Walker A, Wong C K
Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield, England.
Int J Health Serv. 1996;26(1):67-92. doi: 10.2190/0L9E-J9EQ-GLWH-T9WH.
This article employs case studies of China and Hong Kong to question the western ethnocentric construction of the welfare state that predominates in comparative social policy research. The authors argue that welfare regimes, and particularly the "welfare state," have been constructed as capitalist-democratic projects and that this has the damaging effect of excluding from analyses not only several advanced capitalist societies in the Asian-Pacific area but also the world's most populous country. If welfare state regimes can only coexist with western political democracies, then China and Hong Kong are excluded automatically. A similar result occurs if the traditional social administration approach is adopted whereby a "welfare state" is defined in terms only of direct state provision. The authors argue that such assumptions are untenable if state welfare is to be analyzed as a universal phenomenon. Instead of being trapped within an ethnocentric welfare statism, what social policy requires is a global political economy perspective that facilitates comparisons of the meaning of welfare and the state's role in producing it north, south, east and west.
本文采用中国和香港的案例研究，对比较社会政策研究中占主导地位的西方以民族为中心构建福利国家的做法提出质疑。作者认为，福利制度，尤其是“福利国家”，已被构建为资本主义民主项目，这不仅将亚太地区的几个发达资本主义社会排除在分析之外，还将世界上人口最多的国家排除在外，产生了有害影响。如果福利国家制度只能与西方政治民主国家共存，那么中国和香港就会被自动排除。如果采用传统的社会管理方法，即仅根据国家的直接提供来定义“福利国家”，也会出现类似的结果。作者认为，如果要将国家福利作为一种普遍现象来分析，这些假设是站不住脚的。社会政策不应陷入以民族为中心的福利国家主义，而需要一种全球政治经济视角，以便对福利的含义以及国家在福利生产中的作用在北方、南方、东方和西方进行比较。
