Financialised welfare and its vulnerabilities: Advice, consumer credit, and church-based charity in the UK

Davey, Ryan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4965-5924 2022. Financialised welfare and its vulnerabilities: Advice, consumer credit, and church-based charity in the UK. Ethnos 87 (1) , pp. 78-96. 10.1080/00141844.2019.1687545

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Abstract

Debt advice, as a neoliberal variant of social welfare in the UK, highlights the introduction and repercussions of approaches to welfare that encourage, and/or rely on, financial speculation. Since the 1990s, senior managers in the debt advice sector have anticipated funding cuts by advocating co-operation with the financial industry, implying a financialised concept of social welfare that valorises the redistribution of opportunities to speculate, rather than that of wealth. Yet following cuts, ‘front-line’ debt advisers complain they are unable to provide the required level of care and compassion, leading to an increase in church-based, volunteer-run advice, aimed at the poorest and most vulnerable. Rather than some pre-determined political modality, the ethical concepts of welfare that caught on, and the moral qualities consequently ascribed to its beneficiaries, emerged at the interface of managers’ assessments of the viability of particular funding models with the political-economic conditions in which those models were implemented.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Additional Information:	This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
ISSN:	0014-1844
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	28 July 2020
Date of Acceptance:	26 August 2019
Last Modified:	04 May 2023 23:56
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/133820

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