Middle class and welfare state : making sense of an ambivalent relationship
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Middle class and welfare state : making sense of an ambivalent relationship
(Routledge studies in governance and public policy)
Routledge, 2020
- : hbk
Available at 7 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This book examines the relationship between the middle class and the welfare state.
Taking an interpretive approach which understands the middle class as a socially constructed category, it combines discourse analysis, welfare state theory, and interpretive policy analysis in an innovative way to investigate how the middle class becomes a meaningful object of public debates and policymaking. Comparing Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, the book reconstructs the prevalent images and meanings of the middle class from each country's public debates and tracks how the middle classes with their various meanings and characteristics are entangled with the identification of societal problems, the articulation of political demands, and the construction of welfare policies. Ultimately, it shows how the formation and consolidation of different welfare regimes can be interpreted as specific ways of solving the puzzle of how to incorporate the middle class in the construction of a welfare state consensus.
This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of comparative welfare state research, policy analysis, political sociology, political theory, and European and comparative politics.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1. The Middle Class: A Constructivist Perspective 2. Middle Class and Social and Political Theory: Old Heritage, Contemporary Variations 3. Middle Class and Theory of the Welfare State: Meanings of Welfare, Overlapping Consensus, and Target Group Constructions 4. Different Welfare Regimes, Different Middle Classes: On Methodology and Methods 5. Sweden: The Egalitarian Understanding of the Middle Class 6. Germany: The Conservative-Communitarian Understanding of the Middle Class 7. United Kingdom: The Libertarian-Multicultural Understanding of the Middle Class 8. Conclusion
by "Nielsen BookData"