Perspectives on Target Publics and Welfare State Transformations. A Few Proposals from Political Sociology

Abstract

This chapter aims at furthering the debates raised by the previous contributions. Three main proposals for studying welfare policies’ target publics are introduced. Firstly, this chapter calls for breaking from a study of the welfare State carried out only by social policy specialists. It sheds light on the heuristic gain to be made from the import of political sociology’s traditional questioning in this field of research. Secondly, it underlines the need to consider in which way social policies participate to the contemporary reconfiguration of governmentality. Thirdly, it opens new perspectives of research on policy-feedback, by thinking together the social and political effects of welfare State transformations.