation of emotion for the service of an organisation and the performance of a professional role. She captures this in the very descriptive title of her classic study of air stewards, The Managed Heart. Whenever feeling is “put in to the marketplace, it behaves like a commodity” (Hochschild, 2003, 14).

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Table 9 Emotion Management System FEELING RULES Social and cultural guidelines embedded in interpretative frameworks which dictate the appropriateness of emotional display in terms of extent, direction and duration. Feeling rules are often in conflict with lived experience.

EMOTIONAL LABOUR Emotion is bodily cooperation with an image, a thought, a memory or event of which the individual is aware – emotion management or work is the process of interpreting feeling. Emotion management focuses not only on how people try to feel but also on how people try to appear to feel.

EMOTIONAL DISSONANCE Discrepancy between what an individual may feel about a situation, image or event, and what they want to or think they ought to feel about a situation, image or event.

RESOLVING DISSONANCE Cognitive: change images, ideas or thoughts in order to change feelings associated them. Bodily: change somatic or physical symptoms by breathing techniques trying to remain still and stop shaking. Expressive: change facial expressions, try to cry or smile.

Suppression

Display

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The organisational system employing an individual will invariably have a commercial ideology, or mission, which will be anchored in a customer relations protocol which in turn provides the framing rules governing the demeanour, attitude to clients and appropriate emotional display expected of employees in the work place. Hochschild observes: When rules about how to feel and how to express feeling are set by management, when workers have weaker rights to courtesy than customers do, when deep and surface acting are forms of labour to be sold, and when capacities for empathy and warmth are put to corporate uses what happens to the way a person relates to her feelings or to her face? (Hochschild, 2003, 89)

In answering this question, she identifies the real problems that “emotional dissonance” can create in workers, especially those on the frontline of the caring professions such as social workers, nurses and social care workers. Hochschild draws on the concepts of deep and surface acting to describe the processes involved in emotional labour. Surface acting requires only that the worker manipulates appearance; pretending to be something that they are not for appearance sake. By contrast deep acting requires the worker actually to imagine and believe that the emotion they are trying to display is real; they are sincere at that moment of display. Professional training is at a fundamental level about coaching the employee, or training the professional, to acquire the skills to engage in both deep and surface acting and be aware of the differences between them in order to better manage their appropriate display. However, only when the employee identifies with the organisation they are employed by, and can switch to performing their role as a “professional” by deep acting, has the skill of emotion management been refined. It is about acquiring the skill to control the extent to which immersion in the moment can appear real but in reality is always being managed by the actor/worker (See Hochschild, 2003, 3555). In returning discussion of emotional labour to the relationship between system and lifeworld, it is important to recognise that there is always a layer between cognition and behaviour, namely, emotional response which is guided by feeling rules which are learned through early socialisation anchored in family and community before they become the “property” of an organisation and employer. Those feeling rules become, in the words of David Riesman, an inner gyroscope which guides how a person relates to social, interpersonal and work dilemmas. However, in the work place it tends to be the system imperatives of an employer’s organisation which predominates. For example, Hochschild draws on the work of Randall

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Collins (1975) on conflict sociology to observe that different social classes and social groups will adhere to sets of framing rules and feeling rules which may from time to time conflict. Indeed, she suggests that conflicting feeling rules can create an arena of political struggle within an organisation or profession. This becomes evident in the field of social welfare, especially where interpersonal relationships between professional practitioner and client are involved. People are attracted to the caring professions such as social work and health care primarily because they seek to engage in employment that is focused on caring for others rather than managing people but the two emotional dispositions can give rise to distinctive framing rules which define meanings in contrary ways. Emotional dissonance can lead to ongoing tensions between, for example, professional field social workers and their departmental or team leaders seeking to “manage” at “arms length” the way their professional role is performed.

The Paradox of Social Work and Social Care The professional encounter between social worker and client provides the best example of the tense and often complicated relationship between contrasting emotional dispositions in a street-level bureaucratic setting. We can return to Luhmann to assist in making the logics at play in different types of encounter visible. He distinguishes between three discrete types of relational codes which structure connections between people: interactional, organisational and social. With respect to understanding the caring and support relationship between professional social worker and client, the interactional and organisational codes come into play. Each relational code gives rise to distinctive system logic. As discussed in the introduction, social systems are defined by their relationship to meaning (see Holub, 1991, 109) and the boundaries of systems are defined by what is meaningful and what is not meaningful to them. So, the client is embedded in the lay normativity and feeling rules anchored in their social lifeworld of family, community and everyday routines while the social worker is attached to a professional and occupational culture which defines her role. There are two sides to the social worker/client relationship which illustrates the paradox of the welfare system in a clear way. For example, interaction, whether it is between two, three or more people, adheres to a set of presuppositions which establish the auspices which allow the encounter to take place. In the context of an encounter between a social worker and a client(s), we must presume that the interaction is grounded in

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the principle that it is the best interests of the client which is given precedence in the face-to-face meeting. The individuals who are present decide what is relevant for their conversation; in strictly autopoietic terms, the interaction operates on the basis of the code present/not present (or us/the rest of the world) because only those present can be part of the interaction and the interactional system exists only for the duration that they are engaged with each other in a face-to-face meeting. Each will draw on their own experiences, problems and normative assumptions in making sense of the conversation between the parties to the interaction and each will contribute to its autopoietic movement. The logic of an interactional system between a social worker and client dictates that typically both parties can speak freely, and that any issues relevant to the client’s circumstances can be discussed openly. Indeed, remedies for the client may be decided by agreement between the two parties alone without interference from those not present. The language of caring and concern may be expressed by the social worker in order to signal to the client empathy and emotional engagement about the circumstances which have led to the meeting. In reviewing the role of the social worker in the 21st century, Asquith, Clark and Waterhouse (2005, 2) identify six key roles of the professional practitioner, three of which are clearly based on offering caring and supportive help to the client by acting as a counsellor (or caseworker) who works with individuals to help them address personal issues; as an advocate on behalf of the poor and socially excluded; and as a partner working together with disadvantaged or disempowered individuals and groups. The model of the practitioner/client relationship which emerges here appears to be one which is primarily about befriending and shaped by an ethos of care. However, there is another side to the encounter which is often obscured by the conviviality displayed by the practitioner’s emotion management, namely the “voice” of the not present organisation which is being represented by the social worker. While the client is relatively powerless, the social work practitioner represents the organisational face of the welfare state and may be required to draw on social work law to ensure that whatever remedies are to be implemented, or indeed imposed, on the client, they will have been approved in advance by both the organisational and legal systems underpinning the practitioner’s role. The communication code in this professional encounter is always asymmetrical. While it may appear that the parties present are conversing in an informal and friendly way, engaging through the medium of caritas structured by the code us/the rest of the world, the relationship can quickly involve the absent voices of the administrative and legal systems entering the conversation, transforming

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the logic of the encounter from an interactional to an organisational logic operating on the codes lawful/unlawful, if an issue arises relating to problematic behaviour and the supervision of children, or payment/nonpayment, if an issue arises which relates to the provision of a social service which requires to be funded. The organisational logic dictates that the professional social work role must be subject to an established protocol relating to how interviews should be managed and decisions made. This information will be known in advance of the meeting with a client and all professional practitioners will be expected to follow its strictures. The report by Asquith, Clark and Waterhouse (2005, 2-3) underpin this observation when they list the remaining three key roles of the modern social worker, two of which have explicit regulatory functions and one which relates to the management of material resources. First, the social worker must be an assessor of risk which can be associated with surveillance of the movements and daily activities of the client in addition to making judgements about his or her mental well-being. This role may conflict with the supportive counselling aspects of the social worker’s responsibilities to a client. Second, in the role of care manager, the practitioner is consigned to a purely administrative and coordinating set of activities arranging services for a client with whom they may have little direct contact. The social worker as care manager plays a crucial role in determining the suitability and eligibility of the client for services which must be paid-for. Third, the social worker is an agent of social control who helps to maintain the social system against the demands of individuals whose behaviour may be problematic. The social worker becomes involved in “the policing of families” to draw on the language of Jacques Donzelot (1980)4. Beyond the world of the professional social worker lies the third sector volunteer who is increasingly being called on by both central and local government to contribute to the delivery of key social services, particularly those that lie outside the boundary of statutory obligation by the state, an issue discussed in chapter 2. The work of the volunteer does not escape the reach of paradoxical confusion. They are placed at the centre of it by the fact that voluntary work has to be “organised”. Many aspects of social care and voluntary social work are undertaken by people who engage in ordinary everyday activities such as visiting, befriending 4

Asquith, Clark and Waterhouse (2005) also draw attention to the changing ideological and policy models which have transformed the social work profession in the past three decades: welfare paternalism; consumerism; managerialism; and participationism. Each model signals a change in the approach to professional practice.

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and shopping to supplement the effort made by the statutory public and private paid-for services to people in need. La Cour and Hojlund (2008), applying Luhmann’s systems theory to a study of voluntary social work in Denmark, capture the sense of confusion and paradox which lies at the heart of the voluntary effort: Voluntary work emerges…as a paradox because it is tied to an effort that links up with both sides of a distinction between interaction and organisation…voluntary user-oriented social effort emerges as a paradox because it is impossible to decide whether the effort functions on the conditions of presence or…represents an organisational logic where actions refer back to the decisions of an organisation. (La Cour and Hojlund, 2008, 49)

La Cour and Hojlund argue that the paradox is impossible to resolve because to manage the voluntary work in advance of it being delivered “will immediately pollute the voluntary spirit”. However, to leave it unorganised risks a service being patchy and uneven and, occasionally, being overly reliant on the self-organising capacities of individual volunteers which from time to time may lead to no delivery of a service at all. They identify three issues which highlight the structural tensions created in voluntary social service between an interactional and organisational logic. First, the definition of quality involved in service delivery echoes both sides of the interaction/organisation distinction. Quality can be and often is understood as a negotiated and emergent property of agreement between the two people involved in the interaction: it becomes what the parties feel at ease with because it is felt to be comfortable and non-challenging. Quality in this sense becomes what is defined by the giver and receiver of the voluntary effort based on an interactional logic. However, in arrangements involving partnership between volunteers and local government departments or the NHS, quality becomes what has been decided in advance by an organisational logic. In those circumstances, for example, the standards relating to the frequency, duration and indeed the intensity of visits may not be those that the volunteer and the recipient of the supportive assistance might agree between themselves but rather those that are established by the official offer made to clients by the organisation sponsoring the volunteers work. Second, frequently volunteers must be prepared to submit to processes of “training” to establish their suitability to undertake their volunteer work. The training and the educational practices they engage with must be consistent with the mission and caring ethos of the organisation. In the study by La Cour and Hojlund, they observed.

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To be trained and educated about how best to interact with someone who may only be seeking simple human contact transforms the effort being offered by the volunteer. So, third, organisational rules which relate to the availability of volunteers to carry out their volunteering duties are meaningless if the interactional contact is self-organising and based on mutually beneficial arrangements agreed informally between the volunteer and client. The professional social worker and the social care volunteer operate on the basis of parameters which speak to quite distinctive logics. However, very often the basis on which any form of supportive care is given can be ambiguous and requires to be managed. The default position of systems is that they “organise”. The social worker is not a volunteer but a licensed, educated and trained practitioner of the welfare state whose professional role is underpinned by the possession of legal powers. Managing the paradoxical nature of the social worker role requires high degrees of emotional intelligence on the part of the practitioner to be able to accomplish the many demands of dealing with multiple problems, not all of which can be fulfilled by employing “niceness” and a supportive attitude. This can be illustrated by reference back to Table 5 in chapter 2 which describes the issue of polyphonic communication codes in the context of the relationship between third sector charitable organisations and the welfare state. There I described the necessity of third sector organisations to be able to switch system codes to enable them to communicate with both the political and commercial institutions which fund them on the one hand and the community and client groups they deliver services to on the other hand. This paradoxical arrangement also applies in an especially clear way to social workers and professional social care workers in their dealings with clients. Whenever there is a social worker or social care/client relationship, simultaneously there is also a triadic relationship between the legal, political and psychic systems framing the encounter because all forms of connectivity between people are influenced by the system codes which structure the interaction at a given point. The codes structuring the encounter can switch from background to foreground, depending on the

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tenor of the interaction, but are always present “behind the scenes”. Table 10 illustrates this circular and fluid situation. Initially the medium through which interaction between social worker and client takes place will be what I have called caritas, or caring and empathy (I have described this concept more fully in chapter 2, footnote 1). If, however, a remedy being considered will require an intervention either by a social work department or a law officer, then the medium structuring the relationship will turn towards the law. Should matters of material resources arise, perhaps relating to housing or special caring needs, then the medium structuring the relationship may turn first towards money and the paying for services, or second, in circumstances where that is not an option for a client, then power comes in to play and the social worker or social care volunteer must adopt an advocacy role in support of the client in dealings with financial providers of services in local government or in private philanthropic organisations. Whatever is not present at a given time can make a re-entry and transform the meaning of the initial interaction.

