Welfare, Inequality and Social Citizenship: Deprivation and Affluence in Austerity Britain

✍ Scribed by Daniel Edmiston

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2018
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 225
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Exploring the lived realities of both poverty and prosperity in the UK, this book examines the material and symbolic significance of welfare austerity and its implications for social citizenship and inequality. The book offers a rare and vivid insight into the everyday lives, attitudes and behaviours of the rich as well as the poor, demonstrating how those marginalised and validated by the existing welfare system make sense of the prevailing socio-political settlement and their own position within it. Through the testimonies of both affluent and deprived citizens, the book problematises dominant policy thinking surrounding the functions and limits of welfare, examining the civic attitudes and engagements of the rich and the poor, to demonstrate how welfare austerity and rising structural inequalities secure and maintain institutional legitimacy. The book offers a timely contribution to academic and policy debates pertaining to citizenship, welfare reform and inequality.

✦ Table of Contents

WELFARE, INEQUALITY AND SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP
Contents
List of tables and figures
Tables
Figures
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction
Welfare austerity: perjury, punishment and destitution
Towards an explanatory account of ‘unequal citizenship’
Book overview and research design
2. Unequal citizenship? The new social divisions of public welfare
Introduction
Towards neoliberal citizenship: your risk, your reward
The new social divisions and distributional effects of public welfare
Citizenship status and identity: validation and contingency
Conclusion
3. Lived experiences of poverty and prosperity in austerity Britain
Introduction
Poverty and plenty
Work and worklessness
Area deprivation and affluence
The material and symbolic significance of inequality
Conclusion
4. The sociological imagination of rich and poor citizens
Introduction
Welfare attitudes and inequality: knowledge and attitude formation
The ‘deserving workless poor’: Becky
The ‘undeserving workless poor’: Aimee
The ‘deserving working poor’: James
The ‘undeserving working rich’: Robert
Structure versus agency: explaining attitudinal divergence
Conclusion
5. Heterodox citizens? Conceptions of social rights and responsibilities
Introduction
Claiming versus earning the social rights of citizenship
Conceiving and enacting responsible citizenship
Resistance and resignation to the prevailing citizenship configuration
From welfare deficits to institutional disengagement?
Conclusion
6. Identity, difference and citizenship: a fraying tapestry?
Introduction
Identity, difference and liberal citizenship
Citizenship and the gendered division of (care) labour
Citizenship, race and place
Universalism versus particularism
The warp and weft of collective (dis-) identification
Conclusion
7. Deliberating the structural determinants of poverty and inequality
Introduction
Poor debate: entrenched attitudes towards poverty and inequality
Galvanising public opinion towards socially inclusive ends
Conclusion
8. Conclusion
The rise of anti-social citizenship?
Implications for welfare policy and politics
Appendix: Details of the qualitative fieldwork
References
Index