The Redistribution of Responsibility Between State and Parents: Family in the Context of Post-Welfare-State Transformation

Abstract

The diagnosis of a fundamental malfunction of the welfare-state arrangements in the light of global modernization requirements is often taken to be an unshakable truth in the current sociopolitical discourse (see Maaser 2006). It constitutes the background for a new model of the regulation of state welfare production. The welfare state, formerly active provider of benefits, relocates to a new arrangement of the social, leading to a reassessment of strategies for the activation of a “responsibilization” toward legally granted benefits (on the concept of welfare production, see Oelkers 2011). The social intervention state intervening in the life conduct of the individual, simultaneously being both normative and caring in many aspects, is supposed to be replaced by a postwelfare steering state stressing individual initiative and responsibility, turning individuals into the base of an altered practice of steering the social: a “government from a distance, willing to be the coxswain, but letting others do the rowing” (Lindenberg 2002, p. 78, translated).