This study investigates welfare system retrenchment in the advanced capitalist countries over the period 1980–97. During this time, welfare retrenchment occurred along three dimensions: expenditure growth slowdown, organizational/programmatic restructuring, and policy reversal. Explaining the political attack on social provision has been a matter of controversy within the social sciences, yet an increasing number of studies are focusing on the impact of economic globalization on welfare system delivery. Research on the globalization-retrenchment relationship is marked by mixed conclusions. Some analysts argue that capital mobility and economic integration have produced a generalized convergence toward retrenchment, while others emphasize that globalization has either increased social provision effort or that it has had no impact at all on welfare system operation. This study addresses both the theoretical and empirical limitations of previous globalization-retrenchment research. First, it conceptualizes and historicizes the processes of capitalist transformation over time, highlighting the crisis of capital accumulation and its subsequent reordering through economic globalization. Second, it provides an analytic framework that centers on the broader socio-economic context within which welfare systems are embedded. A comparative political economy approach to welfare system retrenchment allows changes in contemporary capitalism to be linked to social provision outcomes. Historical analysis shows that the early 1980s employers' offensive was launched to restore capitalist profitability. Neo-liberal transformative action aimed to reorder post-war capitalism's structural and institutional arrangements, and to shift the balance of class forces in capital's favor. This neo-liberal reordering unleashed the economic transforming tendencies of state rationalization, market contestability, and factor mobility (“coercive competition”) on all nations. The importance of coercive competition is that it simultaneously acted on and transcended domestic institutional-policy frameworks. In this new political economic context, domestic welfare systems faced a number of transformatory pressures, including the erosion of government autonomy over social provision, integration induced convergent welfare effects, and welfare system rivalry. The prime source of retrenchment pressures was that mobile capital has an aversion to anything that contributes to competitive locational disadvantage. How these pressures were dealt with politically determines the nature and scope of welfare system retrenchment.

This is a study of the international community living movement to enable people with disabilities to either leave custodial institutions or be supported to live improved lives in the community. It is examined from the vantage point of the closure of a local mental retardation institution in western Massachusetts. This local example was seen as being a microcosm of a larger social movement and was deeply influenced in its broad outline by the ideology of normalization (now increasingly referred to as social role valorization theory). The study examined the identity and role of fourteen local service delivery leaders who both helped propel the aims of improved community living and eventually close the institution by the early 1990's. The study revealed the important role of ideology as a mobilizer of change, the influence of other contemporary social movements in providing a broad framework for change, the commitment of governments to the expansion and adequacy of public services in the 1970's and 1980's, the shift in professional opinion towards a preference for community living, the induction into the system of dissident young people in large numbers, the family and related advocacy movements and the key role of pivotal professional leaders in service and government roles. The study revealed the fragility of being able to sustain this movement into the future notwithstanding the remarkable success in closing institutions for several decades at an increasing rate.

In this dissertation, I studied organizational characteristics of nursing home facilities (NHs) and the health outcomes of their residents. Organizational features of nursing homes, such as the category of ownership (either profit or nonprofit), facility size (number of beds), and chain affiliation (chain or independent) were linked to resident outcomes (quality indicators). The analyses were informed by theory from the sociology of organizations. This study had four objectives: (1) analyze the extent of homogenization in the current field of NH care; (2) measure quality of care using new and existing indicators; (3) impact of NH organizational structures on quality of care; and (4) changes in organizational structure and outcomes of NHs over time. The primary data for this study are from the National Nursing Home Survey (NNHS). The survey was conducted in 1973, 1995, 1997, and 1999. Data from 1995, 1997, and 1999 are publicly available and were downloaded for use from the National Center of Health Statistics website, which is part of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/major/nnhsd/nnhsd.htm )(2003). There were two types of data collected at each occurrence of the survey, facility-level and resident-level. A high amount of homogeneity was present across NHs by organizational type (i.e., ownership and affiliation). NHs were similar according to resident characteristics, types and amounts of services offered, presence of specialty units, source of payment, and use of volunteers. Facilities varied substantially in their daily and monthly charges by organizational type and size of facility. Quality indicators (QIs) were obtained from previous research funded by the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare. These “existing” QIs were prevalence of three conditions: bowel or bladder incontinence, urinary tract infection, and use of indwelling catheters. New QIs were flu, pneumonia, and Tetanus-Diphtheria vaccination rates. No significant differences were found across facility types using existing QIs. More variation was found across types using immunization rates. Nonprofit NHs had better quality than for-profit NHs using immunization rates. Several theories from the sociology of organizations were supported by examining changes in the industry of NHs over time. There was generally homogenization in the NHs. When there was change in facilities, it was in the direction of NHs emulating the most successful types of NHs, which were nonprofit, chain-affiliated homes.

