The Culture of Welfare Markets: The International Recasting of Pension and Care Systems (Routledge Advances in Sociology) - Hardcover

Bode, Ingo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0415958016 ISBN 13: 9780415958011

Publisher: Routledge, 2007

Synopsis

This book examines the rise of welfare markets in Western societies and explores their functioning, regulation and embeddedness by addressing the particular field of old age provision, including both retirement provision and elderly care. It goes beyond a mere social policy analysis by investigating major cultural underpinnings of the new (quasi-)markets, with these underpinnings embracing collective normative representations of how societies (should) institutionally handle old age. The book looks at whether pension and care systems are converging under the influence of globalization – with marketization being a key phenomenon – and to what extent this is creating a transnational culture of welfare markets. This book, the first book to systematically describe and analyse the phenomenon of welfare markets, elucidates the complex cultural underpinnings of care and pensions systems in an era of marketization, arguing that we are facing a cultural struggle over the way late modern societies conceptualize institutional old-age provision.

About this title

About the Author

Bode is a sociologist, independent researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Sociology of the University Duisburg-Essen, Germany. He has also taught at the University of Montréal, at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, and at the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0415958016
• ISBN 13: 9780415958011
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 264