Social Welfare Responses in a Neoliberal Era: Policies, Practices, and Social Problems

This book seeks to explore welfare responses by questioning and going beyond the assumptions found in Esping-Andersen's broad typologies of welfare capitalism. Specifically, the project seeks to reflect how the state engages, and creates general institutionalized responses to, market mechanisms and how such responses have created path dependencies in how states approach problems of inequality. Moreover, if the neoliberal era is defined as the dissemination and extension of market values to all forms of state institutions and social action, the need arises to critically investigate not only the embeddedness of such values and modes of thought in different contexts and institutional forms, but responses and modes of resistance arising from practices that might point to new forms of resilience.

Mia Arp Fallov is Associate Professor of Social Integration and Social Policy Strategies, Department of Sociology and Social Work, Aalborg University, Denmark. Her research covers welfare policy, urban sociology, social work, and social theory.

Cory Blad is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Manhattan College. His work focuses on the impact of political economic change on nationalist politics and cultural political mobilization. His recent work includes "Faustian States: Nationalist Politics and the Problem of Legitimacy in the Neoliberal Era" in Global Culture: Theories and Paradigms Revisited, edited by Vincenzo Mele and Marina Vujnovic (2016) and "Course Corrections and Failed Rationales: How Comparative Advantage and Debt Are Used to Legitimate Austerity in Africa and Latin America" with Samuel Oloruntoba and Jon Shefer in Third World Quarterly (2016).