By Joe Whelan

Hardback | ISBN-13: 978-1-5275-6714-6 | ISBN-10: 1-5275-6714-1 | Date of Publication: 23/03/2021 | Pages / Size: 155 / A5 | Price: £58.99

Book Description

Who deserves to get what and what should they have to do in order to get it? These are questions that societies have grappled with since antiquity, and they continue to echo today. This book explores questions of social deservingness by tracking how it has been treated across the centuries, from ancient Greece to the present day, taking in many notable thinkers along the way. In doing so, it focuses, in particular, on what different thinkers have had to say on and about poor relief and social welfare. Modern welfare systems are also examined to show how particular logics of poverty, while they may be ancient in origin, continue to inform our notions of who deserves to get what today. This book will be of interest to those studying or working in the areas of social welfare, social policy and sociology.

A Word from the Author

I wanted to explore where our ideas about deservingness come from and to show how they are deeply and historically rooted.

Accordingly, this book seeks to add to the discourse and debate surrounding this area of scholarship in a manner which is arguably prescient by not only discussing welfare, stigma and deservingness, but by also drawing in narratives around how we need to begin to think about the ‘doing’ of human welfare in the face of the oncoming climate catastrophe. Welfare and how we organise around collective risk and need are always areas of significant import in respect to scholarship. However, this importance has arguably become even more pronounced in the face of a rising and sustained move toward automation and artificial intelligence along with the impending climate catastrophe. On the basis that ‘you have to look back to move forward’ this book has sought to document the historical impetus for contemporary state of welfare discourses and, in so doing, challenge contemporary thinking.

I think I have shown how many of the things reflected in how we ‘do’ welfare now are, in fact, very old. I think that the book also suggests that the post-war welfare settlement was a blip in the doing of collective welfare and that since about the 1970s, it has been business as usual with respect to how we treat the poor, which is to say, harshly.

About the Author

Dr Joe Whelan is a Lecturer in the School of Applied Social Studies of University College Cork, Ireland, where he is also the First-Year Coordinator and Deputy Director of the Bachelor of Social Work programme. His main area of research interest is exploring the nexus of work and welfare, and he is particularly interested in exploring and understanding lived experiences in the context of welfare recipiency, focusing on the processes and effects of welfare conditionality. His recent publications include “Work and thrive or claim and skive: Experiencing the toxic symbiosis of worklessness and welfare recipiency in Ireland” in the Irish Journal of Sociology, “Spectres of Goffman: Impression management in the Irish welfare space” in the Journal of Applied Social Science, and “We have our dignity, yeah? Scrutiny under suspicion: Experiences of welfare conditionality in the Irish social protection system” in Social Policy and Administration.

Welfare, Deservingness and the Logic of Poverty: Who Deserves? is available now.