This paper contributes to the debate on the limited efficacy of civil society in Africa. It examines the complex interface between notions of civil society and citizenship within the context of the postcolonial state in Africa. It argues that the bifurcated character of citizenship is implicated in the inefficacy of civil society. This is underlined by the limited achievements in social citizenship, aggravated by the economic crisis and neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 1990s as well as the politics of regime sustenance. Political disengagement, drain on the moral content of public life and diminished collective orientation of citizens, aggravated conflicts within society, thereby, promoting a democratisation of disempowerment and a disorganised civil society.

Digitalisation has given rise to concerns about the future effectiveness of older adult grassroots organisations in enabling group-based participation in later life. Despite this, these organisations and their potential role in securing a just digital transition has featured in neither research debates nor policy and innovation agendas. It is essential that this absence is addressed to ensure future citizenship rights across civic, social and political spheres within digitalising ageing societies. The aim of this article is to explore the impact of digital transformations on the capacity of older adult grassroots organisations to support group-based multifaceted engagement in later life. Focusing on an Irish national voluntary membership-based organisation, and its network of local groups, this analysis draws on data from a multi-level mixed-methods study design. Data collection involved: European expert interviews (n = 4); social media analysis (X); organisational-level interviews (n = 11); an older adult member survey (n = 464); follow-up lifecourse interviews (n = 40); and a Translational Forum involving participants from all research strands to validate findings and agree key messages (n = 13). The analysis demonstrates the transitional nature of digital communication for these groups, and the need to and difficulties in addressing the diverse preferences and digital literacies of grassroots membership. The analysis also shows that the most significant challenges are systemic and structural in nature. An assets-based, capability-orientated approach that is supported by state-level leadership and resourcing is required to equip ageing societies for an equitable digital transition.

A new legal order has arisen in the United Kingdom (‘UK’) following that country's withdrawal from the European Union (‘EU’). Nowhere are these changes more evident than in the complex rules that have emerged in the fields of freedom of movement and the right to work. In evaluating the new legal landscape, this Article has two overarching aims. The first is to assess the level of protection granted to the right to work and associated free movement rights within EU and UK law, including the terms of the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement. The second aim is to examine the extent to which those right to work rules are reflective of the status of the right to work as a fundamental social right. It is argued that Brexit unmoors the right to work from EU free movement rules, thereby undermining the normative value of that right, while exacerbating flaws in domestic rules governing access to employment for both national and migrant workers.

The analysis examines the effort to incorporate labor rights into the American conception of civil liberties and the opposition to that endeavor. It focuses on three Senators—Robert Wagner, Robert La Follette, Jr., and Elbert Thomas—and New Deal officials who conceived of the National Labor Relations Act as a cornerstone of the effort to achieve “economic justice” and defended the law against its critics. It examines the opponents, including the National Association of Manufacturers and an anticommunist alliance between southern Democrats and Republicans. An ideological counteroffensive recast the supporters of social rights as un-American opponents of free enterprise and defined civil liberties as protecting the individual from an expansionist state and labor bosses. The analysis demonstrates the multiple causes for the disappearance of ideological space for conceiving that protection from oppressive employers constituted a civil liberty and the displacement of labor rights by the “right to work.”

This article reviews the recommodification of social policy in the context of financialised austerity capitalism and post-crisis welfare states. It sets out an understanding of recommodification as a multiple set of processes that involve the state in labour market-making, by shaping labour’s ‘saleability’. Under conditions of finance-dominated austerity capitalism, the article argues that recent dynamics of recommodification complicate the long established Piersonian observations. For Pierson, recommodification signifies how elements of the welfare state that shelter individuals from market pressures are dismantled and replaced with measures which buffer their labour market participation. This article examines ways in which recent policy trends in recommodification, whether by incentivising or coercive means, increase exposure to labour market risks and connect with the growing inequalities between capital and labour under post-crisis re/financialised austerity capitalism. This analysis is paired with a synoptic review of recent labour market trends and reforms across the European Union. As recommodification evolves, the insecurity it institutes raises fundamental questions about the underlying nature of social citizenship which are also addressed.

Whilst populism has a long-standing relationship with social policy, the recent emergence of radical right populism as a considerable political force across Europe and beyond compels us to think further about this relationship. The aim of this review essay is to bring together literature on populism, welfare chauvinism and social citizenship in order to highlight the role social policy plays in the rhetoric and political approach of the populist radical right. This essay reviews, how, by developing artificial distinctions between culturally homogeneous ‘people’ and corrupt ‘elite’, the populist radical right generates interpretations of social citizenship that confers social rights based on of cultural or ethnic belonging, rather than as a matter of right. By simplifying the nature of complex social policy problems, radical right populism further problematises the mainstream social policy agenda. Consequently, radical right populism will continue to present a significant challenge to progressive and inclusive social policy.

This article examines how the property rights in land have come to be a constitutive element of social citizenship. Reviewing the theoretical developments on the idea of social citizenship since Marshall’s seminal essay on Citizenship and Social Class (1950), this introductory article identifies four processes which bring property rights to the centre stage of social rights. First, recognition of entitlement beyond ownership opens up different social functions of property. Social citizenship as a tool is able to demand contextually appropriate rights from the bundle of rights that property is constituted of. Second, the idea of social citizenship is global today, and has transcended nation-state boundaries. How trade and communications impact property in land shapes the realisation of social rights. Three, active citizens contribute to the creation of public spaces in emerging urban residential areas. Citizens make social claims on such spaces through radical forms of insurgent citizenship. Four, planning as a tool, which organises property for the realisation of citizens’ social rights, is able to meet the competing objectives of human rights and speculative profiteering by real estate owners. These four aspects become essential to understand how social citizenship is unfolding, particularly in the Global South.

