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Social policy and social change – explanations of the development of social policy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2009

John Carrier  and
Ian Kendall
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Extract

The resources of sociology do not appear to have been extensively or systematically utilized in the study of social policy and administration. One source of evidence for this statement is the absence of explicit references to sociological theories in some of the most well known general texts on British social policy and administration. Pinker's recent analysis of social theory and social policy also lends support to the view that there has been, and still remains, something of a division between sociologists and students of social policy and administration. He concludes that the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology (Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Spencer) had a tendency to be ‘not greatly interested…(in)…remedies for social problems’, and makes the general observation that ‘sociologists have been oddly diffident about the subject-matter of social administration’, possibly because of the latter's atheoretical nature.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Social Policy , Volume 2 , Issue 3 , July 1973 , pp. 209 - 224
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1973

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References

1 See for instance Marshall, T. H., Social Policy in the Twentieth Century (3rd ed.), Hutchinsons, London, 1970Google Scholar; Marsh, D. C. (ed.), An Introduction to the Study of Social Administration, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965Google Scholar; Forder, A. (ed.), Penelope Hall's Social Services of Modern England, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971Google Scholar; Brown, M., An Introduction to the Study of Social Administration, London: Hutchinsons, 1969Google Scholar. There are of course exceptions to our generalization, such as Warham, J., Social Policy in Context, London: Batsford, 1970Google Scholar and Heraud, B., Sociology and Social Work, London: Pergamon, 1970Google Scholar. Several American texts can also be excepted, for instance Rein, M., Social Policy, New York: Random House, 1970Google Scholar; Schorr, A., Explorations in Social Policy, New York: Basic Books, 1968Google Scholar; Miller, S. M. and Reismann, M., Social Class and Social Policy, New York: Basic Books, 1968Google Scholar; Gouldner, A., The Coming Crisis in Western Sociology, London: Heinemann, 1970.Google Scholar

2 Pinker, R., Social Theory and Social Policy, London: Heinemann, 1971, pp. 44–5.Google Scholar

3 This definition of ‘welfare activities’ is based on those of A. Briggs, T. H. Marshall, D. Wedderburn and R. M. Titmuss. See Zald, M. (ed.), Social Welfare Institutions, New York: John Wiley, 1965, p. 43Google Scholar; Marshall, T. H., Sociology at the Crossroads, London: Heinemann, 1963, p. 294Google Scholar; Miliband, R. and Saville, J. (eds.), The Socialist Register, London: Merlin Press, 1965, p. 128Google Scholar; and Titmuss, R. M., Commitment to Welfare, London: Allen and Unwin, 1968, p. 20.Google Scholar

4 Goldthorpe, J. H., ‘Development of Sodal Policy in England, 1800–1914’. Transactions of the Fifth World Congress of Sociology, 1962, Washington, London: International Sociological Association, 1964, pp. 42–50.Google Scholar

5 Ibid. pp. 54–6.

6 Zald is one of the few authors to be explicit about his use of a ‘positivist’ approach. See Zald, op. cit. p. vii.

7 See especially Lundberg, G., Foundations of Sociology, David McKays, New York, 1965Google Scholar. This approach is exemplified by Durkheim's well-known exhortation that ‘social phenomena are things and ought to be treated as things’ (see Durkheim, E., The Rules of Sociological Method, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1938, p. 27).Google Scholar

8 Berger, P. and Luckmann, T., The Social Construction of Reality, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967, p. 222.Google Scholar

9 See Silverman, D., The Theory of Organizations, London: Heinemann, 1970, p. 140.Google Scholar

10 Marshall, , 1970Google Scholar, op. cit. pp. 14, 15, 24, 62 and 76.

11 See Bruce, M., The Coming of the Welfare State, London: Batsford, 1966Google Scholar, preface and Eckstein, H. H., The English Health Service: its origins, structure and achievements, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958, pp. 2–3.Google Scholar

12 All social phenomena can be the subject of numerous interpretations and evaluations. See Becker in Becker, H. (ed.), Social Problems, et al., New York: John Wiley, 1966, pp. 4–5Google Scholar and Silverman, in Filmer, P. et al. , New Directions in Sociological Theory, London: Collier-Macmillan, 1972, p. 3.Google Scholar

