Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- one Editor's introduction
- two Supporting people? Universal Credit, conditionality and the recalibration of vulnerability
- three Punishment, powerlessness and bounded agency: exploring the role of welfare conditionality with ‘at risk’ women attempting to live ‘a good life’
- four Resisting welfare conditionality: constraint, choice and dissent among homeless migrants
- five No strings attached? An exploration of employment support services offered by third sector homelessness organisations
- six Exploring the impact of welfare conditionality on Roma migrants in the UK
- seven Exploring the behavioural outcomes of family-based intensive interventions
- eight Editor's afterword
- Index
one - Editor's introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Notes on contributors
- Acknowledgements
- one Editor's introduction
- two Supporting people? Universal Credit, conditionality and the recalibration of vulnerability
- three Punishment, powerlessness and bounded agency: exploring the role of welfare conditionality with ‘at risk’ women attempting to live ‘a good life’
- four Resisting welfare conditionality: constraint, choice and dissent among homeless migrants
- five No strings attached? An exploration of employment support services offered by third sector homelessness organisations
- six Exploring the impact of welfare conditionality on Roma migrants in the UK
- seven Exploring the behavioural outcomes of family-based intensive interventions
- eight Editor's afterword
- Index
Summary
Introduction: defining and understanding welfare conditionality
Before outlining in a little more detail each chapter's specific focus, it is important to consider how welfare conditionality might be precisely defined, to outline the extent to which it has become an accepted part of welfare policy and practice within and beyond the UK, and to consider what its purported purpose may be.
Looking first at issues of definition, Clasen and Clegg (2007) offer a useful starting point. Considering the concept of welfare conditionality in its broadest sense, and exploring how it might be defined and operationalised to enable a comparative consideration of welfare state regime change, Clasen and Clegg identify three ‘levels’, or types, of conditions operating within welfare states which may govern an individual's access to social security. The purpose of their discussions was to offer insights into the qualitative shifts in the relationship between social rights and responsibilities that define the quality of social citizenship in different settings, at different times:
The first, or primary, condition for the receipt of social security is always membership of a defined category of support … Analytically secondary to conditions of category are conditions of circumstance or in more common social security parlance, eligibility and entitlement criteria … The third and final level of conditionality … intervening only after eligibility for benefit has been otherwise established and having the function of regulating the ongoing benefit receipt. It pertains to what could be called conditions of ‘conduct’, with the policy levers being the tightening or loosening of behavioural requirements and constraints imposed upon different kinds of benefit recipients. (Clasen and Clegg, 2007:172-4).
This approach reminds us that very few rights to social benefits and services in contemporary welfare states are in effect ‘unconditional’ and that when operating alone, or in conjunction with one another, conditions of category, circumstance and conduct – as identified by Clasen and Clegg – routinely function to define and limit an individual's right to social security. It is also worth noting at this point that conditionality operating at a fourth level, that of front-line implementation, operationalised by what Lipsky (1980) famously called ‘street level bureaucrats’, may also be significant.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Dealing with Welfare ConditionalityImplementation and Effects, pp. 1 - 14Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2019