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Table10 The Social Work/Client Encounter

PSYCHIC SYSTEMS in the Social Lifeworld in need of protection and social care

Media Structuring Social Work/Client Relationships Caritas Law Power Money

LEGAL SYSTEM Family Law Social Work Law Child Protection Law Antisocial Behaviour Law

POLITICAL SYSTEM Social Work Dept. Housing Department Social Care Provision

Resolving the Paradoxical Nature of Social Work The relationship between welfare system and human emotion is one in which the authenticity of feeling is shaped and filtered by the operation of organisational logics which circulate around and episodically penetrate social relationships. Feeling rules are constantly created and refreshed in line with social change. At a societal level, the forces of the mass media system establish what is and is not to be known, as was discussed in chapter 4, and we are exposed to the full range of available emotional choices on display through entertainment, news and social media. We can rehearse our emotional responses to the ever-changing events occurring in society before trying them out in reality where they might be observed in public. At the level of the organisation, people as workers submit to the

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disciplines of education and training in the workplace in order to acquire the emotional skill set appropriate to fulfil their work tasks. The human emotion that they may feel for others in their community and in their family is not expected to be visible in face-to-face encounters between worker and the customer/client. At a semantic level the ways in which language and narrative are used in everyday life make us accustomed to what we should be feeling even when we do not feel what society appears to signal that we ought to feel. Occupational training is designed to correct this by placing the issue of emotion management into a frame which presents it as the acquisition of professionalism. Perhaps there is seepage from this type of formal behavioural training which people undertake in their place of work to the everyday social interaction which they then take into civil society. This may be a partial explanation for the disconnection between intellect and emotion described by Mestrovic (1997) and before him David Riesman (1971). Other-directedness has become a feature of the civilising process, and a common manifestation of that orientation is the adoption of what Mestrovic calls postemotionalism which amounts to the display of synthetic emotions in public places, commonly surrounding the death of a celebrity or as part of a national festival of caring such as the BBC’s Children in Need or Comic Relief. This development suggests that there exists an anxiety in contemporary culture about the loss of a sense of national community. Indeed, there may be a concern that without the occasional display of organised public emotion, society will become truly anti-social in the sense that the uncaring attitudes which are often suspected to be widespread and culturally embedded in selfish consumerist behaviour will be validated. All of these problems and issues come together to reveal a shock to the welfare system5 when the abuse of children and other vulnerable people become visible on a scale that undermines confidence in the functioning of 5

The paradox lying at the heart of the whole of the UK welfare system was uncovered by Philip Alston in November 2018. The report by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Professor Philip Alston, stated that “the government had inflicted great misery on its people with punitive, mean-spirited, and often callous austerity policies driven by a political desire to undertake social re-engineering rather than economic necessity. Poverty is a political choice”. The scale of reported destitution and extreme poverty led the government to counter, first, by criticising the language of the report for being overly political, and second, by drawing on its own economic narrative which suggests that austerity policies were necessary to repair the economy after 2010 and that from 2018 onwards the problems identified in the UN report will gradually lessen because its policies have been successful.

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the welfare institutions which have been created to safeguard and protect them. Child abuse in all its gruesome manifestations allows the paradoxical reality of the welfare system’s failures to rise to the top. The paradox for social work’s self-image as the preventer of child abuse…stems on the one side from the impossibility of performing this task in any reliable ‘scientific’ manner…On the other side lies the inconceivability of admitting that the task is indeed impossible, for to do so would threaten the very existence of this social identity and be likely to cause immeasurable damage to general morale. (King, 1995, 320)

At that point the emerging reality that the welfare system cannot protect vulnerable children threatens to become the received wisdom accepted by many in society. When this occurs, the public mood can turn against the social work profession and destabilise the welfare system (trust is lost in practice competence and professional judgement) (see Thompson, 1998, 87-110). The postemotional clamour for sackings, policy change and professional criticism of social workers and social work bureaucracies becomes loud. While the general public will not know the families involved in a particular abuse scandal, many may express attitudes which signal an emotional connection with the victims. While such comments may well be “just what a person is expected to say” rather than reflect an authentic emotion, nevertheless a climate of hostility to the welfare system can be created. See Table 11 listing critical turning points in the modern history of child abuse scandals. Table 11 Landmark Child Abuse Events 1973 The death of 7-year-old Maria Colwell led to the establishment of our modern child protection system. 1984 Further changes were prompted partly by the inquiries into several other child deaths, including 4-year-old Jasmine Beckford. 1989 The Children Act 1989 established the legislative framework for the current child protection system in England and Wales. 1995 Children (Northern Ireland Order) 1995 and Children (Scotland) Act 2000 The death of 8-year-old Victoria Climbie led to Lord Laming’s report (2003) which led to sweeping changes to the way children's services were structured in England and Wales. 2001Establishment of children Commissioners; Review of the 2012 Children’s Hearing System in Scotland; death of 1-year old Peter Connelly and review of social services departments in

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England; Safeguarding Board for Northern Ireland Operation Yewtree (Jimmy Savile legacy); Rochdale sex abuse gangs; historical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and in Football. Ongoing large-scale inquiries into historical child abuse in England and in Scotland.

While abuse has always existed and continues to exist even though modern societies have created a profession and laws to ensure that abuse cannot happen, the issue is frequently treated as if it is a new problem. The phrase “broken society” has been used in recent years to summarise the popular perception of the abuse problem in contemporary society. The association that was engineered between the supposed collapse of the modern family and the upsurge of infamous child abuse scandals in the period after the passing of the Antisocial Behaviour Act 2003, triggered a moral panic about crime and disorder which did little to enhance the reputation of the social work profession (see Rodger, 1996 and 2008; Thompson, 1998, 87-110)). When the paradox of the caring professions becomes visible how can the uncovering of failure be repaired? The answer to this question is that the key systems of knowledge in society frequently come to the aid of social work. The main branches of human knowledge, particularly science, medicine and law, are structured around distinctive functional codes: truth/falsity in the case of science, and perhaps proven efficacy/not proven efficacy in the case of mainstream medicine, because they are both branches of scientific knowledge based on empirical research using positivist methodologies. In the case of the legal system, the code is lawful/unlawful because the legal system possesses exclusive authority to interpret what is and is not legal in a differentiated liberal democratic society. However, statutory social work has been structured on a more opaque hybrid code which draws on a wide range of knowledges: it straddles the worlds of law, medicine, economics and social engineering (social and psychological knowledge relating to behaviour modification and emotion management). The social and caring professions have always had an inability to predict, manage and correct abusive behaviour in ways which would protect them from professional criticism. By incorporating medico-scientific and legal ideas into its occupational practices, social work can shift attention on to “scientific” or “legal” explanations for practice failures rather than on incompetent practitioners. Historically the political oversight and regulation of child protection in the early part of the 20th century drew on explanations which in the light of today’s knowledge seem quite bizarre. For example, a popular apology for paedophilia in political discourse in the last century

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was that it was the child rather than the adult male to blame: it was the sexual precociousness of children which had a “siren” affect on unsuspecting adult male victims. Early 20th century medicine similarly found it difficult to come to terms with the very idea of sexual abuse of a child by an adult male. The discovery of venereal disease in young children was explained away as a product of “poor household hygiene” rather than contact with an adult male abuser. Smart (2000) informs us that in 1909 Dr Flora Pollock of John Hopkins University explained venereal disease in children by their use of dirty towels and toilets because that was the only way to account for the excessively large numbers of infected children. She was, of course, inadvertently uncovering the large scale of child abuse at that time because the problem was not acknowledged nor controlled by law. When it became clear that men transmitted venereal disease to children by actually raping them, the explanation offered was that they did so not for malign reasons but to rid themselves of venereal disease. This view was repeated regularly to the Commissioners on the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases 1916 and it was reiterated throughout the 1920s. What is most interesting about this account…is that it desexualised the sex abuse. The man was said to have no sexual interest in his victim but, equally, she was depicted as completely innocent, little more than an object that was used as a conduit to rid the man of his affliction. (Smart, 2000, 59)

Other attempts to explain what for many people was a threatening form of abnormal behaviour was provided by psychiatry. Influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, medical discourse tended to see child sexual abuse within the frame of fantasy and so the problem lay with the child rather than any person accused of abnormal sexual contact with the child. The language of social work has, over many decades, borrowed from a number of professional paradigms to enhance its professional status and, it should be added, to quieten the large-scale emotional outbursts of anger accompanying the public surfacing of iniquitous abuse cases. The need for the emotional “noise” to be quietened became a pressing concern and the welfare system was forced to consider ways to de-paradoxify its services by offering an acceptable scientific narrative to explain what for many was inexplicable. Medicine, allied to the burgeoning new medical science of psychiatry, was the first discipline to offer remedies for paradoxical confusion. Psychoanalytical perspectives were popular for a while in some areas of work during the middle and end period of the 20th century. However, the adoption of allopoietic systems theory drawn from medical science has been used extensively in social work education to provide a

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practice paradigm for social workers in the field; a paradigm which focuses attention on system balance and stability within the family which, from time to time, has predisposed the social work team to focus on saving families rather than protecting vulnerable children (Rodger. 1996; Boyd, 2019). The profession borrowed the notion of contract from business law as a practice tool when trying to secure negotiated agreements with clients about their problematic behaviour, although in reality the “agreements” were metaphorical rather than legal. These knowledge paradigms have not always worked effectively in support of social work when things have gone wrong (see Rodger, 1996, 167-197). In the era of the welfare state from the inter-war years of the 20th century onwards, the social work profession acquired the responsibility to develop its own knowledge base and scientific competence to “police the families” most likely to offend. With the discovery of the phenomenon of “battered baby syndrome” in the 1960s, an alliance between the medical and social work professions in the field of child protection began to develop (see Hann and Fertleman, 2016). While the diagnosis of physical harm caused by abuse became clearer and more frequently made, prediction of when child abuse would occur and under what circumstances it would occur was less firmly established. Consequently, the combination of poor predictive power in social work departments and the less than infallible ability of social workers to know “dangerousness” in families when they saw it, led to a number of practice failures. Practitioners were accused of precipitate removal of children from their homes when the grounds for such an action were unsound, creating a debate in law and politics about the extent and limits of parental rights in modern society but, more significantly, they were pilloried in cases where the practitioner failed to identify risk which subsequently resulted in increased numbers of children being murdered in families which the social worker had deemed to be safe. The history of social work in the modern welfare state is a history punctuated by periodic professional crises surrounding national child abuse scandals. After each landmark controversy the aim has been to incorporate greater levels of rigour in practice principles and to utilise ways of thinking and working that will improve the practitioner’s control over often quite complex social and behavioural issues when decision making challenges arise. However, regardless of the profession’s best efforts, social work has lunged from one child protection failure to another. Despite many high profile public inquiries and commissions established to examine “what went wrong”, the social work profession has struggled to

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maintain a positive self-image in the face of often hostile public reaction to its shortcomings (see Table 11).

Law’s Authoritative Voice in Social Work Michael King (1995) identifies the crucial role played by the legal system in coming to the aid of the world of social work practice when its selfimage as a competent provider of care and protection for children against abuse is threatened by large scale child protection failures. Using Luhmann’s systems theory, he argues that the law appears best suited to offer the profession a way to de-paradoxify its problematic practice failures. King argues that law is a great concealer and is particularly adept at lending its authority to support “whatever belief systems happen to be socially acceptable at the particular time” (King, 1995, 322). The courts in the past tended to accept unquestioningly the claim that the medicoscientific knowledge that informed social work practice was sound and rigorously tested. However, science and medicine have proved to be problematic supporters of social work practice because elements of their perspective are essentially contestable. Medics have been successful in understanding the physical signs of unnatural trauma on the human body but there is a limit to their capacity to explain the circumstances which led to such injuries. It is clear that the frequency distribution of unexplained broken limbs in children suggests that there is a strong association between poverty, the presence in the house of a male adult who is not the child’s father, incidence of domestic violence, family structure (especially single parent households) and level of education of the child’s main carer. However, while these factors are most common and more frequently than not explain the social patterns of child abuse, they fail to help with cases where a particular family are not poor and family structure is based on what appears to be a stable marriage relationship between parents. Compared with science and medicine, the legal system provides a much better knowledge base to protect the social work practitioner. As noted previously, the value of the legal system lies in its exclusivity in deciding matters of what is lawful and unlawful. The legal system is best suited to address matters of paradox in the welfare system because it has little bother in attending to its own paradoxical confusions: the practices of law are determined as being right by the legal system because they are lawful and only the legal system can determine what is lawful so all matters dealt with inside the legal system are lawful even if those observing the system from outside consider them to be unfair or unjust. When matters of

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universal values, aesthetics, human rights or indeed scientific principle are brought to law, the system deals with them not by adjudicating on whether a piece of art is what it says it is, or whether a human right to free speech has been violated by a prohibition issued by an other authority, or indeed whether the removal of a child from a suspected abusive family was in the best interests of the child. No, the law ignores the substantive issues of social and human values by simply deciding whether the matter before it raises a question of legality. The landmark commissions of inquiry which illuminate the history of child protection have established the importance of the structural coupling of the legal system and the welfare system which oversees social work and social care. Social workers have been encouraged to rely on the legal framework which secures their practice (see Carr and Goosey, 2017). They are expected to do this by determining the “facts” in a case and clearly following the “evidence” of abuse and wrong doing sufficient to be accepted by a court of law. The enduring message from the many commissions of inquiry into social work failures is that by understanding and using their legal powers appropriately the profession can assuage public criticism. The emergence of “legalism” is testimony to the gradual but inexorable change in the welfare state. A process of juridification has taken place in which the social worker has been transformed into a risk manager who is less focused on making professional judgements about what is in the best interests of the family based on sociological and psychological knowledge, and more concerned with “evidence gathering” and following legal and bureaucratic guidance closely. It is the legal system which protects the social work profession so long as the profession acts primarily as law officers rather than social medics.

