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Conditionality then and now? Moral ordering and the young unemployed : policy lessons from the 1930s
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Cooper, Matthew (2018) Conditionality then and now? Moral ordering and the young unemployed : policy lessons from the 1930s. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3253719~S15
Abstract
This thesis sheds light on welfare reform since 2010 through the study of similarities and differences in policy during the depression of the 1930s. It sets out to make an empirical, analytical and theoretical contribution to the study of welfare reform and policy in the 2010s and in the past by undertaking a new analysis of the 1930s. This analysis of policy discourse uses as its sources, original, primary documents from national and local government in the 1930s. It provides a new empirical case study of local benefit administration in Birmingham, and looks at the far less studied issue of young people’s unemployment. It adopts a governmentality approach to policy analysis informed by Foucault’s ideas of ‘discipline’ in social institutions. The thesis examines how welfare claimants have been constructed in policy discourse and how this then feeds into policy interventions. It explores the way these views are institutionalised in policy in different disciplinary measures that groups of claimants are subjected to. Its main findings are that 1) many new technologies of behavioural regulation represent revivals of practices from the past; 2) similar preoccupations with the subjectivity of claimants are present in each period but they have been translated into policy differently, since 2010 access to benefit has been determined primarily through behavioural assessments, in the 1930s this was dependent on status distinctions; 3) Youth had a special status in the 1930s, and was subject to specific forms of discipline which contrast with the treatment of adults.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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Subjects: | H Social Sciences > HC Economic History and Conditions H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor |
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Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Great Britain -- Economic conditions -- 1918-1945, Great Britain -- Economic conditions, Unemployed youth -- Great Britain, Welfare recipients -- Employment -- Great Britain | ||||
Official Date: | August 2018 | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
Theses Department: | Institute for Employment Research | ||||
Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Green, Anne E. ; Whiteside, Noel | ||||
Sponsors: | Economic and Social Research Council (Great Britain) | ||||
Extent: | 306 leaves | ||||
Language: | eng |
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