13 As Pinker has pointed out (op. cit. p. 102), social policies are derived from ‘value-judgements’ as well as from ‘objective’ evidence. Titmuss has also drawn our attention to the role of individual morality in decisions about social policy. See Titmuss, R. M., The Gift Relationship, London: Allen and Unwin, 1970, p. 12.Google Scholar

14 See, for example, Jordan, W. K., The Charities of London: 1480–1660, London: Allen and Unwin, 1960Google Scholar, and Philanthropy in England: 1480–1660, London: Allen and Unwin, 1959Google Scholar; Woodroofe, K., From Charity to Social Work, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962Google Scholar; Morris, M., Voluntary Organizations and Social Progress, London: Gollancz, 1955Google Scholar, and Voluntary Work in the Welfare State, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969.Google Scholar

15 Halmos, P., The Faith of the Counsellors, London: Constable, 1969, p. 191.Google Scholar

16 For an account of varieties of ‘technological determinism’ in the organizational context, see Silverman, op. cit. Ch. 5.

17 See, for example, Walker, C. J. and Guest, R. H., The Man on the Assembly Line, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Roberts, D., The Victorian Origins of the Welfare State, Yale University, 1960, p. 310Google Scholar: see J. Eyden's comment on Roberts' book in Marsh, op. cit. p. 34.

19 Eckstein, op. cit.; see particularly the Introduction.

20 Wilensky, H. and Lebeaux, C., Industrial Society and Social Welfare, New York: Free Press, 1965, p. 230.Google Scholar

21 Ibid. p. 81.

22 See for example J. Eyden in Marsh, op. cit. p. 18; D. Roberts, op. cit. pp. 317–18; Zald in Zald, op. cit. p. 22; Forder in Forder, op. cit. p. 8; Saville, J., ‘The Welfare State – An Historical Approach’ in The New Reasoner, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1957, pp. 6, 7, 10Google Scholar; Rostow, W. W., Stages of Economic Growth, London: Cambridge University Press, 1965, p. 11Google Scholar; Kerr, C. et al. . Industrialism and Industrial Man, London: Heinemann, 1962, pp. 177, 179, 180.Google Scholar

23 See Wedderburn, op. cit. p. 130 and Titmuss, R. M., 1968Google Scholar, op. cit. pp. 149–51, 252–60 and 267–8.

24 See Year Book of Labour Statistics, 1971, I.L.O., Geneva, pp. 44–58Google Scholar; and UN Statistical Year Book 1971, New York: United Nations, p. 594.Google Scholar

25 It would seem that doctors in the Bantu areas are prohibited from entering ‘starvation’ as a cause of death on death certificates; see Television, Granada, ‘The Dumping Grounds’, screened, 21 December 1970.Google Scholar

26 A. Briggs and D. C. Marsh have noted the pioneering role of New Zealand (see Zald, op. cit. pp. 57–8 and Marsh, D. C., The Welfare State, London: Longman, 1972, p. 47Google Scholar). Using the measure of the proportion of the labour force employed in agricultural, horticultural and pastoral pursuits, New Zealand would appear to be marginally ‘less industrial’ in 1911 than Britain was in 1861 (see Mitchell, B. R., Abstract of British Historical Statistics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 60Google Scholar and Lloyd-Pritchard, F., An Economic History of New Zealand to 1939, London: Collins, 1970, p. 189Google Scholar). Thus when the two countries reached a similar stage of industrialization New Zealand already had social security legislation on the statute book (1882) whilst Britain had to wait until 1906 (Workmen's Compensation Act) for its first ‘modern’ social security legislation.