Concluding Comments The argument of this chapter has been that human emotion has evolved as an embedded aspect of changing political, social and psychological change. The work of Norbert Elias on the civilising process provides an exceptionally clear way of looking at this phenomenon developmentally. As social relationships have become closely interdependent and the networks of social interdependence have become denser in modern complex societies, the emotional dimension of what autopoietic systems theory calls the psychic systems of the human being have adapted to this complexity. Other-directedness, postemotionalism and emotional management are the key concepts drawn on to describe what has happened to people’s emotional life as they work, live and engage in myriad ways

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with the function systems of contemporary society. The social lifeworld incubates emotional reactions in civil society and fires them at the welfare system, often laying bare the paradox which lies at the heart of all social systems; their failure to deliver the services for which they have been designed. In this context, the professional social work role provides a particularly clear illustration of the pivotal role played by the mainstream systems of knowledge in repairing the breach in the welfare system’s walls. While science and medicine have historically been the most favoured disciplines used by the profession, law has proved to have been the most effective in modern times. The social worker draws on a number of different communication codes in the practice setting but in the context of working with families and abuse it is their legal powers which have simplified their role: it has been concluded that the only way the profession can protect itself from public criticism is to rely on facts and evidence. In a sense what the social work profession has to come to terms with is that the practitioner is engaged in a truly polyphonic role which must gel the powers of law and professional authority with the skills of everyday social interaction as a supportive friend. They must recognise the differences between interactional and organisational logics and embrace them both as part of their job. The welfare system and social lifeworld become structurally coupled in the practice setting but it is always an asymmetrical relationship in which the lifeworld is made to bend towards the system imperatives. In the final chapter the analysis augments the discussion of human emotion by focusing on the preeminent principles of compassion and altruism which may well define what is commonly understood as an enlightened welfare society. It is the embodiment of compassion in the institutional solidarity of the modern welfare state which, for many people, defines the nature and purpose of the welfare system.

CHAPTER SIX COMPASSION, ALTRUISM AND THE WELFARE SYSTEM

Introduction The concepts of compassion and altruism appear at first to embody the virtues of enlightenment philosophies which sought to provide a reasoned and practical foundation for the building of societies constructed on the principles of justice, equality and other-regarding social values. However, it is also possible to consider the social and political functions of such enlightenment notions. As with the discussion of human rights in Luhmann’s sociology discussed in chapter 1, at the end point of the book it is interesting to ask a similar question about compassion and altruism: what functions if any do they play in the 21st century welfare system? Martha Nussbaum formulates the key issue concisely. What do we do when we cannot rely upon compassionate actors in public life? It seems obvious that in some areas, such as the judiciary, we cannot embody everything we want in systems of rules, and individual actors will continue to exercise broad discretion. But the final point I want to make here is that compassion can and should inform the structure of public institutions themselves, so that we do not need in every case to rely on the perfect compassion of individual actors. (Nussbaum, 1996, 56)

The welfare system (in all its many ramifications) is the institutional construction which modern societies have evolved to deal with the concern raised by Nussbaum. Historically, the call for compassion to be displayed followed the posing of the question what is to be done about destitution and social injustice? In Luhmann’s terms, it signified “noise” which the political machinery (system) of the day had to quieten after first interpreting the meaning of the “noise” and its consequences for the existing order of society. In the Elizabethan and Victorian eras, worlds in which religion and moral righteousness existed alongside extreme poverty and cruelty, “compassion” in the form of alms was exchanged for social docility and a biddable population. The reality of politics and welfare law

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today is that in line with the historical trajectory established by the Elizabethans and Victorians, compassion, now expressed as social security policy, has been transformed from being embedded in individual acts of virtue and fellow feeling for the suffering of the poor into a bureaucratic exercise in complexity reduction, primarily to stabilise expectations about living in a society driven by work and the market principle. Whilst the creation of the modern post-1945 welfare state was originally an attempt to institutionalise compassion and altruism as social solidarity and, as I discuss below in relation to Titmuss, change the quality of relationships between people to one of mutuality and support, the contours of a harsher and less benevolent system have evolved in the first two decades of the 21st century. Consistent with the argument that has developed throughout this book; I maintain that it is important to acknowledge the relationship between what has been called here system and lifeworld. To see compassion and altruism as not only qualities shaped by the social lifeworld and carried by social actors in their everyday lives but also qualities that are coded in their psychic systems by the institutional arrangements and social systems which structure the society in which they live. When considering compassion and social attitudes to suffering and injustice in the modern welfare state we should take note of Nussbaum’s observation above that compassion “should inform the structure of public institutions” and move beyond a discussion of the political philosophy of virtuous behaviour to include an understanding of the influence of welfare regimes on shaping popular attitudes to suffering. It is the embedding of compassion and social solidarity in the design of welfare policies which establish expectations about social and legal rights of entitlement. As Larsen (2008) and Van Oorschot (2000 and 2006) argue, there is an institutional logic underpinning popular attitudes to social welfare which is revealed by comparative analysis of welfare regimes: people living in predominantly liberal and conservative societies such as the USA (see Alesina and Glaeser, 2005) or Germany (Mau, 2001) tend to be less supportive of the idea of a welfare state than those who live in a social democratic society such as Sweden. There is a view that the length of time a social security system has been in existence, and most western European systems have existed since the early years of the 20th century, the more habituated to welfare and social service support a population becomes (see Rodger, 2000, 55-73) When that longevity of welfare provision is combined with a social democratic left of centre government for large periods of a countries history, as in Sweden and other Scandinavian countries, then it may not be surprising to find that popular support for an extensive welfare state has

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become entrenched in the political and social culture of a society. Graham (2002), for example, explains the uniqueness of the Swedish welfare system in terms of the absence of an “emotional divide” between welfare bureaucracies and citizens. Swedish political culture contains two generally accepted and uniquely Swedish words for thinking about welfare and its purpose; folkhemmet and trygghet (the people’s home and material security). The strange word of trygghet in particular captures the “logic” of the Swedish system and is very suggestive of how system levels principles affect population attitudes to something which for many people in other European countries remains a controversial issue. Trygghet often refers to material security and is ubiquitous in discussions of virtually every aspect of the welfare state, the rights and conditions of workers, and the state of society in general…More like a feeling tone or long- lived sentiment than a specific emotion, trygghet is a property of society as a whole. It is generated by and dependent on the material conditions for which the welfare state has responsibility, and is the emotional foundation for individual independence and well-being. (Graham, 2002, 202)

Social entitlements are enshrined in law and provide a yardstick to measure policy innovation and development against the lived principles of Swedish civil society. There is a strong emphasis on egalitarianism in Sweden. Graham refers to “the common feeling” and “the desire to lay a common ground among equals”. The Luhmannian idea of the structural coupling of the welfare system with the psychic systems of the Swedish population is clearly captured in these uniquely Scandinavian ways of thinking about justice, compassion and altruism through the socio-political culture created by a social democratic welfare state. It should be noted, however, that the weakening homogeneity of Swedish society resulting from a liberal policy towards immigration over the past two decades has led to the convergence between Sweden and other countries in the EU, including the UK, regarding populist reaction against welfare for the “other”. Consequently, a more grounded way of looking at the issue of compassion and altruism is to adopt a sociological perspective which focuses on the institutionalisation of virtue in social policies which are engineered within the welfare system. And, of course, as part of that exercise we need to acknowledge that very often the design engineers of the welfare system have frequently lost sight of the social virtues which first stimulated action to formulate “enlightened” policy measures. The evolution of the welfare state in Europe and North America reveals a history of social policy development which from time to time has been

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driven not by social virtue and compassion but by social prejudice and partisan political ideology: the objective has been, as Foucault has observed, to discipline populations rather than create a society of solidarism and mutuality (Foucault, 1977). It is a history in which “compassion” has been used as a substitute for justice in society; the offering of relatively cheap measures to relieve suffering by governments to ensure that a minimum level of social support is provided to those in need while failing entirely to address the more expensive, and politically more difficult, issues surrounding the reward structure of society. The Victorian Poor Law is a clear example of this tendency in history to combine a supposed ethic of compassion with a self-serving behaviourist explanation for poverty, dividing those in need into the deserving and undeserving poor to ensure that the underlying reasons for poverty and destitution are never confronted and the interests of the wealthy were protected (Porter 2006). And, of course, the structure of Universal Credit as it is proposed at the time of writing in 2019, is less about supporting families and children out of poverty by ensuring that the benefit system “supports them into work” and more about downsizing the welfare state by shifting the burden of social security from the welfare system to the precarious minimum wage “gig economy”. The principle of workfare rather than social security prevails.

Titmuss and the Principles of the Modern Welfare State The work of Richard Titmuss provides the best example of a modern theorist of the welfare state steeped in the relationship between social policy and the spirit of social altruism. In the post-1945 period of social reconstruction he was an advocate for progressive welfare arrangements in order to create a society at peace with itself. Administrative structures and enlightened principles anchored in and nourished by the social lifeworld of working-class communities were pitied against the autopoietic market system which, he argued, fed on money and amoralism. In The Gift Relationship, his classic comparative study of blood donation in Britain and America, he captured the moral core lying at the heart of the modern welfare project: privatised and market systems of welfare cannot foster the “moral value of altruism” which is necessary for a just society. In an introduction to the 1997 edition of the book, Oakley and Ashton observe that The Gift Relationship is more than a comparative study of blood donation. The book is the clearest statement of his (Titmuss) moral philosophy: the view that a competitive, materialistic, acquisitive society based on

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hierarchies of power and privilege ignores at its peril the life-giving impulse towards altruism which is needed for welfare in the most fundamental sense. (Titmuss, 1997, 7)

Voluntary blood donation was tantamount to the “gift of a stranger” to another without any expectation that the gift will be reciprocated. It was an act of pure altruism. It represents a momentary example of the “the good society”. It was a view which influenced policy thinking in the period of post war reconstruction and was considered by many in academic social policy to be the best exemplar of liberal-socialist thinking about what a welfare state ought to be. The substantive point made by Titmuss was that the market principle in the field of welfare generally and in blood donation in particular fails as an efficient distributor of scarce resources. He argued that the American system of payment for blood donations created both shortages and surpluses and led to contaminated supplies containing blood borne viruses such as hepatitis and HIV, although the latter problem did not come to light until after Titmuss’s study. In terms of equitable treatment of patients, the American system of blood donation was distributive in the wrong direction because it was mainly the poorer members of society who donated their blood. For example, a large and reliable supply source was the prison system where the donating prisoner faced a number of dilemmas. First, the incentive for prisoners to maximise the income available from blood donation while incarcerated was substantial but it was also a motivation to sacrifice their health for money, particularly in circumstances where there were no checks on the frequency of an individual’s donations. In addition, Titmuss maintained, whether intended or not, there was inevitably moral pressure on prisoners from the institutional authorities to donate in order to impress parole boards, even though “officially” many institutions were required to make clear that remission of sentence could not be bargained against regular blood donation. Nevertheless, Titmuss found that there was a tacit acknowledgement by both prison authorities and prisoners that blood donation “looked good on a prisoner’s record”. Beyond the prison walls the principle of payment for blood was generally accepted in America as the most appropriate way of organising a sustainable supply of blood products for medicine and the pharmaceutical industry because the payment for service nexus was so habitual in American culture; an observation made by Robert Merton (1957) in his classic perspective on anomie and the “American Dream”. The market principle prevailed and a number of variations on the donor payment system were adapted to suit the different circumstances that might arise to

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facilitate giving blood. Titmuss compiled a typology of some of the most common schemes. x The professional donor: someone who donates on a regular basis and is paid on a unit-fee basis weekly or monthly. x The Responsibility Fee Donor: patients who are registered members of such a programme are charged a “responsibility” or “replacement” fee as a deposit. x The Family Credit Donor: these schemes require a family member to make regular donations at least once a year in order to ensure that other members of their family will be covered for blood should they require a medical procedure in the future. All of these schemes, whether organised around cooperative or pooling arrangements, require to be funded by a system of payment for blood. The relationships between the participants will consequently be coloured by the monetary nexus which binds them, although there are undoubtedly elements of voluntarism present in such programmes too. For Titmuss the wholly voluntary basis on which the British NHS operates removes the monetary aspect from the National Blood Transfusion Service. The American system which is predominantly driven by the code payment/no payment is the clearest example of the colonisation of the social lifeworld by the economic system as described in chapter two; transforming relationships based on “other-regarding” social values with those motivated by monetary gain. In a sense Titmuss has, together with Habermas and Elias, contributed significantly to highlighting the conceptual and policy space occupied by the social lifeworld in modern society; illustrating its importance for accentuating the more noble side of the human condition. The conceptual vocabulary used by Titmuss, Habermas and Elias in their different ways expresses the optimistic side of modern society while mindful of the economic forces which can undermine mutuality, compassion and altruism. The significance of having a voluntary system of blood donation for Titmuss was his belief that it would enhance the quality of relationships between people in a good way. However, his preference for thinking about modern welfare relationships in terms of a “gift relationship” and altruism has proved to be problematic. Anthropology has shown us that even in its original and primitive contexts the gift was used as a mechanism to organise economic relationships for selfish and strategic purposes. While money was not at the centre of primitive exchange systems between tribal societies, prestige and power were. The “gift” had economic and political effects on the recipient and imposed obligations on them which were strategically conceived by the donor, something which Marcel Mauss

