The essays in this book are about new approaches to welfare in an era of globalization. Byapproaches, I mean both forms of governance and ways of studying them.

Charles Lemert has eloquently reminded us that we need new methods of study for these times of globalization.¹ For Lemert, “global methods” means getting close while achieving critical distance at the same time so as to better understand diverse people and practices in the fluid contexts of globalization. It could be argued that we should have been practicing this sort of double work whether there was globalization or not. Placing social...

A very capable student once reminded me that when she asked in class how I define “truth,” I lamely replied that the truth was at best … “mushy.” More than fifteen years later, the former student attended a lecture I gave at a university in the metropolitan region where she had moved. Her children now grown, she was seeking to reconnect to her academic past. Her attendance in part prompted my revisiting the truth question. I began by quoting Slavoj Žižek. Now the truth was no longer mushy but, perhaps no more reassuring, it had become … “one-sided.”

If anyone...

I have a confession to make. For over two decades, I have discussed with students that the research literature was filled with references to the United States as a “welfare-state laggard.”¹ Research study after research study provided copious statistical documentation on the fact that the United States spent far less on social welfare policies to combat poverty and did less to aid the poorest members of U.S. society than did most, if not all, other industrialized societies.² The major implicit normative subtext of such objective social science studies was more often than not the idea that the United States would,...

I teach in a graduate school of social work at a women’s college. Students in my classes are continually using an important dichotomy to turn discussions of the growing emphasis in social policy on work into debates about care. The emphasis on work glosses over the importance of care as students are wont to remind me, again and again. You would think I would learn that by now. They have a point. To emphasize one part of the dichotomy risks neglecting the other. Sending more and more women, especially mothers of young children into the workforce, puts at risk our...

Welfare in the United States was dramatically reformed in 1996 in ways that I would argue are highly racialized but that Europe has yet to fully emulate.¹ Yet, American welfare reform’s racial subtext remains understudied by mainstream policy analysis. And that is the focus of this chapter: given the way it is most normally conducted these days, conventional public policy research is incapable of addressing the major political questions, such as what is the racial character of welfare reform. Only when we place welfare reform in historical and cultural context so as to highlight in particular the role of discourse...

Given the limited alternatives to welfare reform in today’s political climate, some very progressive thinkers have joined a growing number of analysts, activists, administrators, and policymakers who believe that the some of the most feasible progressive alternatives lie in promoting asset accumulation by the poor.¹

Asset-building policy initiatives are touted as transcending political differences and offering something appealing to both the left and the right. For the right, asset-building discourse moves policy away from income redistribution across the classes and refocuses policy on supporting low-income individuals in becoming more self-sufficient by way of taking steps to enhance their own wealth...

Not too long ago, at the end of a somewhat rambling presentation on the rolling retrenchment in U.S. social welfare policy in the era of globalization, a member of my academic audience asked me the proverbial academic question: “What is your method?” I paused, having reluctantly to switch gears from policy analyst to methodologist, and then replied, “ … Aphasia!”

A couple of thoughts inspired this response. I remembered reading Frederic Jameson’s argument that postmodern political thought was a noncritical manifestation of the confusion of our postmodern times and the resulting indeterminacy.¹ Jameson in good part meant this as a...

The discourse of globalization creates new ways of reinscribing privilege and subordination by calling forth new forms of governance for regimenting populations into the emerging social order.¹ How should people respond to the implicit understandings of self and other embedded in the globalization discourse’s preoccupation with welfare dependency? They need to identify those embedded biases, call them out publicly, and propose alternative understandings about how they should practice relating each other, one-to-one and collectively. In so doing, they can make the welfare state less exclusionary and tap its latent possibilities for more compassionate policies. Failing to challenge the discourse of...