Introduction and conclusion available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence.
The turn towards a Social Investment approach to welfare implies deploying resources to enhance human capital and mobilise the productive potential of citizens, starting in early childhood.
This edited collection brings regional and local realities to the forefront of social investment debates by showcasing successes, challenges and setbacks of Social Investment policies and services from ten European countries: Italy, UK, Sweden, Finland, Greece, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Spain. It provides practical, accessible illustrations of good practice, routes to success, and lessons learned. The book is informed throughout by engagement with service users and local communities, and features many previously unheard voices including front-line workers, local decision makers, volunteers and beneficiaries.
‘Commerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good government,’ wrote Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations, ‘and with them, the liberty and security of individuals.’ However, Philipp Rössner shows how, when looked at in the face of history, it has usually been the other way around.
This book follows the development of capitalism from the Middle Ages through the industrial revolution to modern day, casting new light on the areas where pre-modern political economies of growth and development made a difference. It shows how order and governance provided the foundation for prosperity, growth and the wealth of nations.
Written for scholars and students of economic history, this is a pioneering new study that debunks the neoliberal origin myth of how capitalism came into the world.
We return to policy and empirical or archival-based histories zooming in on a now all but forgotten type of business venture once characteristic of the preindustrial oeconomic landscape as a case in point: the very same large centralized workshop or manufactory (Manufaktur) that Smith had used in the opening chapters of the Wealth of Nations to illustrate his point about division of labour, stopping short of a full explanation of how the origin of the wealth of nations through the virtuous forces of manufacturing really came about (the difference between Smithian and cameralist development; just a nuance, but of world-historical dimensions). Since the 16th century it was consensual among European writers to see manufacturing or the crafting of things as a main source of national prosperity. Manufacturing embodied skills, value-added, curiosity, learning and creativity so much more so than other economic activities such as farming, finance or trade. Studying the history of industrial policy with a focus on Manufakturen or manufactories in the Germanies, Scotland, Sweden, Austria and France, the chapter surveys how discourses examined in Chapter 7 reflected back upon and interacted with medieval and early modern economic practices, providing the foundations for capitalism, industrialization and the wealth of nations.
political climate supportive of collaboration and Social Investment in unaccompanied children; (2) mission-driven policy entrepreneurs (Petridou et al, 2015) among CSO leaders and municipal administrators that promoted the partnership idea; (3) municipal administrators’ knowledge and trust in the CSOs’ capacities based on experiences of other collaboration forms; and (4) a positive mutual experience among several partners of an earlier IOP on EU migrants. An additional contributing factor was partner commitment to the same social values, which eased agreement
regions. 14 Rationales varied over time and across space, as did the ways that such policies were applied in situ ; in practice they often boiled down to central authorities aiming to repatriate value-added activities to raise the wealth of the common weal (and the fisc). Occasionally simplified by scholars as the ‘standard model’ of European historical economic development, 15 key features included strategies later on known as ‘infant industry’, ‘import substitution’ or, more recently, ‘mission-driven’ policies, 16 or a ‘German’ or ‘Renaissance’ way of doing