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(1990) recognised. Similarly, Sahlins’ (1974) study of archaic societies recognised the complexities involved in gift exchange, elaborating a number of distinctions between generalised reciprocity, balanced reciprocity and negative reciprocity which draws our attention to the relevance of the anthropology of the gift for understanding the modern debate about welfare better. The generalised form of reciprocity in contemporary western societies is associated with universal redistributive policies and, more recently, the rising popularity of basic income policy which is designed to foster solidarity in society by blurring the division between givers and takers in the benefits system (Standing, 2011, 171181). This is probably the clearest modern example of a “gift relationship” in the sense used by Titmuss when applied to social security. However, the balanced form of reciprocity, which is associated with the social insurance principle which links benefits to contributions, was the reality of most European welfare systems until the late 20th century when due to the increasing complexity of demands on modern social security it has gradually given way to the negative form of reciprocity. In common parlance the negative form of reciprocity has come to be understood as exemplifying the principle of “something for nothing” when applied to the non-pension part of the social security system today. Consequently, most welfare systems in the 21st century under pressure from public opinion, and not a little manipulative propagandising from the political right, have effectively evolved into workfare systems, with the possible exception of the Scandinavian countries where universalism and the solidarity principle have survived better than elsewhere in Europe. The absence of a reciprocal principle to structure unemployment and in-work benefits has become a contentious issue in most complex welfare systems because it is not popularly accepted as a legitimate use of taxpayers money for welfare purposes as revealed by social surveys on attitudes to the welfare state (Rodger, 2000 and 2003; Larsen, 2008; Shildrick and MacDonald, 2013; Van Oorschot, 2006 and 2000). This has led to the continuing prominence given to “deservingness” criteria in the political and policy narratives which surround the welfare debate, something which Titmuss and others did not envisage being a part of a universalist-based welfare system in the UK. Compassion and altruism have emerged in present-day social politics as the moral drivers of the super rich seeking to “do good works” in the neo-liberal wastelands created by post-industrialism and austerity economics. Indeed, many of the super rich having made their fortunes in the world of financialisation now wish to engage in philanthropic actions, perhaps partly to repair the socio-economic damage caused by their “day

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job”. However, that altruistic action requires to be coordinated by government; legal frameworks and financial safeguards must be in place in order to facilitate the altruism of the super rich to occur. The argument advanced in chapter two suggested that the “new philanthropists” are embracing the world of social entrepreneurship by investing in the many charities in the third sector tasked with providing more and more services once provided by a retreating welfare state. Social entrepreneurship seeks to shape the world of charitable enterprise in the same mould as investment finance; striving to create services which are economically sustainable by using the principles of the market and managerialism. The “new philanthropists” may appear to be compassionate and altruistic but not in the original sense of those virtues as understood by Titmuss. The changing relationships emerging today between the third sector, government and the social enterprise system of philanthrocapitalism is determined by the willingness of the charities to adopt new forms of connectivity demanded of them by the economic and legal systems of society. Those relationships are coordinated by the media of law, money and political power rather than caritas. As outlined in chapter two, sources of funding for charities such as banks, government departments and wealthy social investors can only articulate with money, business plans and legally binding contracts rather than simple caritas offered by the philanthropic individual or charitable enterprise. That is why all governments, particularly since the financial crisis in the period between 2008 and 2010, have been engaged in trying to construct an infrastructure of funding and socio-political incentives behind a “civil society strategy” to enable virtuous individuals to engage in “gift relationships” in a more structured and sustainable way. Without government backing for philanthropy, the compassionate individual would soon discover that it is only through engaging with the major social systems of society that real impact on meeting social need can be made. The broader institutional structures of society are crucial for setting agendas for action and resourcing intervention which will result in real material change. In Luhmann’s terms, if compassion is to have a function in modern society it must first become embedded in the codes which structure institutional action. This harder edged vision of modern welfare can be contrasted with a more traditional left of centre view which remains aloof from the realities of complex societies. Lynn Frogett (2002), for example, argues for a transformation in welfare relationships sufficiently far reaching as to be able to cut through the monetary, bureaucratic and divisive practices of the modern welfare system in order to establish authentic social relationships grounded in friendship, voluntary

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association, recognition and an ethic of care. She contrasts this vision of a new formation of enlightened welfare support with three other models of welfare which have existed in our recent history. The old welfare model is associated with the early incarnation of the Beveridge model as translated by post-1945 Labour. That model largely survived the Conservative governments of the 1950s, 60s and 70s because MacMillan, Home and Heath led one nation Tory governments which accepted the mixed economy and the welfare state. The evolution of the mixed economy of welfare was a product first of Thatcherism and the introduction of market and quasi market principles into the welfare sphere and then by the New Labour governments of Blair. The no welfare model remains a vision of the neo-liberal right that is threatening but probably unrealisable as a practical alternative to the welfare state today as is the conception of beyond welfare model as suggested by Frogett. Table 12 summarises the key features of each welfare model. The unshaded square lists the features of a system beyond what is currently imagined. The problem with Frogett’s mode of thinking about this issue is that she presents each model as a totality of “successive paradigms” when in reality the welfare systems of Europe and the English-speaking countries have evolved as mixed systems which contain elements of bureaucratic paternalism, contractualism, self-interest as well as voluntarism and caritas. To repeat the question posed by Nussbaum (1996) again, “what do we do when we cannot rely upon compassionate actors in public life? The answer is that we institutionalise procedures which deliver an ethic of care in professional codes of practice, and specify in law precisely what people are entitled to receive which the legal system will protect against political expediency and the material self-interest of capital. The issue ultimately comes down to whether compassion and altruism can be made to find expression in modern societies, in however an imperfect way, through the institutions which are delegated to meet social need and general welfare. Or as Luhmann might have formulated it, the languages and meanings of money, law and caritas must become structurally coupled in order that translations of different “noises” and meanings can take place in the formulation of legislation and social policy: complexity reduction requires pragmatism.

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Table 12 Welfare Paradigms in post-war British Welfare1 Linking Interpersonal Relationships, Organisational and Cultural Principles and Political Economy OLD WELFARE

MIXED WELFARE

Parent-Child Expert-Client Paternalism Bureau-Professionalism Social Democratic Welfarism

Mixed economy of welfare Contractualism, Consumerism Rights, Reciprocity Interest Group Stakeholder

NO WELFARE

BEYOND WELFARE

Market-led Private Provision Possessive Individualism Self-interest Instrumental Hierarchy Market Competitors

Friendship Voluntary Associations Recognition, Response Ethic of Care

Most of the philosophical literature distinguishes compassion from pity in the sense that compassion requires those who witness suffering to take action (Porter, 2006; Horsell, 2017). Pity reflects a feeling of paternalist and detached concern without any necessary compulsion to intervene (Nussbaum, 1996). Whilst Frogett (2002) is correct in observing, for example, that social and mental health care as currently practiced in many NHS and private care home settings today display mechanistic approaches to caring which are devoid of real caritas, it is difficult to imagine that situation changing in the complex and expensive welfare context of today. Compassion needs to be grounded in political realties and an understanding of the nature of modern social systems. Neo-liberalism not only displaces the moral vocabulary we use to describe and make sense of caring relationships it also distorts the social structures which make more caring relationships possible. The central argument to be emphasised is that we need to look away from the philosophical debate about the virtues of human kind and focus instead on the processes which Elias wrote about 1

Table inspired by Frogett (2002)

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in The Civilising Process (Elias, 1982 and 1979). Civility may be the more important principle to be concerned about simply because if we are civil, polite, thoughtful and empathetic to each other then compassion and other virtues will follow but civility is, as Elias understood, a by-product of an organised and orderly social system. The degeneration of the social lifeworld due to de-civilising processes which disturb empathetic relationships between people in polarising European societies is the current danger. The global economic system is tending to fragment societies and atomise communities.

The Social Lifeworld and the Degeneration of Civility I have written elsewhere about the synergy between the sociologies of Elias and Wacquant on the de-civilising tendencies which are disfiguring present-day western societies (see Rodger, 2012, 87-106)). In Europe and North America people are being excluded to the margins of society by financialisation, de-industrialisation and a retreating welfare state; a socioeconomic process which Wacquant (2008) has described as “advanced marginality”. Before considering compassionate social policy, it is sobering to reflect on the real structural context which frames such a task. The comparative sociology of the structure, dynamics, and experience of urban relegation in the United States and the main countries of the European Union during the past three decades reveals not a convergence on the pattern of the US ghetto, as the dominant media and political discourse would have it, but the emergence of a new regime of marginality on both sides of the Atlantic. This regime generates forms of poverty that are neither residual, nor cyclical or transnational, but indeed inscribed in the future of contemporary societies insofar as they are fed by the fragmentation of the wage-labour relationship, the functional disconnection of the dispossessed neighbourhoods from national and global economies, and the reconfiguration of the welfare state into an instrument for enforcing the obligation to work in the polarising city. (Wacquant, 2007: 66-67)

Here Wacquant is summarising concisely the key structural forces which are pulling all the main Western societies towards a standardised profile in which marginal social groups and marginal communities, which ought to occupy centre place in their economic and policy agendas, are largely ignored, starved of investment and relegated to the periphery of society. Advanced marginality is caused by the growth of the minimum wage/gig economy which creates precariousness in people’s lives, the shrinking of the social state, and the degeneration of the moral economy of reciprocity

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based on kinship and place that used to be a feature of working-class communities in the Fordist-Keynesian era of the mid-20th century welfare state. Globalism and austerity have become the main economic concerns for governments (compassion is frequently indicated in the many vacuous narratives uttered by political leaders but advanced marginality remains largely ignored). In chapter one I described the long historical process of functional democratisation which Elias used to described the gradual incorporation of all social classes into society and the growth of denser networks of social inter-dependence. Today we are beginning to see the reverse process occurring. Functional de-democratisation has been a particular effect of financial crisis and de-industrialisation. The work skills and intellectual capital tied to industrial enterprises in decline are quickly discarded trapping the unemployed in their de-commodified status in the decaying post-industrial regions and towns throughout northern England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Those whose outsider status is combined with spatial isolation in these circumstances are typically stigmatised for the social dispositions that they cultivate as survival tools for life in the neglected peripheral communities of our major urban centres. Their idleness has typically become an issue of their personal motivation to find alternative work, or their willingness to accept unskilled minimum wage jobs, rather than the failures of economic policy, education or the market. It is the economic and social consequences of these processes that have become the focus of Wacquant’s analysis of advanced marginality (see Wacquant, 2004; Young, 1999). His description of the consequences of neo-liberalism connects well with Elias’s perspective on the dangers for social order resulting from the de-pacification of society. We see the return of violence and social insecurity to the streets and neighbourhoods of our large sophisticated metropolitan centres. This invariably leads to wariness of the stranger and fear of the “other”. Advanced marginality can be conceptualised as a figuration that ties together agencies of the state and the occupants of the forgotten and neglected communities into a conflictual and hierarchical relationship constantly in friction. This is evident in the rise of “populism” in the political sphere, with unpredictable voting patterns suggesting an underlying volatility in poor working-class communities which has found expression in the Brexit vote, support for Trump in the USA, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Giuseppe Conte in Italy. The popular reaction of those who feel neglected can take a punitive form, particularly against those who are not members of the dominant ethnic and cultural population; this has been evident in America, Hungary and Italy. The absence of integrative

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economic and occupational connections between the marginalised populations and mainstream (legal) market processes heightens the sense of social and economic division. The withdrawal of the social state from its welfare obligations leads to a reaction from the marginal communities that is shaped by having to live increasingly in a society without a welfare state or at best a retreating welfare state. The cultural tool kits that are fashioned by those living in such marginal communities involve developing attitudes, skills and emotional predispositions that are antithetical to mainstream society but essential for their own social and economic survival (see Duncan, 1999; Swidler, 1986): the growth of the hidden economy and the growing complexity surrounding illegal drug distribution is only the most commonly reported criminal problem developing alongside the skewed affluence of Western societies. The mentalities and physical deportment of the marginalised youth of the inner city are transformed by their routine engagement with hostility, interpersonal threat and, too often, only the coercive arm of the state because all the helping and supportive arms have disappeared thanks to austerity budgeting. The youthful residents of the advanced marginal communities develop the knowledge of what Anderson (1999) has referred to as the ‘code of the street’ and Miller (1958) described as the ‘focal concerns of the working-class community’; skills that are too often lacking in empathy for the other. Civility for those who do not belong to the immediate neighbourhood can very quickly erode. The spatial order is maintained in the marginal communities by a heightened sense of territoriality. Advanced marginality has its own autopoiesis: the “noise” from mainstream society, the police, or simply from those who are deemed by the residents as not belonging, are repelled by violence and silence which reproduces their peripheral positioning within society (Wacquant, 2009). The return of high levels of routine inter-personal violence to some urban areas today requires a sociological account that does not reduce explanation to the perverse incentives of a profligate welfare state or the mental frailties of an “underclass”. For example, in the American context Wacquant (2004) traces the transformation of the black ghetto from a socio-economic space that contained a broad representation of social classes and institutions of civil society with a strong social lifeworld (understood in terms of strong civic leadership which provided a distinctive but mainstream moral economy) to a marginal enclave containing residual housing, ill-educated and unskilled residents who are united, not by common local institutions, customs and solidarity, but by their race, religion and common status as a dispossessed group who often compete violently and criminally against each other in an internecine war

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of survival. De-industrialisation leads to the flight of the middle classes from the inner-city communities that were once vibrant and socially mixed in pursuit of social advancement and employment elsewhere. The shops and services dwindle as their customer base dwindles. The institutions of civil society shrivel through a lack of supportive funding and willing volunteers to maintain their functional buoyancy and, worst of all, unpredictability in social exchanges and the fear of inter-personal violence are normalised as an everyday fact of life in growing numbers of impoverished communities, as it has been in parts of London and other major British cities blemished by rising knife crime and drug criminality. The only state agencies left after the withdrawal of the social state are the agencies of criminal justice geared to the zero-tolerance management of urban promiscuity in a society that resolves fear of crime by supporting an ever-expanding penal system (see Wacquant, 2009, 195-208). To underline the thesis on advanced marginality it might be instructive to consider some comparative data on penal justice. Table 13 contains selected statistics on the prison rates comparing the most carceral country in the world, the USA, with some countries in Western Europe. The most recent figures for the USA, England and Wales, Scotland, France, Germany, Sweden and Norway are compared with the figures in brackets from Wacquant’s original table using 1997 data (2009, 119). A broad general observation is that America and the UK, both of which have pursued a neo-liberal policy combined with austerity public sector budgeting, have seen social inequality rise in parallel with the prison population. It is a policy that has been referred to by American criminologist Jonathon Simon (2007) as “governing through crime”. The American prison rate keeps rising inexorably as does that of the UK, with Wales currently having the highest prison rate in Western Europe at 153 per 100,000 of the population. While the rate in France has risen, Germany and the Scandinavian countries have been stable or slightly declining. The strength of the Scandinavian welfare systems is indicative of a social culture which is less focused on substituting carceral solutions to resolve problems which have their origin in global economic causes. Norway has one of the lowest recidivist rates in the world and the lowest crime rate in the world. The median prison rate for Western Europe is 84 which is revealing about the more aggressive carceral policy of the UK2 and especially America. 2

HM Chief Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales Annual Report 2017–18. Violence, drugs, suicide and self-harm, squalor and poor access to education were “prominent themes” in jails during the year to the end of March 2018 annual report by Peter Clarke, the chief inspector of prisons for England and Wales.

