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Viewing report
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New Welfare Spaces. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, Oct 2008, Pages: 328
The ‘post Keynesian’ shift in the welfare settlement
involves the emergence of ‘workfare’ as a dominant
policy regime. Social benefits are increasingly
conditional on the unemployed participating in
activation programmes and major aspects of labour
market policy delivery is devolved to local
institutions. The book explores this theme through a
comparison of two diverse welfare systems – the UK
and Denmark and two city case studies Sheffield (UK)
and Aalborg (DK). The book analyses the dynamics of
spatial rescaling of welfare and the politics of
geographical uneven development, revealing that the
local is a site for innovation and adaptation and as
a consequence plays a crucial role in mediating
national welfare policy production. Second, political
agency and actors within welfare-work policy regimes
(trade unions and social movements)contest and
negotiate workfare at different spatial scales,
including the locality. ‘Localisation’ as such
involves the production of new welfare spaces which
is inherently contradictory, unstable and contested.
The book argues that an understanding of the role of
the ‘local’ as such is of importance to any
assessment of future welfare trajectories.
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