Abstract not available

This dissertation brings into sharper focus the crisis of care in our society which underlies the politics of the welfare state. It explores points of vulnerability in the liberal, professional-bureaucratic approach to care which the New Right has been able to exploit in undermining support for much needed public sector human services. It argues that we need to move beyond conservative, liberal, and orthodox Marxist approaches to care, in favor of a socialist-feminist, communitarian approach which recognizes the need for mutual support in dealing with our common human vulnerability. This approach makes the super-exploitation and devaluation of women's caring capacities, within home and state, and the underdevelopment of men's capacity to care, a central issue. The void of mutual supportiveness, combined with prolonged economic insecurity and social disorientation, has given rise to a level of personal anxiety and pain that has reached crisis proportions, outstripping the professional-managerial capacity of the liberal welfare state to contain, and increasing the power of the right. Human service practitioners are caught in a severe bind as they attempt to fill this support void, while being bound by a set of professional-hierarchical and fiscal constraints not of their own making. The thesis concludes with a vision of service in which the professional-hierarchical and gender defined social relations of care are transformed to enhance our capacity to care for one another as an ongoing, mutually shared part of our life activity. It points to the black and white working class women, who are the main providers and recipients of state human services, as an important and underacknowledged source of insight and leadership in undertaking these changes upon which our social survival and growth depends.

This dissertation is a historical study of mothers' pensions, the first state welfare program aiding poor mothers with dependent children. The early twentieth century mothers' pensions program represented a radical departure from nineteenth century relief policies of institutionalizing the poor. It laid the foundations for the legislation put forth in the New Deal and remains the basis of present day welfare policy. Importantly, this program marked a new relationship between the family--especially mothers--and the state, and provides the historical base to the current scholarship on women and the welfare state. The analysis presented here establishes a feminist framework from which to analyze both historical and present welfare policy. Through a case study of mothers' pensions, I focus on the complex ways in which contemporary gender relations inform welfare policy, and identify how welfare programs, in turn, act to define, reinforce, and reproduce gender relations in society. First, the dissertation locates the mothers' pensions movement within the Progressive Era climate of reform and the contemporary debates on motherhood and the home during a period of destabilizing industrial growth. The study then moves to an examination of individual state mothers' pensions laws and administrative practices. Here, I look at the definitions of proper family life and gender relations embedded and promoted in the laws and implementation process. I argue that the definition of a "fit mother" was derived from white, middle class standards of motherhood and, as a condition for aid, functioned to structure the behavior, relationships, and work options of poor, often immigrant women. In a review of the current liberal and marxist literature on welfare, the dissertation concludes with an argument for a feminist analysis of welfare policy. The discussion identifies women's primary relationships with men, children, and wage-work as the key traditional sources of women's dependency and the key areas of state regulation of women's lives. Finally, I address the problem of women's independence in a capitalist, patriarchal order.

A review of research literature on problems of women in the labor force, recent changes in sexual attitudes and behavior, and materials from the Sociology of Work, suggests that the issue of sexuality at work has not been researched as a significant component of the dynamics of work organizations by either sociologists or sexologists. This study examines the incidence and consequences of the sexualization of the workplace. By sexualization is meant any verbal or physical contact that occurs among persons at work that could be sensual or sexual in intent or content. Interactions may be agreed to or coerced; they may occur between persons of the same or opposite sex, between persons of similar rank or between superior and subordinate. The analysis is based on data from a twenty page mailback questionnaire on the experiences of 377 working women--both heterosexual and lesbian; it focuses on the relationship between their sexual identity, age, marital status, feminist identification, and several workplace characteristics--gender structure, extent of supervisory responsibilities, social class difference--and (1) their resulting definitions of sexual harassment, (2) the extent of their sociability at work and beliefs about the integration of their public and private lives, and (3) their experiences at work of unwanted sexual approaches, sexual assaults, and committed intimate sexual relationships. The findings indicate that (1) working women do not maintain sharp lines between their public and private lives but have significant social contacts with persons from work. Beliefs about the desirability of this integration and experience are constrained by workplace factors, such as gender structure and supervisory responsibilities, and background factors such as age and race; (2) the workplace does provide a context for beginning a committed sexual relationship, particularly for lesbians. Co-worker liaisons are the most prevalent pattern of involvement for all women; involvements with bosses are frequently detrimental to a woman's career; (3) significant majorities of both heterosexual and lesbian women had physical or sexual contact with someone at work in the last year; almost all women consider these approaches unwanted and disliked behaviors; their opinions are directly grounded in actual experience; (4) lesbians show greater awareness of, and hostility toward, these experiences than do heterosexuals; this is most clearly reflected in definitions of sexual harassment. While all women workers unanimously define as sexual harassment those behaviors characterized by forced sexual intimacy, physical violation, and sexual objectification, there is little consensus and much ambivalence about behaviors considered less serious but more common. Ambivalence reflects the complexities of male-female interaction and the meaning of heterosexuality in daily interactions at work. In contrast to opinions about the problem of unwanted approaches, definitions of sexual harassment reflect crystallized consciousness of power inequality. Women who define less serious behaviors as sexual harassment are strongly identified as feminists, and those in economically and socially powerless or vulnerable positions--the young, the poor, the lesbians, the "token" women, victims of sexual assault. In conclusion, the workplace is sexualized in many complex ways, most to the detriment of working women.

Le résumé en français n'a pas été communiqué par l'auteur. / Le résumé en anglais n'a pas été communiqué par l'auteur.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 100-107). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Thesis (doctoral)--University of Hull, 1994. / BLDSC reference no.: DX194067.