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Table 13 Incarceration Rates in Key Western Countries 2017-2018. * prison rates quoted in Wacquant (2009) for the year 1997 compared with Most Recent Data in brackets Prison Date Estimated Prison population national population total population rate (inmates per 100,000) USA 2,121,600 31.12.16 323.90m 655 (648) UK: England & Wales UK: Northern Ireland UK: Scotland France Germany Sweden Norway

83,014

28.9.18

59.20m

140 (120) & 153

1,435

28.9.18

1.88m

76

7,771

28.9.8

5.45m

143

65,084 62,194 5,979 3,373

1.9.18 31.3.18 1.10.17 5.9.18

65.14m 82.93m 10.09m 5.32m

100 (90) 75 (90) 59 (59) 63

Source: World Prison Population List, eleventh edition, (London: Institute for Criminal Policy Research) http://www.prisonstudies.org/sites/default/files/resources/downloads/wppl_12.pdf

At the heart of this analysis is a critique of the retreating welfare state and the withdrawal of its protective safety net against the harsh vagaries of a post-industrial and austere British society. The prospects for compassion and altruism are not looking good. Whatever policy initiatives can be constructed to address advanced marginality, it would seem that they must be designed to counter the inexorable trend in present-day society for extreme social polarisation.

Compassion and the Proximity Principle If a more compassionate and altruistic approach to social policy is to be considered seriously by governments then the advanced marginality which frames socio-economic relationships in an austere post-industrial Europe must be addressed as one of the most important issues to be confronted. A number of recent contributors to the discussion about the place of

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compassion in contemporary societies have identified one key aspect about the virtue; in order for compassion to lead to an altruistic action by an individual they must first have witnessed an event or injustice directly and that probably means without it first being mediated and sanitised by mass media. The lacklustre public reaction to homelessness, refugees, immigrants, child poverty, racism and people trafficking are just some of the issues which have exercised debate about the absence of compassion and altruism in European societies today. Despite major events such as the conflagrations engulfing large parts of the Middle East which have led to human suffering on a large scale, attitudes from both governments and populations throughout Europe to those who have experienced desperate personal crises of life or death, and who have miraculously escaped war zones, have frequently been hostile. Writing about the moral economy of immigration policy in France, Fassin (2005) describes a situation where the “social reproduction of indifference to refugees by bureaucracies” is combined with the strategic use of political expediency to screen out most asylum seekers. The impossible demand that asylum seekers must in all circumstances be able to provide corroborated testimony of their claims of torture, murder and rape in the country they are fleeing is balanced by allowing relatively low numbers of undocumented immigrants entry so long as they are terminally ill or have a life threatening illness. The default position in many EU countries has been that all immigrants are undocumented and fraudulent unless proved otherwise. Even the bureaucratic processing of immigrants into liberal minded Sweden has caused Graham (2002) to write about the “emotional complexity” and challenges posed to Swedish welfare bureaucrats unaccustomed to dealing with such raw human problems as those presented by refugees fleeing war zones. The strain of working with such human misery has led to the adoption of detached postures towards people desperately seeking some level of basic human warmth. The growing insularity of the indigenous populations in large parts of Europe suggests that a process of incivility is taking place, specifically towards the “other”. The Brexit vote and its aftermath, for example, appears to have exacerbated a much deeper and longer-term issue relating to the way some people cope with the social heterogeneity that a postcolonial and global society has brought into being. The “UKIP” view of British society is now being categorised by political analysts as populism (See Kaufmann, 2019; Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018). It is in many cases xenophobic and in its Brexit mode talks of “taking back control of our Borders, our laws and our Parliament” but is probably best captured with the “America first” slogan which encapsulates Trump’s primary message.

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For example, the attitudes of poor people about “other” poor people described in chapter four by Shildrick and MacDonald (2013) highlights something about what is at issue; people compare themselves with those who are “near” to themselves in terms of wealth and well-being. In the context of the very varied and wide-ranging mediated information now being received by people in today’s social media free-for-all, suspicion of abstract “others”, because they are not known and so appear to be more threatening, cuts across attempts to build community solidarity. It seems that in a divided society there is a too ready willingness to accept the popular narrative that immigrants are welfare tourists who are either unwilling to work or are here to steal “our jobs”. This lack of sympathy for those who are fellow sufferers in poverty in the Shildrick and MacDonald study was expressed largely, it is suspected, because the individuals expressing those unsupportive attitudes did not have direct knowledge of the people they were criticising. Their views were shaped indirectly by the tabloid press, television, social media and community gossip rather than being based on their direct witness of the actions they condemn. Social and economic policy throughout Europe has allowed the spatial organisation of society in all countries to drift towards a segmented rather than integrated structure. Post-colonialism and global poverty have led to the movement of large populations across the globe with many heading towards the UK. However, the socio-cultural mosaic that is the typical British town and city has largely failed to project a coherent picture of social harmony: distinct cultural, religious and class groups frequently live in the same place but in different places. Particularly in working-class communities, there is a weakening of an integrated lifeworld nourished by a common moral economy about work, welfare and fairness. Instead the indigenous population lay claim to “our work and our welfare system for us” and not for “others”. Segmented community structures lead to an increase in the number of conflicting and competing public spheres in the sense used by Negt and Kluge (1993) discussed in chapter four: each public space is used to rehearse the received wisdom circulating around the particular social groups owning their public sphere. A compassionate social policy strategy needs to find ways of connecting the incongruent structure of many public spheres into a large coherent voice that can bridge the divide between people with different life pathways. The research undertaken by Kearns, Bailey, Gannon, Livingston, and Leyland (2014) into the relationship between residential context and attitudes to income inequality and redistribution establishes the importance played by where one lives, and with whom one interacts on a habitual and routine way, for shaping viewpoints. Reviewing the literature on attitudes

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to inequality and redistribution, Kearns et al make a number of observations. People are more likely to be “quiescent” about inequality if their knowledge of other’s lives is limited while their support for redistributive welfare policies will rise with increased knowledge about those receiving its benefits. Crucially, the degree of social and urban density of residential communities plays a significant role in shaping popular attitudes to inequality and redistribution: urban density leads to more social interaction between people from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds consequently it leads to more sympathetic social attitudes to the “the other” and a more supportive attitude to redistributive social policies. By contrast the weakening of social density, as found in rural areas, leads to less supportive attitudes to redistribution and “the other”. People who live together and talk together are, therefore, more likely to develop supportive ways of thinking about social issues and each other. Ethnic diversity has a positive effect on attitudes as long as the diverse groups live in blended and not segmented communities. Kearns at al (2014) noted, for example, that neighbourhood density had a strong positive effect on attitudes even in those who expressed views deemed not to be altruistic in relation to unknown “others”; they changed their views when considering their neighbours. Interestingly, the authors draw on Boyd’s analysis of the value of “civility” (Boyd, 2006) as a key prize of solidaristic relationships. Civility is functional for keeping the peace and, as Elias (1979 and 1982) shows, pacifying modern society. It implies a moral relationship between people and is a very social and sociable concept which is undermined by such things as gated communities and residential segregation of people by income, ethnicity and status. The importance of presence or local visibility for stimulating compassion is revealed in a debate about the place of virtue in social policy (see Collins, Cooney and Garlington, 2012 and Gregory, 2015). In responding to what Collins, Cooney and Garlington (2012) describe as the application of “virtue theory” to the construction and design of more compassionate social policies, Gregory (2015) has countered that we need policy mechanisms which create a direct connection between different types of people by suggesting an alternative to “virtue theory” which he calls “proximity theory”. It is exactly in line with what is suggested theoretically by Elias and empirically by Kearns et al. Altruistic and compassionate attitudes are more likely to be evident in circumstances where people know and interact with each other; witnessing the discomfort and suffering of others in their own communities for example. Gregory appears to take a pragmatic and more grounded approach to virtue than Collins et al. Compassion is ineffective and purely a reflective act if it is

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not proximate to suffering. We cannot therefore expect compassion in a socially and spatially divided society because it will be hard to find. The better-off will not witness the suffering of those in poverty; the indigenous population will not feel compassion for refugees and immigrants who are hidden away in Home Office detention centres and so on. His core argument is that the welfare system can create the circumstances which enable compassion and altruism to flourish if social policy has first created the conditions to enable this to happen, a view which is precisely the same as that advanced by Titmuss many years ago. Social policy in areas such as housing, homelessness, addiction, prison aftercare and education can act as drivers of connection which work to create social cohesion rather than division and segregation in society if their primary purpose is to connect people. And in the design of social policies, it matters little if it is welfare state paternalism or professional duty which is employed to implement interventionist social policy in an individual welfare client’s life. It is the quality of the social intervention which is important even if those managing the implementation of policy are doing so as part of a legal “obligation”, indeed even if some might complain pejoratively about a “nanny state”. What is required are rights and duties to deal with clients in ways which recognise their humanity and dignity which is protected in law and can establish organised compassion in a sustainable way and is not, as Nussbaum might observe, dependent on virtuous individuals. Gregory (2015) points to research which supports the findings of Kearns et al (2014) on mixed housing communities. Going back to the Social Exclusion Unit initiatives under the early Blair governments in the 1980s, he describes the positive levels of integration which became visible in social housing areas where mixed tenures were the norm. In America he draws attention to housing strategies which took seriously the need to deconcentrate poverty in neighbourhoods to “break the spell” of the unrelenting degraded life experience of mainly black and Hispanic families living in communities where “everyone” was abjectly poor. However, having recognised the importance of “proximity” and witness for virtuous action, whether by the state or the individual, the realty of living in a global world driven by the neo-liberal orthodoxies of markets and financialisation is that the conditions for building and sustaining a strong social lifeworld grounded in inter-personal civility and virtue are currently weak.

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Concluding Comments The original conception of a welfare state in the post-1945 period of social reconstruction was one in which compassion and altruism were to be axial principles around which social institutions were to be designed. The theorists of the welfare state such as T.H. Marshall, Richard Titmuss and John Maynard Keynes in their different ways converged on an image of an interventionist state which would iron out the ebbs and flows of the market, would allow a mixed economy to evolve in which corporate relationships between labour and capital could develop cooperatively, and once that context was established, citizenship and enlightened social policies and services would complete an ideal world of social solidarity and altruism. Welfare system and social lifeworld would be become conjoined, or structurally coupled, by the social insurance principle, complemented culturally by the “the gift relationship”, which would have been the British equivalence of what the Swedes call trygghet (Graham, 2002). This vision has struggled to survive several decades of neoliberalism and globalisation, although some optimists still think it retains a potential, especially when the Scandinavian model of welfare is on show. Beyond the financial crisis confronting the health and welfare systems in many European countries resulting from an ageing population, unhealthy lifestyles and periodic global financial uncertainty, millions of workers have been forced by de-industrialisation and technological evolution to join “the precariat” surviving in the “gig economy” on a minimum wage with insecure employment arrangements and declining trade union membership (Standing, 2011). This type of social change has tended to atomise people. The vibrancy of the lifeworld, the community and the public sphere, has been lost under the weight of declining town centres, which are populated with fast food outlets, betting shops and the rise of internet shopping which is relentlessly challenging the survival of high street shops. Meanwhile, the fluidity in world populations caused by war has led to problems accommodating refugees in such numbers as to cause a “perfect storm” of declining social and economic resources at precisely the time when all of the advanced countries are still trying to navigate themselves towards a sustainable economic model capable of dealing with the advance marginality afflicting large numbers of their indigenous populations. This chapter has suggested that rather than compassion and altruism being on display in European societies, there is a danger that processes of de-pacification and incivility will creep in to British and other European societies. If the adage that America shows us our future is true then that future might be a little bleak given what is

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happening there under the Trump Presidency: social, ethnic and racial division is combining with inward looking political populism that looks very much like xenophobia in those areas of society which are cut-off from the prosperity which globalism has distributed on a very selective basis.

