Austerity’s impacts on the healthcare, social care and education professions are under the spotlight in this important book.
From scarcer resources to greater stresses, and falling training budgets to rising risks, it charts how policies and cuts have compromised workers’ ability to undertake their professional roles. It combines research and practice experience to assess the extent of de-professionalisation in recent years and how workers have responded.
This book is a vital review of how austerity has resculpted our notions of professionalism.
With austerity’s disproportionately heavy impact on women now apparent, this engaging book considers activism against it from a feminist perspective.
Emma Craddock goes deep inside activist culture to explore the many cultural and emotional dimensions of political participation. She questions what motivates and sustains protest, considering the enabling aspects of solidarity and empathy, as well as the constraining factors of negative emotions and gendered barriers associated with activism, examining the role of gender and emotion within protest.
This is a lived-in study that gets to the heart of what it means to be an anti-austerity activist and an important addition to social justice debate.
David Etherington provides bold and fresh perspectives on the link between welfare policy and employment relations as he assesses their fundamental impact on social inequalities.
Exploring how reforms, including Universal Credit, have reinforced employment and social insecurity, he assesses the role of NGOs, trade unions and policymakers in challenging this increasingly work-focused welfare agenda. Drawing on international and national case studies, the book reviews developments, including rising job insecurity, low pay and geographical inequalities, considered integral to neoliberal approaches to social spending.
Etherington sets out the possibilities and challenges of alternative approaches and progressive new paths for welfare, the labour market and social rights.
Demographic ageing is identified as a global challenge with significant social policy implications. This book explores these implications, with a particular focus on the pressures and prospects for ageing societies in the context of austerity.
The book presents a carefully crafted study of ageing in Ireland, one of the countries hardest hit by the Eurozone financial crisis. Providing a close, critical analysis of ageing and social policy that draws directly on the perspectives of older people, the text makes significant advances in framing alternatives to austerity-driven government policy and neoliberalism, giving a refreshing interdisciplinary account of contemporary ageing.
207 Part III Austerity Marco Pomati The economic downturn of the late 2000s and early 2010s, now known as the Great Recession, led to a major fall in economic output that, combined with state support for the financial sector and fiscal stimuli, increased government debt and deficits around the world. This global financial crisis was followed in countries like the UK by a period of austerity, advocated on the grounds that government needed a period of fiscal consolidation. The theme of austerity has been at the forefront of most Social Policy
This collection of original essays explores the myriad expressions of austerity since the 2008 financial crisis.
Case studies drawn from Canada, Australia and the European Union provide extensive comparative analysis of fiscal consolidation and the varied political responses against austerity. Contributions examine such themes as privatization, class mobilization and resistance, the crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of the far right.
The potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in shaping future austerity and alternatives is signalled. Given the rapidly shifting terrain, this comprehensive handbook provides important insights into a complex and fast-changing period of politics and policy.
The politics of austerity has seen governments across Europe cut back on welfare provision. As the State retreats, this edited collection explores secular and faith-based grassroots social action in Germany and the United Kingdom that has evolved in response to changing economic policy and expanding needs, from basic items such as food to more complex means to move out of poverty.
Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and practitioners in several areas of social intervention, the book explores how the conceptualization and constitutive practices of citizenship and community are changing because of the retreat of the State and the challenge of meeting social and material needs, creating new opportunities for local activism.
The book provides new ways of thinking about social and political belonging and about the relations between individual, collective, and State responsibility.
Austerity is not always one-size-fits-all; it can be a flexible, class-based strategy taking several forms depending on the political-economic forces and institutional characteristics present.
This important book identifies continuity and variety in crisis-driven austerity restructuring across Canada, Denmark, Ireland and Spain. In their analysis, the authors focus on several components of austerity, including fiscal and monetary policy, budget narratives, public sector reform, labor market flexibilization, and resistance. In so doing, they uncover how austerity can be categorized into different dynamic types, and expose the economic, social, and political implications of the varieties of austerity.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence.
In a world dominated by austerity politics and policies, Advising in austerity provides a lively and thought-provoking account of the conditions, consequences and challenges of advice work in the UK, presenting a rare and rich view of the world of advice giving. Based on original research it examines how advisors negotiate the private troubles of those who come to Citizens Advice Bureaux (CAB) and construct ways forward. Exploring how advisors are trained, the strong contributor team reflect on the challenges facing Citizens Advice Bureaux in the future, where austerity will ensure that the need for advice services increase, while funding for such services declines.
In the first book of its kind, Bassel and Emejulu explore minority women’s experiences of and resistances to austerity measures in France and Britain. Minority women are often portrayed as passive victims. However, Minority women and austerity demonstrates how they use their race, class, gender and legal status as a resource for collective action in the face of the neoliberal colonisation of non-governmental organisations, the failures of left-wing politics and the patronising initiatives of policy-makers.
Using in-depth case studies, this book explores the changing relations between the state, the market and civil society which create opportunities and dilemmas for minority women activists. Through an intersectional ‘politics of survival’ these women seek to subvert the dominant narratives of ‘crisis’ and ‘activism’.
