 | Welfare Discipline: Discourse, Governance and Globalization Subjects: Public welfare; Social policy; Public welfare -- United States; United States -- Social policy -- 1993–; Public welfare -- Europe; Europe -- Social policy; Globalization -- Social aspects; Discourse analysis; For the past decade, political scientist Sanford Schram has led the academic effort to understand how Americans and their political officials talk about poverty and welfare and what impact that discourse has on policy and on the global society. In Welfare Discipline , Schram argues that it is time to take stock of the new forms of welfare and to develop even better methods to understand them. He argues for a more contextualized approach to examining welfare policy, from the use of the idea of globalization to justify cutbacks, to the increasing employment of U.S. policy discourse overseas, to the development of asset-based approaches to helping the poor. Stressing the importance of understanding the ways we talk about welfare, how we study it, and, critically, what we do not discuss and why, Schram offers recommendations for making welfare policy both just and effective. Sanford F. Schram is Visiting Professor and the Director of the Center on Ethnicities, Communities, and Social Policy at Bryn Mawr College. He is the author of three books, including Words of Welfare: The Poverty of Social Science and the Social Science of Poverty, which won the American Political Science Association's Michael Harrington Award. |