CHAPTER SEVEN CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

Reviewing the Argument In examining the relationship between system and lifeworld, the focus has been on the encounter between the logical structure of autopoietic systems and the social values and normativity of human beings. Looking at the system through the lens of the lifeworld, as critical sociology does, it is clear that the language of the enlightenment continues to flavour the political, sociological and philosophical investigations of those who begin analysis from the point of view of the human subject in the social lifeworld. It is not a stable and orderly social structure of functioning social systems which is seen but instead a state of rampant institutional anomie1 permeating the lives of ordinary people and undermining the democratic process. In this view the systems of society have become disembedded from normative regulation by the people supposedly served by them. This creates the potential danger that the social lifeworld is conceptualised either as being without political efficacy or, alternatively, when social groups mobilise for social change, they are imbued with more influence than is consistent with the realities of modern political systems in a global world. The message of this book is that the relationship between social system and social lifeworld is one in which the latter is a key source of “environmental noise” which forces the social systems of 1

The concept of institutional anomie has been mainly developed in criminology to explain the weakening social control of economic institutions and the market by non-economic institutions (see Messner and Rosenfeld, 2001; and Muftic, 2006). The central argument of the theory is that the institutions of civil society cannot regulate or control a disembedded market system leading to an anomic ethic which exaggerates the pursuit of money leading to criminality and a decline in civic responsibility. More broadly it is a thesis which can be applied to the analysis advanced by Habermas that the economic system has colonised the social lifeworld and undermined democracy and the political public sphere by weakening the influence of socially generated ethical standards rooted in family, community and social relationships by those singularly derived from market imperatives.

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society to react but not necessarily in ways that individuals demand. People have no direct influence on the adjustments made inside social systems which might enable those same systems to respond to the environmental “noise” they, “the people”, are creating. But those voices nevertheless remain essential lubricants of the differentiated social structure. In the classic words of Marx “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past” (Marx, 1984) Habermas has come to accept the facticity of relatively autonomous social systems in modern complex societies but nevertheless continues to argue that the social lifeworld, anchored in the principles of discourse ethics, has the potential to guide democratic thinking and achieve effective action to shape policy, law and decision making in contemporary western societies. However, it has to be recognised that his analysis is largely divorced from the intricacies of the modern forms of the political public sphere which modern societies have fashioned and through which democratic influence is filtered. This problem is partly explained by his interest in developing a social theory rather than a sociological theory which might at least describe an agenda for political, legal and institutional reform which would allow the normative influence of the social lifeworld on law making and policy formation to be realised, even if in a limited, compromised or pragmatic way. Habermas’s theory understood as public discourse ethics can provide a valuable yardstick for measuring and monitoring the effectiveness of the political public sphere in contemporary society. The debate between Luhmann and Habermas has largely revolved around competing sets of rational principles which in the last analysis describe the same social, political and legal objects at a fairly abstract level which perhaps suggests greater distance between them than actually exists at a more grounded level. Both theorists have focused on the key issue of how best to manage and legitimise decision making processes in modern societies. And more negatively, both theorists can be accused of neglecting the importance that should be placed on the psychic systems of people acting in a society of differentiated autopoietic social systems. Luhmann decentres human agency to such an extent that psychic systems are largely a residual and implicit aspect of his theory. And Habermas has overlooked the extent to which his theory of democracy emphasises procedural issues at the expense of explaining how argumentation processes grounded in people’s very different material realities could ever possibly function effectively in the plethora of political public spheres

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which exist in our digital age. The reality is that typically “lay normativity” today is being absorbed by the chaos of social media and finding expression in political populism which cares little for the differentiated institutional structures of mainstream society. Both theories can be helped by Elias’s sociological theory of human nature and the pacification of social order. Elias does not ignore the psychic systems of society. He alone developed a sociological theory which incorporated an understanding of the way in which political, sociological and psychological relationships are inextricably tied together in the evolution of human development. At the heart of Elias’s view of society is the understanding of how social order is stabilised and made secure and predictable by the institutions of society. This has consequences for the inner nature of people and their social and commercial relationships. It is the autopoietic character of the institutions and organisations of society which reduce complexity created by people acting in society. Systems channel “noise” to wherever its efficacy is most appropriate. In this way, social systems, institutions and organisations establish and reproduce predictability in social relationships in an ongoing way: that is their purpose. When social systems fail to deal effectively with complexity reduction then problems arise relating to the pacification of social order. This problem complex lies at the heart of Elias’s sociological perspective. Not only is social uncertainty and political unpredictability heightened by the failure of social systems to act as expected but also the canopy of restraint in society weakens allowing inter-personal relationships to be shaped by conflict and mistrust and the return of interpersonal violence in those areas of society most disadvantaged and marginalised (note the unease surrounding global bank failures, the onset of austerity economics and more recently the unpredictability created by the Brexit shock to the British political system). I have argued that Elias complements Luhmann on this particular sociological issue. The emotional dimension of system/lifeworld relations is therefore very important. Chapter five switched from the general understanding of emotion in the evolution of human societies to focus on its micro-level manifestations in the present-day through a discussion of “emotion work” in social work practice settings. To illustrate this particular theme, I refer the reader back to the introduction where I described the salient features of the film ‘I, Daniel Blake’. An episode in the film captured the tension between conflicting “feeling rules” surrounding how best to help a client seeking social support. While generally Daniel was dealt with peremptorily by the staff in the benefits office, one adviser displayed empathy for his plight and imparted advice about how best to negotiate the

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bureaucratic system in his pursuit of an appeal against the decision not to allow his claim; spending time openly assisting him. When this “too helpful” assistance was observed by her superior, she was called in to the manager’s office to be reprimanded for failing to adopt the appropriate distanced and professional posture in her dealings with Daniel. It is clear that the ideological ethos of an organisation colours how a social situation is defined and, for some, this clashes with their instinctual and sociable approach to interaction. Often the emotional repertoire learned in our early years is displaced by occupational training and professionalisation. While some occupations require the “emotional baggage” of one’s personal life to be concealed in order to perform the work task of the employer, others actually require employees to use their natural skills of sociability in the service of professional roles. In chapter five Hochschild’s classic study of air stewards was discussed because she was one of the first sociologists to identify the phenomenon of “emotion work” which has become so influential in contemporary organisational theory and social work. Consequently, in chapter five the discussion of emotion and work roles led to consider the “polyphonic” character of the professional social work role; specifically, the need for the professional social worker to be able to switch between a companionable and a professional demeanour as the dynamics of an interview with a client changed. It was made clear that the way in which professional/client relationships are structured can lead to the stark uncovering of the paradoxical nature of the caring professions: friendly chats between social worker and client simply based on the code present/not present can change quickly if the professional social worker feels the necessity to draw on their legal and resource management powers to allow the welfare system to intrude into and determine the outcome of an intervention with a client. Chapter five explicitly advances the argument that human emotions have been extensively cultivated by the economic and welfare systems of society. These shape and impose a template of trained professionalism on the psychic systems of people in their inter-personal relationships both at work and more widely in society. I surmised that if the professional role requires people to behave in a pragmatic and disciplined way by controlling their personal emotions in a work situation, then it is likely that elements of that “emotion work” will spill over into routine everyday non-work relationships. The penetration of the psychic system by the system imperatives of work, culture and politics has been described by Riesman as “other directedness”, Mestrovic as “postemotionalism” and Hochschild in terms of “the managed heart”. They are all, in their different ways, capturing the connectivity between the system and the social lifeworld.

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Chapter six discussed the place of altruism and compassion in contemporary welfare policy. It was noted that societies in the west are becoming more socially polarised between rich and poor leading to a state of “advanced marginality”. This has meant that the scale of social need has expanded to such an extent that today the virtues of compassion and altruism in individuals might be difficult to find let alone rely on. Nevertheless, there has been a continuing debate in social policy suggesting that altruism and compassion should continue to be pivotal principles used in designing social policy in the 21st century. One conclusion from those debates which I have drawn out for emphasis is that compassion and altruism are more likely to find expression in society if attention is paid to the importance of “proximity” in stimulating social reaction by bystanders to poverty and injustice (see Gregory, 2015). Compassion as a principle must be grounded in the realties of the modern economy and society which means that reducing spatial and social divisions is a necessary precursor for the exercise of compassion. Social policy which focuses on practical ways to design better housing projects which bring people together; education policies which are relevant for the diverse cultures of Western European societies; and community development strategies that combat racism is required.

Theoretical Postscript: Autopoiesis, Democracy and Brexit In drawing the analysis to a close it seems appropriate to illustrate the salient aspects of autopoietic systems theory by reference to the clearest contemporary example of system de-differentiation which was evident in the UK’s handling of Brexit: understanding the ways in which a system deconstructs in the face of stress (or “inclusivity overload” as Luhmann would have described it) is insightful about how it should operate routinely under ideal conditions. The debacle that is Britain’s exit from the EU illustrates the processes of structural de-differentiation particularly well. The paralysis of the Parliamentary system, combined with the conflict between the executive of government and parliamentary procedure, provided a context in which abuse, intolerance and social disorder increased on the streets of British society. The key theorists who best illuminate this problem are Luhmann and Elias. In the degenerative democratic condition created in British politics by Brexit, there was a glaring absence of opportunities to realise the “ideal speech situation” which is a necessary precursor allowing Habermas’s “discourse ethics” to prevail. Despite the loud clamour about upholding democracy and the

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democratic will of the people, no one knew what either democracy or the will of the people meant in the midst of the Brexit chaos. Luhmann understood the primary purpose of the political system to be that of securing binding agreement from the electorate about the decisions which parliamentary institutions take on their behalf. Throughout the analysis in this book the argument has been made that one of the key issues confronting modern complex societies is the maintenance of their differentiated system structure. The autopoietic systems that have evolved in modern complex societies in the West are founded on the clear separation of spheres of interest between the social systems of society: each system is structured and given identity through the processes of attending to its exclusive functional purpose. In modern societies there are institutional distinctions drawn between civil society (which incorporates the mass media system and the political public sphere within which public opinion formation takes place and is the medium through which people as collective entities aim “noise” at the social systems of society); the political system (consisting of parliamentary and executive arms of government); and the legal system (which acts as the exclusive arbiter of legality in the political procedures governing the legislative process). With respect to Brexit, we can see that efficient decision making was undermined from the outset by the weakening of the boundary between civil society and the political system because the 2016 referendum was given added legitimacy as a result of commitments given by both leave and remain campaigns agreeing to accept whatever result the public returned: what should have been an advisory process for Government was transformed into a binding constraint. The use of referenda typically condenses complex issues into overly simplistic questions which ironically have the effect of increasing decision-making complexity rather than reducing it because it creates problems of interpretation: it leaves how questions unasked and unresolved. This division deepened further when elements of popular opinion were angered by the intrusion of the legal system into the political process2. Early in the aftermath of the 2016 vote, Gina Miller took an unpopular legal case to the Supreme Court to reaffirm in legal principle the sovereignty of Parliament in the decision-making 2

R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union [2017] UKSC 5 is a UK constitutional law case decided by the United Kingdom Supreme Court on 24 January 2017, which ruled that the UK Government (the executive) may not initiate withdrawal from the European Union by formal notification to the Council of the European Union as prescribed by Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union without an Act of the UK Parliament permitting the government to do so

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process. However, her legal victory not only reaffirmed the sovereignty of Parliament but inserted an incipient division between the executive of government and parliament which deepened relentlessly as the Brexit process in the UK Parliament progressed. The use of a referendum in a political system based constitutionally on representative democracy meant that the political system had ceded decision-making control to the untamed forces of public opinion. The interpretation of what type of exit from the EU was indicated by the close 52 to 48 percent result ignited a two-year long argument in British society that was not captured or controlled by either the Executive of government or MPs in Parliament. At the time of writing there is a constitutional impasse: the deal negotiated with the EU has been defeated three times in Parliament and the indicative voting process adopted by MPs to wrest control over the Brexit decision making process away from the Prime Minister has failed to reveal a clear majority in the House of Commons for any particular model of exit. There appears to be no consensus about what direction should be taken to leave the EU in an orderly fashion. And, of course, there is fear of what a disorderly exit might mean for society and the economy. The conflict between the executive of government and parliament has been exacerbated by the decision taken by the Speaker to use parliamentary precedent to block further attempts to reintroduce “the May Deal” for a fourth time. Meanwhile the impotence of the political public sphere has been exposed by the rejection in Parliament for a second people’s vote. An online petition of over five million signatures demanding that Article 50 is revoked and that the UK remains in the European Union has been summarily rejected by the former Prime Minister May. A march of about one million people in support of a second referendum in London on the 23rd March 2019 was also largely ignored. It is the nature of differentiated societies based on autopoietic social systems that steering power of complex social structures is limited and always mediated because there are competing centres of equivalent and legitimate power throughout society. As argued earlier, there cannot be and there is not a central authority steering society from the top, or centre, despite the popular view that tends to invest high levels of faith in the political wisdom and power of charismatic political leaders. This has become glaringly visible during the Brexit negotiations. Due to structural de-differentiation within the levels of the political system, the effectiveness of political decision making has been undermined: Brexit has created an imbalance between the periphery of the system centred on civil society and the political public sphere and the centre of the political system in Parliament. By the use of an instrument of plebiscite rather than

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one grounded in electoral politics and representative democracy aligned with parliamentary process,” binding agreement” about what should be done cannot be reached. As Luhmann might have observed, what British people now want is to feel assured that effective and legitimate decision making is taking place irrespective of the mechanisms used. Democracy can, and is in the context of Brexit, making a principle out of frustration because the structure of institutions and systems devised over centuries of political and legal evolution are being ignored in the ever-increasing loudness of popular “noise”. The way Brexit is resolved is likely to have an impact on the differentiated structure of British politics and society going forward.

