The activating welfare state often frames recruiting ordinary people as ‘local’ co-producers of residence-based provisions the antidote to standardised bureaucracy. This article demonstrates that their enrolment in delivery public services Netherlands constitutes not an antidote, but another variant standardisation. To do so, it introduces concept ‘intimate standardisation’, a set tactics and t...

The welfare states in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have undergone massive changes since the beginning of the 1990s. This paper reviews the literature on welfare state development in CEE in light of the theories that have been used to study advanced capitalist democracies. Its purpose is to critically assess the extent to which diff erent theories can explain changes in the welfare state dur...

When evaluating the various aspects of the welfare state, people assess some aspects more positively than others. Following a multidimensional approach, this study systematically argues for a framework composed of seven dimensions of the welfare state, which are subject to the opinions of the public. Using confirmatory factor analyses, this conceptual framework of multidimensional welfare attit...

An assertion that occurs in public debate with varying emphasis and at irregular intervals is that the Norwegian welfare state is a product of the policy of the Norwegian Social Democratic Party. Such an assertion has a certain relevance, but it must be considered in the light of the time-span within which one places the establishment and moulding of the welfare state. A perspective of 50 years...

The goal of this article is to provide a balanced assessment of what has happened to the welfare state in advanced capitalist societies since 1980. What is one to make of recent spending cuts and welfare reforms? Do they represent a fundamental rollback of the welfare activities of the state and thus a belated victory for Thatcherite-Reaganite ideas? Or should these changes rather be seen as in...

The methodology for the scientific assessment of animal welfare has developed rapidly in recent years and has become a major scientific discipline. The concepts of welfare, need, stress, health, pain, emotion and feeling are now clarified. In teaching, legislation and practical work referring to animal welfare, a clear definition that can be related to other concepts is needed. The welfare of a...

We study state dependence in welfare receipt and investigate whether welfare transitions changed after a welfare reform. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we apply dynamic multinomial logit estimators and find that state dependence in welfare receipt is not a central feature of the German welfare system. We find that welfare transitions changed after the reform: transitions from ...

The article discusses some difficulties of drawing implications from welfare state reform in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for "middle-income countries", and whose welfare states have been less well institutionalized. It is argued that globalization's role in contemporary social policy dynamics were not unimportant, but social processes occurring within national con...

China’s social welfare reform since the mid-1980s has been characterized as incremental and fragmented in three dimensions—social insurance, privatization, and targeting. This paper attempts to explore the micro-foundation of China’s urban social welfare reform by examining the diverse social welfare preferences and the cleavages among societal groups. It argues that the diversity of the societ...