27 See Marshall, op. cit. pp. 182, 15, 24; and Warham, op. cit. p. 61.

28 Saville, op. cit. pp. 7, 10.

29 The concepts are used by Zald in Zald, op. cit. pp. 8, 21; Saville, op. cit. p. 6; Wedderburn, op. cit. p. 138; Dahrendorf, R., Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959Google Scholar; and Myrdal, G., Beyond the Welfare State, London: Duckworth, 1960, see especially p. 44.Google Scholar

30 See Warham, op. cit. p. 107 and Wedderburn, op. cit. p. 138.

31 Warham, op. cit. p. 82.

32 Forder in Forder, op. cit. p. 1.

33 See especially Marshal, op. cit. pp. 14, 15, 16 24, 61, 62, 76; also Saville, op. cit. p. 20.

34 Briggs in Zald, op. cit. p. 38.

35 Saville, op. cit. p. 20.

36 Op. cit. p. 208

37 See Berger, P., Invitation to Sociology, Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1966.Google Scholar

38 Filmer et al., op. cit. p. 26.

39 Op. cit. p. 6, our italics.

40 Op. cit. p. 138 (our italics).

41 A brief critique of this commonplace sociological assumption is presented by Macrae, D. G. in ‘Classlessness’, New Society, Vol. 22, No. 525, 26 10 1972, pp. 208–10.Google Scholar

42 Gilbert, B. B.'s two books – The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain, London: Michael Joseph, 1966Google Scholar, and British Social Policy, 1914–39, London: Batsford, 1970Google Scholar – lend support to the view that the ‘threat of class conflict’ or more generally the ‘threat of social unrest’ was a factor in policy-making in the Deriods he examines.

43 See Saville, op. cit. p. 6; the system referred to in this case is ‘the industrial order’.

44 1968, op. cit. p. 133.

45 See Mills, C. Wright, The Sociological Imagination, Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1970, pp. 14–15Google Scholar and Titmuss, , 1968Google Scholar, op. cit. p. 133. One of the changes that has taken place in some people's conception of ‘poverty’ is broadly speaking from a ‘personal troubles’ to a ‘public issues/social costs’ perspective. That is to say the idea has been developed that people are not poor because of their personal inadequacies but because of the characteristics of the social and economic system.

46 Titmuss, ibid. p. 133, (xxx) Titmuss observes of the choices that have been made that ‘the social costs of…(socially generated)…disservices…(were allowed)…to lie where they fall…in nineteenth century Britain’ and that this situation still prevails ‘to a large extent in the U.S.A. today’ (ibid. p. 117).

47 See footnote 23.

48 See Wilensky and Lebeaux, op. cit. pp. 138–9.

49 For example the constructions of social reality of Titmuss (1968, op. cit. Ch. 21) and Lees, D. (in Health Through Choice, Institute of Economic Affairs, 1961)Google Scholar would appear to be so discrepant as to be completely irreconcilable.

50 See Titmuss, , Essays on the Welfare State, London: Allen and Unwin, 1958, pp. 111–18Google Scholar, on the ‘norms and values of family life’ and the ‘norms and values of work in industry’.

51 Garfinkel, H., Studies in Ethnotnethodology, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967, pp. 73–75.Google Scholar

52 Silverman, in Filmer, et al. , pp. 168–9.Google Scholar

53 See especially Marshall, op. cit. pp. 36, 62, 115, 153.

54 See ibid. pp. 19, 92; Roberts, op. cit. p. 316; and Bruce, op. cit. preface.

55 See Marshall, op. cit. pp. 30, 36.

56 Warham, op. cit. p. 117.

57 See, for example, Gilbert's two books (see note 42) and B. Abel-Smith's comment on the beginnings of statutory social security provision that steps had to be taken to ‘lighten the load of the poor, lest the poor take violent steps to lighten the load of the rich’ (see Ginsberg, M. (ed.), Law and Opinion in the Twentieth Century, p. 351).Google Scholar

58 Weber, M., The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, New York: Free Press, 1964, p. 119.Google Scholar

59 Gilbert, 1966, op. cit. pp. 19, 451.

60 ibid. p. 451.