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INDEX

Introductory Note When the text is within a figure, the number span is in italic. Eg, paradigms 25n4, 54, 94, 130-1, 143-4 When the text is within a note, this is indicated by page number, ‘n’, note number. Eg, ageing populations 34, 42n3, 154 Act for the Relief of the Poor (Elizabethan Poor Law Act 1601) 18 active citizens 37-8, 43-5, 53 advanced marginality 111n2, 114n3, 145-9, 160 Age UK 34, 53 ageing populations 34, 42n3, 154 Albert, M. 28 alexithymia 19 allopoietic systems 6, 9, 130 Alston, Professor Philip 127n5 America 16, 39-41n2, 48, 136, 146, 148-9 Anderson, E. 147 anomie 50, 64, 111, 139, 156n1 anthropomorphism 13 anti-humanism (Luhmann) 12, 17-22 Arrighi, G. 39, 41 Ashton, J. 138 Asquith, S. et al. 121-2n4 asset stripping 40 automatic processing 66 autopoietic systems bridge with lifeworld 82-4, 85-6, 96-7, 100, 106, 107 compassion and altruism 138 conclusions 156-8, 160-3 paradox of social work 109, 121, 133 paradox of the welfare state 9-10,

12-13, 13-15 sociological theories 20, 25, 31, 35 street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky) 58-9, 68, 74, 76-8, 79 see also biological systems; psychic systems; social systems Bakken, T. 78 Barrett, L. 116 Baxter, H. 58, 60, 85, 87, 107 behavioural problems 43 benefit claimants 12, 69 Benefit Sanctions (Work and Pensions Select Committee) 12 Berry, C. 43 Between Facts and Norms (Habermas) 15, 85-7, 93, 107 Beveridge, William 6, 38, 143 Big Society project 14, 35-6, 37, 43-5, 49-50, 53 binary codes 9 biological systems 20 Bishop, M. 49 Blair, Tony (UK Prime Minister) 143, 153 Blake, Daniel (fictional character) 3-4, 5, 12, 21, 84, 158-9 blended communities 152 Blond, P. 46, 49 blood donation 16, 138-40

176

Index

body language 65-6 boundaries erosion 14, 23, 29, 32, 161 Luhmann's autopoietic system 9-10 meaningful/not meaningful dichotomy 120 noise 13, 84 by statute 53, 122 street-level bureaucrats 63, 69, 74 Bourdieu, P. 97-8 bourgeois public sphere 90 Brexit Big Society project 44 compassion and altruism 146, 150 democracy and autopoiesis 16, 160-3 differentiated societies 29 mass media systems 105 paradox of the welfare state 10-11 political public sphere 91 bridging lifeworld and system see lifeworld-system bridge Britain see UK bureaucratic systems client-processing mentalities 61, 62-4, 159 compassion and altruism 136, 142-3 compassion and proximity 150 emotion management system 116, 120 legalism 133 Lipsky's perspective 66, 68 paradox of the welfare state 8, 12-13 sociological theories 17 system and social integration 5-6 Weick's sensemaking theory 71 Butler, P. 70 Cameron, David (UK Prime Minister) 35-6, 44, 49-50, 94 capability assessments 3 care homes 34, 144 caritas (caring and empathy) 37n1, 50,

53-4, 121, 125-6, 142-4 categorisation (of clients) 65-6, 68 character typology (Riesman) 111-14 child abuse 128-32, 128-9 child protection 128-9, 132-3 Christianson, M. 76 circulation of power model (Baxter) 87-9, 90, 92, 93 civil society strategy 14, 38, 43-5, 53-4, 56, 142 civilising process (Elias) degeneration of civility 145 differentiated societies 25, 27-32, 31-2 human nature 110-12 and Luhmann 14-15 paradox of social work 127, 133 client-processing mentalities 14, 61-4 cognitive maps 103 collective conscience 22 Collins, E. et al. 152 Collins, R. 120 colonisation Habermas 36 of the social lifeworld 49-56, 83, 85, 140 social media 106 third sector 47 communication codes 50, 54-5, 121, 134 compassion and altruism 135-55 degeneration of civility 149 modern welfare system 13, 16, 134 proximity principle 150, 153 Titmuss and the modern welfare state 140-1, 143 and the welfare system 135-7, 154, 160 complex organisations 61, 69-75, 76 conflict sociology 120 conscience of new capitalism 45-9 Corter, J. 65 criminal justice 29, 32 criminality 29, 32, 147-9, 156 Crouch, Tracey, MP 44-5n4

The Welfare System and the Social Lifeworld Daly, S. 47 Davis, A. 51 de-civilising tendencies 27-32, 31-2, 110, 114n3, 145 de-differentiation Brexit 160-2 and de-civilising tendencies 110 and human rights 24 system boundary erosion 10-11, 14, 29, 32, 74-5 de-industrialisation 40, 94, 98, 145-6, 148, 154 de-pacification 29, 32, 146, 154 de-paradoxification 130, 132 De Swaan, A. 30 deflection scripts 74n3 degeneration of civility 145-9 demeanour 65, 119, 159 democracy Brexit 160-3 Habermas 6, 156n1, 157 lifeworld-system bridge 82, 92 Luhmann 28 welfare state origins 6 Denmark 48, 123 Department for Work and Pensions 3-4, 12, 33-4nn6&7, 70-1n2, 73-5n4, 74n3 depoliticising systems 6 deviance theory 64, 98, 104, 106 differentiated societies autopoiesis, democracy and Brexit 161-3 boundary erosion 13-14 child protection 129 civilising and de-civilising tendencies 27-32, 31 discrete social systems 7, 10-11 economic system 38 and human rights 22-7 Lipsky's perspective 68 Luhmann and Habermas 157-8 other directedness and synthetic emotions 114, 116 digital technologies 101, 104 Disability Living Allowance 96

177

discourse theory of law (Habermas) 10, 12, 23, 84, 85-8, 95 discretion 7, 11, 59, 61-4, 67-8, 73-4 discrimination 62, 65, 74 distancing narratives 96, 107 Dodd, N. 85 domestic abuse 70, 74, 75n4, 132 Donzelot, J. 122 drugs 29, 48, 147-8 Dukerich, J. 72-3 Dunning, E. 8 Durkheim, E. 22 Dutton, J. 72-3 economic hegemony 39-40 economic system and the third sector 37-57 active citizens and social society strategy 43-5 colonisation of the social lifeworld 49-56, 51, 53, 55-6 financialisation 39-43 introduction 37-9 new philanthropists 45-9 Eikenberry, A. 47 Elias, N. civilising process (Elias) 25, 27-30, 110-12, 114n3, 133 compassion, altruism and welfare systems 140, 144-5, 145-6, 152 sociological theorists 7-8, 13-15, 17, 158, 160 emotion management systems 116-20, 118, 121, 127, 129, 133 emotional dissonance 118-20 empathy compassion and altruism 145, 147, 158 economics and the third sector 55 human emotion and social work 111, 119, 121, 124-5 lifeworld-system bridge 93, 108 systems and human emotion 4, 15, 28-9, 31, 37n1 enlightened welfare 134, 143

178

Index

enlightenment and Luhmann's anti-humanism 17-22 philosophies 13, 15, 109, 135, 156 social policy and social welfare 32, 34 values 5-6 entrepreneurship civic 67 economics and the third sector 39, 41, 46-7 lack of 36 social 49-50, 52, 57, 142 eristic discourse 91, 106 ethic of care 143-4 EU (European Union) austerity economics 95 Brexit 16, 32-3, 91, 160-2 compassion and proximity 136-7, 141, 143, 145, 148, 149-51, 154 human emotion and social work 111 sociological theory and welfare 38, 40, 42, 43, 48 street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky) 66 Europe see EU (European Union) European Union (EU) see EU (European Union) Fassin, D. 150 figurations 14, 110, 116, 146 financial crisis 2008-10 2, 14 compassion and altruism 142, 146, 154 economic system and the third sector 38, 40, 41n2 lay morality and social lifeworld 94-5 sociological theories 33, 35 financialisation compassion and altruism 141, 145, 153 and the third sector 37-8, 39-43,

51, 56-7 Finland 67 Foucault, M. 18, 138 Friedman, M. 41 Frogett, L. 142-4 Fuchs, C. 105-6 "fully trained healthcare professionals" 3-4 function systems human emotion and social work 110, 114, 134 sociological theories 14, 23, 26, 28-31 Weick's sensemaking theory 74-5 functional de-democratisation 29, 32, 146 functional democratisation 27, 30-1, 112, 146 Funding Network 47, 49 Gamble, A. 32 Garfinkel, H. 69 gatekeepers 2, 63 Giddens, A. 77 Gift Relationship, The (Titmuss) 138 gift relationships 15, 138, 140-2, 154 gig economy 98, 110, 138, 145, 154 Gilgen, P. 20 global financial crisis see financial crisis Gluck, M. 65 Gotz, N. 92 Graham, M. 137, 150 Great Britain see UK Green, M. 49 Gregory, J. 152-3 Habermas, J. colonisation of the social lifeworld 47, 49-50, 57, 156-7 democracy and Brexit 160 discourse and social lifeworld 2, 7-8, 10-12, 14-15 discourse theory of law 23, 85-8 lifeworld-system bridge 90-1, 93, 99, 104, 106, 107

The Welfare System and the Social Lifeworld and Luhmann 82-4, 115 sociological theory and welfare policy 17 street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky) 58, 78 and Titmuss 140 Hall, S. et al. 104 Halsall, F. 20, 25, 27 Handy, C. 44, 46 Harvey, D. 38 hegemonic capitalist formations 39 Help to Buy 42-3 Hernes, T. 78 Hochschild, A. 15, 79, 110, 116-17, 119, 159 Hojlund, H. 123-4 Holub, R. 9 homelessness 70, 72, 150, 153 homines aperti (Elias) 110-12 horizontal comparisons 96 House of Commons 162 Households Below Average Income 34nn6&7 housing benefit payments 71 Hughes, J. 8 human emotion 109-34 emotion management systems 116-20, 118 homines aperti (Elias) 110-12 law and social work 132-3 otherdirectedness and synthetic emotion 112-16 paradox of social work 120-6, 126-32 human rights 22-7, 31, 83, 127n5, 133, 135 I, Daniel Blake (Loach) 3, 5, 12, 21, 84, 158 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 38 immigration 105, 137, 150 incarceration rates 148-9 inclusivity 10, 30, 160 influencers 104 informalisation 112 information/non-information media

179

codes 102-3 Information Technology (IT) 3, 70 inner gyroscope 113, 119 innovation 39-41, 49, 64, 67, 73, 137 Institute of Fiscal Studies 34 institutional anomie 50, 64, 111, 139, 156n1 institutionalised solidarity 2, 4, 6, 14 interdependence 4, 22, 27-31, 111, 133 interdiscursivity 84 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 38 internet 74n3, 101-2, 104n3, 106, 114, 154 intersubjectivity 69, 72, 83 IT (Information Technology) 3, 70 Jewson, N. 25 Job Clubs (USA) 66 Kallio, J. 67 Kearns, A. et al. 151-3 Keynes, John Maynard 6, 146, 154 King, M. 12, 21, 128, 132 Kluge, A. 90-1, 107, 151 Kortweg, A. 66 Kouvo, A. 67 Kuhn, T. 25 La Cour, A. 123-4 labelling clients 66-7 Larsen, C. 136 law and social work 132-3 lay morality 2, 4, 12, 28, 91-2, 92-9 Leadbetter, C. 67 legal forms see legal systems legal frameworks 133, 142 legal powers 124, 133-4 legal systems autopoiesis, democracy and Brexit 161 compassion and altruism 142-3 human emotion and social work 121, 126, 129, 132-3 lifeworld-system bridge 84, 85-7, 89, 107 paradox of the welfare state 8,

180

Index

10-11 sociological theories 23-4, 25-6, 35 street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky) 58, 77 lifeworld-system bridge 82-108 conclusions 107-8 Habermas's discourse theory 85-9 introduction 82-5 lay morality 92-9 mass media systems 99-107, 100, 102 political public sphere 90-2 Lipsky, M. 14, 60-1, 61-4, 64-9, 71, 76 Livingstone, S. 91, 105 Loach, Ken 3, 5 local authorities 34, 48 localism 36, 44, 53 loose coupling 76 Love as Passion (Luhmann) 18, 22 low paid employment 33, 70-1, 96 Luhmann, N. anti-humanism 17-22 autopoiesis, democracy and Brexit 160-1, 163 civilising and de-civilising tendencies 27-30 compassion and altruism 135, 137, 142-3 differentiated societies and human rights 22-6 economics and the third sector 38, 47, 49-51, 57 framework 13-16 human emotion and social work 110, 115, 120, 123, 132 lifeworld-system bridge 82-4, 85-7, 96, 99-102, 104-6 paradox of the welfare state 8-11 review 157-8 sociological theories 35-6 street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky) 58-60, 61, 64, 69, 76-8, 79 system and social integration 7-8 Lunt, P. 91, 105

MacDonald, R. 95-6, 151 macro level 5-8, 39, 56, 70, 78, 79 see also micro level Maitlis, S. 76 Managed Heart, The (Hochschild) 116-17, 159 marginality 29, 32, 145-9, 154, 158, 160 see also advanced marginality Marshall, T.H. 6, 30, 36, 154 Marston, G. 67 Marx, K. 157 mass media systems autopoiesis, democracy and Brexit 161 compassion and proximity 150 de-differentiation of society 32 lifeworld-system bridge 82, 87, 89, 90-2, 97, 99-107 Luhmann's model 102 other directedness (Riesman) 114 paradox of social work 126 street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky) 78 structural coupling to political party system 100 Mauss, M. 140 May, Theresa (UK Prime Minister) 16, 34, 44, 75, 132 Mazzucato, M. 41 McGarvey, D. 97-8 McVey, Esther (then Work and Pensions Secretary) 75 medical cosmology 25 Merton, R. 64, 139 Messner, S. 50 Mestrovic, S. 15, 110, 114-16, 127, 159 micro level 7, 13-14, 64, 77-8, 79, 158 Middlesbrough study (Shildrick & MacDonald) 95, 98 MIF (Minimum Income Floor) 71 Miller, Gina 161 Miller, W.B. 147 Minimum Income Floor (MIF) 71 minimum wage 98, 138, 145-6, 154

