Abstract
More than two decades ago, leading social scientists suggested a new welfare state architecture centred around the rationale of social investment (Esping-Andersen, 1996; Esping-Andersen et al., 2002; Giddens, 1998). Today, the social investment rationale is a well-established policy paradigm in welfare states across Europe (Hemerijck, 2017, 2018; Morel et al., 2011) with Nordic welfare states often depicted as frontrunners (Cantillon, 2011; Kersbergen and Kraft, 2017; Kvist, 2015).
However, the political, ethical and practical consequences of mobilizing investment rationales remain understudied. How does the social investment rationale work as a normative horizon for the welfare state? How is it translated into operative policies and instruments? How does the investor/investee figuration recast state/citizen relations? How do professionals and citizens experience social investment rationales at the frontlines of the welfare state? This special issue will advance our understanding of how the vision of social investment has played out in everyday reality and thereby enable a qualified deliberation of what role it should be assigned in the future.
Social investment can be defined as strategic allocations of resources to produce future returns (Midgley, 2017: 14). At the macro-level of welfare states, resources can be allocated to universal systems such as childcare or the educational system with the aim of optimizing the human capital of the population (e.g. Michel, 2015; Solga, 2014). At the micro-level, resources can be allocated to specific groups or individuals, for example, through various models of social investment or impact bonds (e.g. Daggers, 2022; Neyland, 2018).
Meanwhile, social investment is an ambiguous and polysemic concept (Morel et al., 2011). Ideologically, it covers a broad spectrum between classical social democracy and neoliberalism (Andersson, 2009); Intellectually, its roots can be traced to Alva and Gunnar Myrdal and the Rehn–Meidner model in Sweden (Morel et al., 2011), to Anthony Giddens (1998) and New Labour in the UK, to Esping-Andersen et al.'s ideas of new European Social model (Hansen and Triantafillou, 2011) and to James Heckman's theory of early childhood intervention (Heckman, 2011).
The rationale of social investment works on a continuum of implementation. Sometimes the social investment rationale manifests in tangible contracts that explicate expectations of returns. At other times, the concept of investment is used as a metaphor by policymakers or citizens to argue that allocations of resources today will pay off in the future without the expectation that this payoff will in fact be measured.
The returns of social investments are often expressed in both economic and social terms. For example, a social investment program tailored for citizens with complex problems may help the welfare state save money for costly services in the future, while at the same time improve the recipients’ life quality. While returns in economic terms may be calculable in monetary terms, the measurement of social return often proves to be quite challenging (Barman, 2016). In some cases, investors and investees might disagree on what counts as a desirable social return or returns may come at the price of exacerbating inequality (Saraceno, 2017). These and other political, ethical and practical dilemmas will be addressed in this special issue.
Questions we may address in this special issue include:
What are the historical roots of the investment rationale in the Nordic welfare states? What are the conceptual boundaries of social investment? What are the political and ethical consequences of the social investment rationale? How (and to what extent) is the investment rationale accepted, practised and/or resisted, adapted and transformed among policymakers, welfare professionals and citizens/recipients/relatives? Who decides how to invest and how to measure and evaluate social investments? How does social investment policies interrelate with structural inequalities linked to gender, ethnicity and social class?
We invite full papers that address any of these questions from different theoretical and methodological perspectives, covering empirical cases across and beyond Nordic countries
If you have questions about the call or whether your paper idea would fit the special issue, you are welcome to contact the guest editors
Manuscripts should be submitted through the normal submission procedure. Read more at https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ASJ. When submitting, please indicate in the appropriate field that the manuscript is a candidate for the special issue ‘Social investment in action’.
The deadline for submissions is May 1, 2024.