61 Marshall, op. cit. p. 97.

62 Berger and Luckmann, op. cit. p. 56.

63 It may be equally possible for there to be apparent majority support for a development in social policy without any statutory action being forthcoming (see Marmor, T., The Politics of Medicare, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970, p. 3).Google Scholar

64 Warham makes this distinction between a ‘social problem’ and a ‘social condition’ (op. cit. p. 61).

65 Ibid. p. 63, Marshall, op. cit. p. 34.

66 See for instance Berger and Luckmann, op. cit. pp. 56, 197.

67 The ‘official statistics’ may be particularly misleading. See, for instance, Feldstein, M. S., ‘Hospital Planning and the Demand for Medical Care’ in The Bulletin of the Oxford University Institute of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 26, 1964, pp. 361–8Google Scholar (especially pp. 367–8) and Garfinkel, op. cit. Ch. 6).

68 Walsh points out that the ‘positivist’ approach ‘fundamentally misconceives’ the relationship of social meanings to social action ‘by treating social meanings as an intervening variable between other social conditions and the social act’, thus failing to recognize that ‘the social world…(is)…constituted by social meanings’ (Filmer et al., op. cit. p. 54). In other words, ‘objective social conditions’ are inseparable from ‘subjective social meanings’.

69 We would define an ‘adequate explanation of the development of social policy as one which:

(a) took account of the meaningful nature of social action;

(b) explained developments in terms of the meanings that members attach to social situations and attempted to explain how these meanings are generated and sustained;

(c) reflected the ‘multiple realities’ situations – that is to say from our point of view takes account of members’ different conceptions of what ‘the social problems of society’ are and different conceptions of the nature of any one ‘social problem’.

Although the ‘traditional’ accounts we have criticized fail to produce what we would term ‘adequate’ explanations of the development of social policy, we would not suggest that all accounts of social policy developments produced to date qualify as ‘inadequate’. Gilbert's two books (see note 42), Briggs in Zald, op. cit. and Abel-Smith, The Hospitals 1800–1948: a study in social administration in England and Wales, London: Heinemann, 1964, are all examples of texts that largely avoid the drawbacks we have been mentioning in this article.

70 ‘Phenomenological sociology…gives primacy of emphasis to how members accomplish social interaction’, M. Phillipson in Filmer et al., op. cit. p. 78.

71 Donnison, D. V., ‘The Development of Social Administration: An Inaugural Lecture’, London: London School of Economics and Political Science and G. Bell & Sons, 1962, p. 30.Google Scholar

72 Goldthorpe, op. cit. pp. 47, 50, 51.

73 Op. cit. p. 110. Pinker points out that such ‘normative’ social theorizing is potentially harmful to ‘the process of scientific enquiry’ (p. 134) since much of it ‘amounts to… (attempts)…to pass off value judgements as scientific methodology’ (p. 119).

74 The alternative approach we have suggested is therefore capable of ‘conversion’ into both ‘conservative, elitist’ and ‘radical, democratic’ normative theories. Both theories would of course involve moving from ‘is’ to ‘ought’ and on this basis can be rejected as not being ‘proper’ extensions of the phenomenological approach. However as Pinker has observed (op. cit. Ch. 3) some ‘normative social theorists’ are inclined to disregard such ‘academic niceties’ and for this reason we consider the potential uses (or misuses) of the perspective we are advocating to be worthy of examination.

75 See Glaser, B. and Strauss, A., The Discovery of Grounded Theory, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1967.Google Scholar

76 Filmer et al., op. cit. p. 189.

77 1958, op. cit. pp. 40–1.

78 This criticism also applies to the Marxian conflict perspective as used for instance by Saville (op. cit.). As we have indicated such a perspective tends to be ‘positivist’ in orientation (see also Walsh in Filmer et al., op. cit. pp. 71–4). However we might also point out that Saville's assumption of ‘inter-class conflict’ is based on an assumption of ‘intra-class consensus’ which means that equally dubious assertions of a consensus of views – albeit on a smaller scale – are an essential element in his perspective (for instance see Saville, op. cit. pp. 8, 9, 10, 11).

79 Comment by Donnison in Donnison, D. V. et al. , Social policy and Administration, London: Allen and Unwin, 1965, p. 26.Google Scholar

80 See for instance Townsend, P. (ed.). The Concept of Poverty, London: Heinemann, 1970Google Scholar, especially the chapters by Townsend and Rein.