Public Rights, Public Rules by Connie L. McNeely Connie L. McNeely

Author:Connie L. McNeely, Connie L. McNeely [Connie L. McNeely, Connie L. McNeely]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138984271
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

8 THE CLASSIFICATORY LOGICS OF STATE WELFARE SYSTEMS

TOWARDS A FORMAL ANALYSIS

John W. Mohr

In the process of conferring the rights of citizenship, modern nation states constitute their citizens as subjects within a variety of discursive registers. The English sociologist T.H. Marshall was one of the first commentators to point out that this process included the construction of citizens as the bearers of social rights. In Marshall’s schema, social rights embraced a broad range of demands, “from the right to a modicum of economic welfare and security to the right to share to the full in the social heritage and to live the life of a civilized being according to the standards prevailing in the society” (1964:72). In effect, Marshall argued, to be a citizen of a modern state was to possess the right to demand a certain style of life and to be able to petition the state to insure for its provision.

In practice, however, social rights do not exist apart from the bureaucracies which implement them. Thus, as Yeheskel Hasenfeld and his colleagues have argued, in order to gain access to their social rights, individuals are compelled to enter into “bureaucratic encounters” wherein they are subjected to the classificatory logics of whichever agencies are charged with the task of evaluating and processing their claims (Hasenfeld, Rafferty, and Zald 1987). In this encounter, an interpretation is invoked and imposed, a set of meanings are brought to bear, and the individual petitioner is located within a system of discourse. Generally speaking, these discourse systems consist of predefined repertoires of social identities, organized as a role structure (Mohr 1994). The number, character, and relative standing of these identities tend to be somewhat stable (though they are regularly being contested). Three types of classificatory projects—regarding claims, needs, and solutions—provide the foundations for a set of mutually constitutive fields of meaning within which these identities are differentiated one from another. Simply put, to claim the rights of citizenship is—in this regard—to enter into a relationship wherein one’s subjectivity is specified according to a pre-existing menu of identities possessing the right to make certain types of claims, having diagnosable needs, and for whom recognizable solutions embodied within established organizational repertoires of action are deemed to be appropriate.

This implies that the relationships which link citizens and welfare states consist, in essence, of systems of meanings which serve to govern practices and to frame the nature of claimants’ needs and rights. In making this assertion I am echoing the position recently advanced by a number of scholars, many of them working from the feminist tradition, who have drawn attention to the crucial role that discourse systems play in the construction and implementation of social welfare institutions. Nancy Fraser, for example, in her analysis of the gendered character of American social policies, has argued that welfare programs are, “among other things, institutionalized patterns of interpretation.” Fraser emphasizes in particular the ways in which “welfare practices construct women and women’s needs according to certain specific—and in principle, contestable—interpretations, even as they lend those interpretations an aura of facticity that discourages contestation” (1989:146).

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