Welfare, Inequality, and Varieties of Social Order

Abstract

Renascent debates on properties of social orders pose opportunities to develop an integrated theory of welfare and inequality in a way that draws on the strengths of welfare regimes analysis while addressing its various weaknesses while also bringing welfare and inequality toward the center of comparative political economy from its ill-suited station at the margins. This chapter develops a framework for the analysis of welfare and inequality within a variety of social orders and illustrates how the framework can be extended to an analysis of marketizing East Asia. The first section of this chapter suggests the basis on which the analysis of welfare regimes can be adapted to account for patterns of welfare and inequality in marketizing East Asia. The second invokes recent literature on social orders and suggests that the debates it has inspired and the problems it has raised suggest the possibility of an analytic framework for linking issues of welfare and inequality to underlying features of social orders. This chapter elbaorates such an analytic framework, with an interest in establishing how dynamic properties of social orders generate and influence patterns of welfare and inequality. Countries in this framework are construed as internally variegated and globally embedded social orders founded on more or less stable political settlements and integrated on the basis of interdependent processes and relations of domination, accumulation, and reproduction upon which the reproduction of social orders depends. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the framework can inform the analysis of welfare and inequality in marketizing East Asia, setting the stage for subsequent comparative case study chapters.