This article traces the emergence of the term welfare state in British political discourse and describes competing efforts to define its meaning. It presents a genealogy of the concept's emergence and its subsequent integration into various political scripts, tracing the struggles that sought to name, define, and narrate what welfare state would be taken to mean. It shows that the concept emerged only after the core programmes to which it referred had already been enacted into law and that the referents (...) and meaning of the concept were never generally agreed upon – not even at the moment of its formation in the late 1940s. During the 1950s, the welfare state concept was being framed in three distinct senses: the welfare state as a set of social security programmes; the welfare state as a socio-economic system; and the welfare state as a new kind of state. Each of these usages was deployed by opposing political actors – though with different scope, meaning, value, and implication. The article argues that the welfare state concept did not operate as a representation reflecting a separate, already-constituted reality. Rather, the use of the concept in the political and economic arguments of the period – and in later disputes about the nature of the Labour government's post-war achievements – was always thoroughly rhetorical and constitutive, its users aiming to shape the transformations and outcomes that they claimed merely to describe. (shrink)

There are two puzzles that confront observers of American capital punishment at the start of the 21st century. One concerns the legal and administrative arrangements through which it is enacted, which strike many commentators as irrational, or at least poorly adapted to the traditional ends of criminal justice. The other concerns the persistence of capital punishment in the USA in a period when comparable nations have decisively abandoned its use. In this essay, I will address both of these two questions, (...) beginning with the first and offering conclusions that bear upon the second.The historical struggles around issues of capital punishment, structured as they have been by the American polity with its distinctive mix of federalism, sectionalism, and democratic populism, form the necessary basis for understanding the American present and for comparing America's current practices with those of other western nations. Any explanation of American capital punishment ought to begin by focusing attention on these structures and these struggles. (shrink)

Modern, liberal democratic states and civilized, squeamish moderns would rather avoid the sights, sounds, and smells of the body in pain. So we eliminate them where that is possible and we hide them behind the scenes when it is not. The body thus creates a problem for modern liberal state punishment, especially in the United States, where nonphysical penalties, such as fines, restitution, or compensation, are notably underdeveloped and where mass imprisonment and capital punishment dominate the penal scene. The problem (...) is that the human body is the unavoidable object of state punishment even when it is avowedly not punishment's target. It is this problem of the body, and the state's handling of it, that I would like to explore. (shrink)

This essay seeks to move on from the critical debates that have followed the publication of The Culture of Control by taking up constructive suggestions, refining or extending the book’s claims, and sketching out new lines for future research. After a preliminary discussion of the proper role of theory in historical and sociological research it seeks to clarify and develop the following ideas: the concept of the field and its role in the study of crime control and criminal justice; the (...) field as a contested balance of forces; situated rationality and conflicted action; gender relations and the culture of control; national characteristics and responses to late modernity; American exceptionalism; analysis and critique in the study of social control. (shrink)

In this unique collection, a distinguished group of social theorists reflect upon the ways in which crime and its control feature in the political and cultural landscapes of contemporary societies. The book brings together for the first time some of today's most powerful social analysts in a discussion of the meaning of crime and punishment in late-modern society. The result is a stimulating and provocative volume that will be of equal interest to specialist criminologists and those working in the fields (...) of social and cultural studies. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue “Societies under Stress” provides an intellectual context for the four articles that follow. The conferences at which the articles were presented brought together comparative welfare state researchers and scholars who work on crime and punishment to explore the links between social welfare and penal policy, particularly in social settings where neoliberal austerity or rising levels of criminal violence put pressure on these fields of social policy. Participants were drawn from Europe, the United States, and (...) Latin America and represented a variety of social science disciplines and an eclectic mix of research methodologies. (shrink)