Bob Jessop
INTRODUCTION
Drawing on the French regulation approach and neo-Marxist state theory,
this chapter addresses three closely related sets of issues.1 First, what
exactly is involved in theorising the post-Fordist welfare state? Second,
approaching the latter as a theoretical object, what might its core features
comprise? And, third, is the British state acquiring these features?
Arguments about these issues are often vague and, when taken together,
frequently prove inconsistent. There is little agreement about the nature
of Fordism and post-Fordism in general or the trajectories which might
link themlet alone about the post-Fordist state in particular or the
transitional regimes which might connect it to its putative Fordist
precursor. Unless these problems are resolved, however, it would be
premature to anticipate the core features of a post-Fordist welfare regime.
Moreover, until these features are spelt out, if only in a preliminary manner,
there can be no referent for assessing whether Britain has been moving
towards some form of post-Fordist welfare state. It is these three issues in
their interconnection that define my agenda here.
Accordingly the first section reviews different understandings of
Fordism and post-Fordism, assesses their various implications for
analyzing the state, and suggests ways of defining a post-Fordist state
and transitional regimes. The next section describes two key
transformations in advanced capitalist states during the current global
economic restructuring which bear directly on the nature of economic
and social policy regimes. These are a tendential shift from a Keynesian
welfare state to a Schumpeterian workfare state; and a tendential
hollowing out of the national state. Some of the economic and political
mechanisms generating these changes are also briefly discussed. The
third section then considers the partial, uneven, and still flawed
development of post-Fordism in Britain and examines the British states
14 Post-Fordist analyses of welfare
role in this, with special reference to Thatcherism. The chapter ends
with some general remarks on the problems of theorising post-Fordism.
1 the nature of the labour process within the state sector itself (e.g.
Hoggett, 1987);
2 the state sectors direct economic role in a Fordist accumulation
regime (e.g. Overbeek, 1990:11419);
3 the states wider role in the social mode of economic regulation linked
to such a regime (e.g. Moulaert et al., 1988; Painter, 1991b); or
4 its role in securing the institutional integration and social cohesion
of a social formation within which Fordism in one or more of its
possible guises is dominant (Hirsch and Roth, 1986).
CONCLUDING REMARKS
The results of my deliberations can be stated quite briefly. First, I have
attempted to show that there are serious theoretical difficulties in the
currently fashionable fascination with the concept of post-Fordism and,
even more obviously, with the notion of a post-Fordist state. Even so, second,
I have tried to introduce some conceptual clarification into the discussion
of Fordism and post-Fordism and, in this context, to suggest several
approaches to the definition of the post-Fordist state in both its transitional
and its consolidated guises. In particular, and third, I have suggested that
the normal form of the latter can be described as the Schumpeterian
workfare state. To some extent this deliberately magnifies, for heuristic
purposes, the discontinuities between the Fordist and post-Fordist states.
In many cases the contrast will be less marked. Fourth, I have indicated
that there can be various forms of post-Fordist state as well as various
transitional routes from Fordist to post-Fordist regimes. This is important
if one is to avoid the impression that there is no alternative to the neo-
liberal variant essayed under Thatcher and Majorespecially as the latter
has recently been flirting with the idea of workfare in its least claimant-
friendly form. Elsewhere we can find neo-corporatist and neo-statist
attempts to pioneer the road to post-Fordism. Finally, I have attempted to
show that, whatever the prospects may be elsewhere for a successful
transition to a post-Fordist welfare state, they are less than bright in Britain.
Rather than moving towards an efficient and competitive post-Fordist
regime, we seem to be moving further down the international economic
hierarchy as flawed post-Fordism replaces flawed Fordism. However, as
will be quite evident from the somewhat speculative form of the arguments
on this point, much work remains to be done on this issue. But I hope that
the various criteria for assessing the development of post-Fordist regimes
will provide a useful basis for subsequent work in this area.
