Abstract
The publication of Fiona Williams’s Social Policy a Critical Introduction in 1989 radically shifted the terms of critical social policy analysis to account for feminist, anti-racist and other new social movement critiques of welfare in a class dominated analytic landscape. Welfare critique from below, forged in and through complex and globally expansive power struggles. Giving the fullest recognition to the value of the voice, agency and subjectivity of welfare users and their lived realities in global coloniality. For an undergraduate student of social policy in the mid 1990s this text was unique critical music to my ears. Social Policy: A Critical and Intersectional Analysis has the same impact on, a somewhat more weathered, academic of 20 plus years who has been writing about equalities policy failure from an intersectional and critical perspective. This long-anticipated arrival of this single authored ‘follow-up’ to this ground-breaking contribution is certainly welcome. Coming, as it does, off the back of William's track record of multiple, expansive critical and ground-breaking interventions into the discipline and the practice of social policy at the global and a local level, and into a field which continues to underplay the constitutive nature of culture (and especially racialisation) to the materialities of power and inequality.
The historical sweep of William's analysis has always been crucial to its potent impact. As has its interdisciplinary scope. Both are central to the analysis presented here. So too are welfare futures and the role of human innovations and solidarities in these. This is a book of the moment rooted in all its complexities; in the gravitas of the multiple crisis of financialized capitalism, but also in futures hopes of ‘street-level actions of generosity, kindness, mutual aid and care’ (p. 4). As a taster overview of what is far too expansive to encapsulate in a short review the text is organised in three parts: Orientation, Analysis and Praxis. Orientation frames the range and scope of the contextual and analytic influences. Analysis frames the rich conceptual apparatus developed in this volume including: the Family-Nation-Work-Nature formation; the social relations of welfare; the intersections in transnational social and political economy of care. Praxis offers empirically grounded exploration of current prefigurative politics for an eco-welfare commons. The final chapter makes a similar move to the 1989 volume calling for attention to the configuration of social policy knowledge constitution.
What this text does is articulate in further depth and with even more clarity Williams’ earlier reconfigured analysis of welfare state formation and its settlements through the intersecting social relations of Family (gender), Nation (race) and Work (class). This reconfiguration of the intersections of gender, race and class in terms of the ideas through which these social categories are lived and understood in the everyday was always crucial to finding a way into thinking about power and agency as relationally enacted in welfare. What this way of thinking does is to disrupt structural analysis of welfare, moving it beyond the problematics of social categorical thinking which homogenised experiences of power, exploitation and resistance in different, but related ways to the universalism it was designed to critique. This new ideational analysis paved the way for the development of post structural theorising of discourse in welfare (Hunter, 2015; Lewis, 2000; Padamsee, 2009). It sadly continues to confound much mainstream social policy analysis.
Adding the domain of Nature to this Family, Nation, Work model, and influenced by decolonial and posthumanist thinking, this text engages with a ‘new set of social relations of power – those between the human and the non-human living world and living organisms’ (p. 219). This approach sits with others like Mbembe (2019) and Lea (2020), the former drawn on, the latter not, who are also concerned to understand our ethical relations to our environs as constitutive of a new decolonial ethics of care, in Williams's terms here: the eco-welfare commons. This is an expansive approach to welfare as part of a broader social commons where the aim of social policies is ‘not only to meet needs but to enable and sustain solidarities and alliances that permit differently positioned groups to articulate those needs’ (p. 216). It makes an urgent call for social policy as discipline and practice in the context of our contemporary global coloniality.
Unsurprising for those who know Fiona Williams's life-long body of work, this text is an empirically grounded theoretically sophisticated, wide ranging and provocative tour de force. It is vital reading for anyone who cares about the world we are in, how we can care for it and the role of social policy in that endeavour.