The welfare state was formed from the pressure and the social innovations initiated in society due to processes shaped by industrialization, modernization and the old social movements. Labour unions, workers associations, cooperatives and mutuals initiated what can be named, in Polanyian terms, a self-protective movement of society against the effects of labour commodification propelled by the market economy (Polanyi 1957). This prolonged until the 1970s, where new social movements extended the ambit of the collective responsibility for the welfare of citizens. Many services and benefits of the infrastructure of the welfare state are an outcome of social innovations such as, for instance, social security systems, inspired by the collective social insurance of worker’s mutual - one of the most successful examples of the scaling up of a social innovation.
In the profound changes in the economy, the state and society since the 1980s and, particularly, in the fact that the economic system of the market economy has been more capable of imposing its priorities to the political system than vice-versa - to use an idea from Niklas Luhmann (1982, see also Ferreira, 2014) – we know nowadays that the welfare state is no longer equipped to deal with the current societal transformations. But we also know that we need the kind of collective responsibility for collective welfare expressed by the welfare state. Therefore, this presentation discusses the possibility that societal priorities can be brought back to the institutions of welfare via the social innovations emerging from the social and solidarity economy.
Concepts such as institutional reciprocal model of welfare (Hulgård 2015), relational welfare (Donati 2015) or state as a new social movement (Santos, 1999) point to the idea of reforming the welfare state from society’s standpoint. In a systems’ theoretical perspective one can describe these proposals as a re-entry of society in the welfare state (Ferreira 2014).
This presentation, therefore, discusses the relationship between the state and social innovations emerging from the social and solidarity economy towards the institutional reciprocal model of welfare.
The concrete contours of this model are still unclear and are to be shaped in specific historical contexts. Namely, one can interrogate its features and possibilities in the southern European welfare states, which have been characterized for its fragmented and familist aspects. Can a relational model of welfare overcome both the lack of universalism which characterizes the Portuguese welfare state and, at the same time, the broader trends towards the privatization, marketisation and commercialization of welfare? What are the different trends taking place in the context of a structurally weak welfare state recently squeezed by crisis and austerity? What social innovations indicate the possibilities of a re-entry of society in the Portuguese welfare state?
With empirical resource to the description of recent changes in the Portuguese welfare and social economy policies and the analysis of cases of social innovations emerging from the public sector, the social and solidarity economy and of multisectoral partnerships, this presentation answers these questions in order to explore the possibilities and limits for the institutionalization of a relational welfare which has the features of the institutional reciprocal model.
The analytical frameworks of social innovation, social entrepreneurship and solidarity economy scholarship that emphasise the systemic approach to complex societal problems solving (Alvord, Brown, and Letts 2004) is the entry-point to underline the potential for social innovations whose emergence is a result of their capacity to observe the lifeworld, beyond systems functional differentiation (an ambition also present in new governance or democratic network governance), and to create conditions for flexible couplings between the different systems and sectors, particularly renegotiating the boundaries and the meanings of the separation between the social and the economic. By analysing examples of social innovations and their articulations with public policies and agencies, I argue, one can identify the possibilities that the state behaving as a new social movement (Santos, 1999), or as metagovernor (Jessop 2010) can bring back the observations of society to its structural selectivities (Jessop 2008).
References
Alvord, S. H, L. D Brown, and C. W Letts. 2004. ‘Social Entrepreneurship and Societal Transformation’. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 40 (3): 260–80.
Donati, P. 2015. ‘Beyond the Traditional Welfare State:“relational Inclusion” and the New Welfare Society’. WP1. Associazione Italiana di Sociologia.
Ferreira, S. 2014. ‘Sociological Observations of the Third Sector Through Systems Theory: An Analytical Proposal’. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 25 (6): 1671–1693.
Hulgård, L. 2015. ‘Differing Perspectives on Civil Society and the state1’. In Civil Society, the Third Sector and Social Enterprise: Governance and Democracy, edited by Jean-Louis Laville, Dennis Young, and Philippe Eynaud, 205–21. Abingdon: Routledge.
Jessop, B. 2008. State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach. Cambridge: Polity.
Luhmann, N. (1982). The differentiation of society. New York: Columbia University Press.
Polanyi, K. 1957. The Great Transformation:(the Political and Economic Origin of Our Time).
9. Social and solidarity economy, civil society and social movements