The arguments presented above have veered from the highly abstract
to the apparently concrete. Thus the first sections of the chapter took
the form of a thought-experiment to determine theoretically what would
constitute a normal post-Fordist welfare regime. The penultimate section
was concerned to apply the arguments presented earlier to the case of
36 Post-Fordist analyses of welfare
Britain during the Thatcher years. There is still much work to be done
both theoretically and empirically before the rather heroic (if not
foolhardy) claims advanced here can be provisionally accepted.
Nonetheless I think there are good grounds for believing that there
really is a widespread tendential shift in Europe and Europe abroad
from the sort of Keynesian welfare state regimes associated with Atlantic
Fordism to the dominance of the sort of Schumpeterian workfare state
regimes found in the paradigmatically post-Fordist economies of East
Asia and successful regions in other growth poles. The grounds for this
belief are twofold: the self-evident crisis of Fordism and the KWS and
the remarkable economic success of societies with more flexible
accumulation regimes and supply-side oriented states. It is this
combination of Fordist crisis in Europe and North America with East
Asian success which is reinforcing pressures in the first two triadic growth
poles to abandon KWS for Schumpeterian workfare strategies. The
growing importance of structural competitiveness is the mechanism
which leads me to believe that we will witness the continuing
consolidation of the hollowed-out Schumpeterian workfare state in
successful capitalist economies. Economic spaces which fail to make
this transition in some form or other will fall down the global hierarchy
of economic spaces and/or be marginalised. This does not exclude
struggles over the future forms of the post-Fordist SWS: it makes them
even more imperative.
NOTES
1 On the French regulation approach see Boyer (1990), Dunford (1990) and
Jessop (1990a); on strategic-relational state theory see Bertramsen et al.
(1990) and Jessop (1990b). I am grateful to Colin Hay for comments on an
earlier version of this paper.
2 I prefer the term social mode of economic regulation to both the usual
French regulationist label (mode of regulation) and that suggested by Peck
and Tickell (social mode of regulation) on the grounds that only the first
highlights both the manner of regulation and its object. Tickell and Pecks
usage conflates the mode of regulation of the economy in its integral sense
and the mode of regulation of the wider society in which a specific integral
economic order is dominant (Tickell and Peck, 1992).
3 Fordist and post-Fordist societalisation effects will be ignored below. In
general they can be seen as derived effects of the dominance of an
accumulation regime in regulation and/or as contributing to that
dominance.
4 This is one version of the general problem in theories of the bourgeois
state: is it a state in capitalist societies or a capitalist state? On this general
issue see Jessop (1990b).
The Schumpeterian workfare state 37
5 An exceptional Fordist state would exist where an ad hoc, more conjunctural
rationality enables state managers to promote Fordist expansion despite
major structural discongruities and relatively weak state capacities.
6 This does not exclude other characterisations from different perspectives
and/or at different degrees of theoretical concreteness or complexity.
7 Flexibility alone is insufficient to define post-Fordism: all accumulation
regimes contain elements of flexibility and, indeed, flexible specialisation
regimes also pre-dated Fordism (Piore and Sabel, 1984). The novel element
in post-Fordism is the way in which flexibility is shaped and enhanced by a
new techno-economic paradigm which institutionalises the search for
permanent innovation.
8 To posit two distinct types of post-Fordist state that succeed one another
(transitional and consolidated) would repeat the structuralist fallacy of
positing a transitional mode of production between successive normal modes
of production, with the former defined by its structurally inscribed function
of securing the transition between the latter (cf. Hindess and Hirst,
1975:26287). This is why I refer to transitional regimes with indeterminate
form and a determinate normal state. Even the latter, however, can have
variant forms (see below).
9 I owe this point to discussions with John Goddard.
10 There may still be a residual functionalism in so far as it is assumed that
post-Fordism and the SWS are the most appropriate forms of economic
and political organisation for the future. This establishes a fixed reference
point from which to calculate the dysfunctionality of some state forms.