It suggests the importance of a historical perspective of welfare in terms of risk, resources, and responsibility. Why study the past? What can a historical perspective contribute to Social Policy as an academic subject and as a programme for action?

1. Themes in
Welfare History
Gladstone, D. (2012) “History and Social Policy”, in
Alcock, P., May, M., Wright, S. (eds.) The Student’s
Companion to Social Policy 4th Ed. West Sussex: John
Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Prepared by Bimo Arianto

2. Risk
Resources
ResponsibilityTHEMES
3

3. RISK
What issues defined as social
problems?
How similar or different from today?
Life expectancy
Health standard
Health services access
Dependent children
Old age poverty
Unemployment
Underemployment
Precarious condition to household
unit and national economy
Work accident
Industrial pollution
Climate change
Health
Life course
Economic and
occupational
Environmental

4. Household strategies, women
deprived themselves to maximize
well-being of husband and children
The state, central
and local
Mutual support networks in working
class communities, trade unions
and faith-based organizations
Self-help organizations such as
banks, commercial insurance
Philantropic charity
Mixed economy of
welfare
RESOURCES
The adjustment and
readjustment of
suppliers in the mixed
economy of welfare

5. – is this an area in which
government is legitimately
involved?
– is the proposed change
feasible in terms, for example,
resources?
– is the change in question likely
to enhance rather than diminish
support for government?
RESPONSIBILITY
Policy changes, political
mobilization, economic
development and tax revenues
Legitimacy
Feasibility
Support

6. • Rather than seeing the story of the modern
welfare state as a simple movement from
individualism to collectivism and ever
increasing amounts of (benevolent) state
intervention, it is more accurate to see
European countries as having had mixed
economies of welfare in which the state, the
voluntary sector, employers, the family and the
market have played different parts at different
points in time, (Lewis 1999: 11)
Lewis, Jane. (1999). “The voluntary sector in the mixed economy of welfare”, in David Gladstone (ed.), Before
Beveridge: Welfare before the Welfare State. I.E.A. Health and Welfare Unit, p.11.