The Welfare System and the Social Lifeworld modern welfare state compassion and altruism 136, 144 paradox of social work 131, 134 semantics of enlightenment 18 social policy context 32 Titmuss and the modern welfare state 15, 138-45 modern welfare system 5, 42, 142 Moeller, H.-G. 19-20, 23n3, 54, 105 Morris, L. 94 NAO (National Audit Office) 74-5 National Audit Office (NAO) 74-5 National Council of Voluntary Organisations 53 Negt, O. 90-1, 107, 151 neo-liberalism compassion and altruism 144, 146, 154 financialisation 41 lay morality 94, 98 lifeworld-system bridge 83 neo-philanthropy 45-6, 48, 50, 52-4, 53 see also new philanthropists Network for Social Change (NSC) 47 new capitalism 45-9, 49-50 new philanthropists 44, 45-9, 52, 142 see also neo-philanthropy New Philanthropy Capital (NPC) 47 New York Port Authority 72 NHS (National Health Service) 34, 42, 91, 123, 140, 144 Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell) 115 "noise" autopoiesis, democracy and Brexit 161, 163 compassion and altruism 135, 143, 147 lifeworld-system bridge 82, 84, 96-7 paradox of social work 109, 130 paradox of the welfare state 13 sociological theories 20, 29, 31, 156-8 street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky)

181

59, 71, 76 system integration and social integration 7 non-information 102-3 Norman, J. 49 NPC (New Philanthropy Capital) 47 NSC (Network for Social Change) 47 Nussbaum, M. 135-6, 143, 153 Oakley, A. 138 occupational pensions 39 occupational training 127, 159 open source journalism 104n3 operational codes 52, 56, 103 Orwell, G. 115 other directedness (Riesman) 15, 112-16, 127, 133, 159 outline of the book 13-16 pacification civilising and de-civilising tendencies 27, 29, 31-2 civilising process (Elias) 14-15 and de-pacification 146, 154 human nature 111 sociological theories 158 paradigms 25n4, 54, 94, 130-1, 143-4 paradox of social work 109-34 emotion management systems 116-20, 118 history of human nature 110-12 and the law 132-3 otherdirectedness and synthetic emotion 112-16 resolving the paradox 126-32 and social care 120-6 paradox of the welfare state 8-13, 73 Parkin, F. 98, 106 Parliament allopoietic systems 6 autopoiesis, democracy and Brexit 150, 160-3 autopoietic systems 11 differentiated societies 32 lifeworld-system bridge 88-9, 98 street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky)

182 58, 75n4 Parliamentary democracy 6 Parsons, T. 19 Pecci, R. 65-6 Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act 1996 (USA) 66 Phelps, E. 109n1 philanthrocapitalism 39, 45, 52, 57, 142 policy implementation process 90, 91-2, 95, 103 street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky) 14, 58-9, 61 system and social integration 7 Universal Credit (UC) 73, 75, 79 political deviance theory (Parkin) 98, 106 political filtering 99 political processes 7, 91, 99, 103, 105-6, 161 political public spheres autopoiesis, democracy and Brexit 161-2 Habermas's discourse theory 87-9 lifeworld-system bridge 79, 82-5, 97, 103-4n3, 107 mass media systems 99-100, 106 recursivity 78 sociological theories 7, 15, 90-2, 156-7 political systems autopoiesis, democracy and Brexit 16, 161-2 differentiated societies 28-30, 32 lifeworld-system bridge 84, 87-9, 105 paradoxes 8, 10-11, 26, 126 sociological theories 35, 156 street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky) 58, 74-5, 79 polyphonic communication codes 55, 124 polyphonic organisations 54-5, 124, 134, 159 Poor Law Act (Elizabethan, 1601) 18

Index Poor Law Amendment Act (Victorian Poor Law, 1834) 138 populism 146, 150, 155, 158 post-industrial society 4-5, 19, 141, 146, 149 postemotionalism (Mestrovic) 15, 114-16, 127-8, 133, 159 poverty compassion and altruism 135, 138, 145 compassion and proximity 150, 151, 153, 160 economics and the third sector 49 lifeworld-system bridge 95-7, 107 paradox of social work 127n5, 132 sociological theories 30, 33-4 system and social integration 5 practitioner/client relationship 120-6 practitioners (social welfare) 7, 120-6, 129, 131-2, 134 pragmatism compassion and altruism 143, 152 lifeworld-system bridge 91, 93, 159 sociological theories 17, 28, 157 Weick's sensemaking theory 75 primary definitions 104 prison populations 148-9 private conceptions 62-3 private pensions 14, 38, 42 proletarian public sphere 90, 98-9 Prottas, J. 63, 66 proximity principle 149-53 psychiatry 25, 130 psychic systems autopoietic systems 9nn1&2 lifeworld-system bridge 84-5, 93, 96-7, 99, 102-3, 105 paradox of social work 109, 111, 124, 126, 133 sociological theories 13, 20-1, 26, 28, 31, 157-9 street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky) 68, 77, 79 system and social integration 7 psycho-genesis 27-8, 110

The Welfare System and the Social Lifeworld psychoanalytic perspectives 130 public-facing occupations 13, 55, 60 public health 30-1 public opinion autopoiesis, democracy and Brexit 161-2 circulation of power model (Baxter) 89 lifeworld-system bridge 82 mass media systems 15, 18n1, 78, 99-100, 102, 105-6 modern welfare system 141 system and social integration 7 public sector austerity budgeting 148 client-processing mentalities 61 economics and the third sector 39, 42, 44, 46, 56 recursivity 78 street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky) 79 public services 32, 48, 60, 62, 67-8, 94 quality of service delivery 123, 153 racism 150 Reagan, Ronald (US President) 41 reciprocity 7, 15, 24, 141, 144, 145 recursivity 68, 76-8, 84 refugees 150, 153, 154 Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (Runciman) 96n2 religion 22-3, 26, 31, 86, 135, 147 responsibilisation of citizenship 37, 43, 56 Riesman, D. 15, 110, 112-14, 119, 127, 159 risk assessors 122 Rosenfeld, C. 50 Rosenthal, P. 64-6 Rudd, Amber (then Work and Pensions Secretary) 71n2, 75n4 Runciman, W.G. 96n2 Sahlins, M. 141 Sanghera, B. 93

183

Sayer, A. 91, 93, 106-7 Scandinavian welfare model 136-7, 141, 148, 154 screen-level bureaucracies 68, 77 second nature (Elias) 28, 31, 111n2 segmentary differentiation 22, 24 segregated communities 152-3 semantics 13, 17-19, 22 sensemaking (Weick) in complex organisations 69-75 lay morality 97 Lipsky's perspective 64, 66, 68 mass media systems 99 and recursivity 76-7 systems theory (Luhmann) 21n2, 26, 59-60 welfare system 79 Shildrick, T. 95-6, 151 SIBs (Social Investment or Impact Bonds) 48 Simon, J. 148 Sky News 74n3 Smart, C. 130 social care ageing populations 42 budgets 34 legal frameworks 133 paradox of social work 120-6 practitioners 7, 13, 110, 119 Universal Credit (UC) 74-5 social dislocation 40 social entrepreneurship 47, 49-50, 52, 57, 142 social integration 5-8, 32 Social Investment or Impact Bonds (SIBs) 48 social lifeworld bridge with systems 82, 85-7, 90-2, 92-9, 107 compassion, altruism and the welfare system 136, 138, 140, 153, 154 conclusions 156-7, 159 and degeneration of civility 145-9 economics and the third sector 37, 39, 41, 45, 49-56, 57

184

Index

human emotion and social work 109, 120, 134 social work/client encounter 126 sociological theories 17, 21, 28 street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky) 59, 78-9 system and social integration 5, 7-8 social media circulation of power model (Baxter) 89 compassion and proximity 151 lifeworld-system bridge 84 mass media systems 99-100, 102, 105-7 paradox of social work 126 political public sphere 90, 92, 158 social policy contexts 32-4 social solidarity 2, 4, 18, 109, 136, 154 social systems autopoiesis, democracy and Brexit 161-2 compassion and altruism 136, 142, 144-5 conclusions 156-8 key structural elements 51-2 lifeworld-system bridge 82-5, 86, 100, 102-3 paradoxes 9-10, 12, 109, 120, 122, 134 sociological theories 17, 20-4, 26-7, 31 street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky) 58-60, 68, 74, 77-9 system and social integration 6-7 social welfare emotion management 120 financialisation 42 lay morality 94 social policy context 32-4 state, philanthropy and third sector 53, 56 street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky) 60, 75 welfare regimes 136 social work

practice 13, 79, 158 profession 122n4, 133-4 and social care 7, 110, 120-6, 133 social workers 67, 119-20, 120-6, 126-32, 132-3 societal memory 102, 105 societal structure 15, 23-4, 27 socio-genesis 27, 110 sociological analysis 5, 13, 22, 35, 79, 83 sociological theories 5, 7, 17-36, 64, 157-8 Standing, G. 32, 141, 154 state pensions 42 state welfare system 53, 95 Stenner, P. 19-20 Storm, S. 51-2 strands (of a system) 5, 37, 56, 103, 105 stratificatory differentiation 22, 24, 28 street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky) 58-79 client-processing mentality 61-4 lifeworld-system bridge 87 Lipsky's perspective 60-1, 64-9 and recursivity 76-8 sensemaking (Weick) in complex organisations 69-75 system-client interface 2, 7, 12 and systems theory 58-60 Weick's sensemaking theory 79 see also screen-level bureaucracies structural coupling civilising and de-civilising tendencies 27, 29, 31 colonisation of the social lifeworld 49-50, 53, 56 compassion and altruism 137, 143, 154 lifeworld-system bridge 84, 87-8, 99-103, 102, 105 Luhmann's concept 14, 21, 26 new philanthropists 47 paradox of social work 110, 133-4 street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky)

The Welfare System and the Social Lifeworld 59, 68, 74, 77, 79 subprime mortgages (USA) 41n2 Sweden 67, 136-7, 148-50, 149, 154 synthetic emotions 112-16, 127 system boundaries 10, 29, 32, 69, 84 system codes 37, 52, 124 system imperatives 37, 68, 82, 119, 134, 159 system integration 5-8 system-lifeworld relationships 85, 107-8, 158 system noise see "noise" systems theory (Luhmann) autopoiesis, democracy and Brexit 160 book outline 13-15 lifeworld-system bridge 83-5, 87 paradox of social work 123, 130, 132, 133 sociological theories 7-10, 17, 19-21, 22, 26, 36 and street-level bureaucracies (Lipsky) 58-60 Taylor-Gooby, P. 32-3, 34 technologies 68, 70, 100-2, 104, 114, 154 Teubner, G. 24, 59-60, 84 Theory of Communicative Action, The (Habermas) 85, 87 third sector 37-57 active citizens and civil society strategy 43-5 background 37-9 Big Society project 36 circulation of power model 89 colonisation of the social lifeworld 49-56, 53, 55 compassion and altruism 142 financialisation 39-43 new philanthropists as the conscience of new capitalism 45-9 paradox of social work 122, 124 Thompson, E.P. 92-3 Thornhill, C. 21

185

Titmuss, Richard 6, 15, 136, 138-45, 153, 154 Trump, Donald (US President) 146, 150, 155 trygghet (material security) 137, 154 UC (Universal Credit) 70-1n2, 73-5n4, 79, 95, 110, 138 UK autopoiesis, democracy and Brexit 160-2, 161n5 compassion, altruism and the welfare system 137, 138, 141, 148-9, 151 economics and the third sector 38, 39, 41, 43-4, 46, 48 lifeworld-system bridge 91, 94-5, 98 paradox of the welfare system 127n5 sociological theory and the welfare system 29, 32-4 Titmuss and gift relationships 16 Ulmestig, R. 67 United Kingdom see UK United States 16, 39-41n2, 48, 136, 146, 148-9 Universal Credit (UC) 70-1n2, 73-5n4, 79, 95, 110, 138 USA 16, 39-41n2, 48, 136, 146, 148-9 Van Oorschot, W. 136 venereal disease 130 Verschraegen, G. 24, 26 Villadsen, K. 43, 48, 54 violence child abuse 128-32, 128-9 domestic abuse 70, 74, 75n4, 132 inter-personal 28-9, 31-2, 110-11n2, 146-8, 158 virtue theory (Collins) 152 volunteers circulation of power model (Baxter) 89 degeneration of civility 148 economics and the third sector

Index

186

37-8, 45, 53 paradox of social work 122-5 sociological theory and the welfare system 36 Wacquant, L. 111n2, 114n3, 145-9 Walsh, C. 51 Weick, K. 14, 21n2, 69-76, 76-8, 79, 99 welfare bureaucracies 6, 61, 63, 74, 137, 150 clients 60, 153 culture 73, 94 models 142-4

policy 37, 160 reform 94 regimes 136 services 2, 42, 44 welfare organisations and street-level bureaucracies 58-79 welfare state paradox 8-13, 73 welfare systems and sociological theories 17-36 welfare systems, compassion and altruism 135-55 Willke, H. 23-4 working classes 90, 92, 97-9, 99, 138, 146-7, 151 Wouters, C. 32, 112, 113