In the globalised economy, the value chains of production have crossed national boundaries. As a result, the demand has intensified for land acquisition in order to set up production facilities and infrastructure. This industrialisation proceeded rapidly, and, therefore, a vast area of land had to be acquired, both in the Global South and in the North. This development has led to many conflicts. These conflicts are the result of the inability to understand the plural values of land in the realisation of property rights in social citizenship. This article has considered two land expropriation case study areas in India, Salbani and Singur in West Bengal, as a source of empirical data. The empirical evidence suggests that the straitjacket of monorational property rights discourse, which heavily relies on the absolute ownership and control (via exclusion of others) ignores the different ways in which plural land values shape ideas of social citizenship. There is a need to rediscover the ‘social’ in citizenship to ensure the subordination of market price to the ideals of social justice.

In this article, we analyse the social distribution of residential property in Norway post-1945 in light of the concept of social citizenship. Drawing on data from censuses and tax registers, we examine the social stratification of owner-occupation and housing wealth in a Nordic nation of homeowners. Our study shows that residential property and housing wealth is very unevenly distributed, and that the share of low-income homeowners decreased markedly after 1990. The implications of these findings are discussed with reference to three different conceptions of citizenship: the socio-liberal, the republican and the libertarian. Our main argument is that the falling rate of low-income owner-occupation constitutes an erosion of social citizenship viewed from the socio-liberal and republican conception of citizenship. This follows from theoretical arguments and empirical studies linking homeownership to positive welfare outcomes, such as civic engagement and social integration. The latter is arguably particularly true in some high-homeownership countries, such as Norway, where owner-occupation is the cultural norm and rental housing is associated with low quality and insecurity.

There has been considerable attention on Brazil’s experience in applying the right to the city, influencing the urban reform movement and subsequent legislation including the 1988 Constitution and the 2001 Statute of the City. While much is known about Brazil’s urban transformations, this article views this trajectory within debates on social citizenship, expanding the focus to show that property is integral to this debate. Through the lens of social citizenship, property rights and insurgency, this article traces Brazil’s right to the city debate through a focus on three issues: (1) the rights dimension of such debates; (2) the role of the social function of property in urban legislation; and (3) the role of insurgent planning evident in urban social movements. While property rights and land rights are often distanced from debates on social citizenship, the Brazil case provides evidence in which the two are clearly intertwined.

This paper reviews the past development of the publicly funded long-term care (LTC) system and aims to advance further discussion of LTC in Taiwan. The Ten-year Long-Term Care Plan 2.0 introduced in 2017 calls for a major reform of a publicly funded LTC system in Taiwan. The reform expands on the previous universal tax-based LTC system, allowing for more comprehensive and accessible subsidies on LTC services. This paper provides a brief overview of the political context of the reform and an introduction to the legal basis, financing and delivery mechanisms of the reform plan. To this end, as a preliminary evaluation, this paper identifies major institutional and socio-cultural tensions that could challenge the implementation of the plan. Institutional tensions include the dominant foreign worker caring model, which relies on approximately 220,000 foreign workers to provide LTC services, and the discontinuity between health and social care governance, which leads to a discontinuity between curative and LTC care. Socio-cultural tensions focus on conflicting values in the allocation of responsibility of care and in the understanding of disability between universal social citizenship in the modern state and traditional Confucian ethics. Policy implications of these tensions for the LTC system are then discussed.

Normative democratic theory assumes that political systems should ensure civil, political and social rights, and this claim has become more salient since the economic crisis that began in 2008. This conception of citizenship was developed most prominently by T.H. Marshall (1950), and it has been further elaborated by numerous other authors, resulting in a clear division between procedural/electoral democracy concepts and authors emphasizing egalitarian concepts of democracy. We use latent class analysis to assess democratic ideals among European citizens as reported in the 2012 European Social Survey. The findings demonstrate that a majority of Europeans consider political and social rights as equally important, while some citizens predominantly emphasize either political or social rights. Furthermore, the focus on social rights is not limited to those with left-leaning ideologies. Considering current manifestations of discontent about the politics of austerity, we discuss the implications of social citizenship concepts for democratic legitimacy in Europe.

Viewed within their historical context, recent cuts to public social spending and increasingly governmental welfare reforms reflect and beget a shift in the praxis of social citizenship in the UK. This review article demonstrates how greater conceptual attention to the constitutive features of social citizenship can help clarify some of the claims made about its relation to austerity and welfare reform within the existing literature. Through schematic consideration of the emerging evidence, this article suggests that welfare austerity is undermining the ‘effectiveness’, ‘inalienability’ and ‘universality’ of social citizenship in the UK.

Drawing on a qualitative longitudinal study that examined experiences of welfare reform among a small group of recipients of out-of-work benefits, this paper considers how individuals’ social citizenship rights, responsibilities and status are all affected by processes of welfare reform. It discusses the ways in which welfare conditionality impacts upon targeted individuals’ citizenship status, noting a trend towards ‘conditioning’, where people seek to govern and manage their own behaviour(s) in order to meet the demands of contemporary citizenship. The paper considers the extent to which even a ‘modicum of economic welfare and security’ is now denied to so many Britons, concluding with a discussion of what if any emancipatory potential social citizenship still holds.

While ideas on ‘earned citizenship’ have been around in discussions on the coexistence of freedom of movement and nationally-bounded welfare states in the European Union, both the concept and the process it entails have hardly been explored in connection to EU (case) law. This contribution identifies earned citizenship as a technique of government in the broader political strategy of neoliberal communitarianism, requiring Union citizens to ‘earn’ access to the welfare system through an emphasis on their individual responsibility to fulfil the economic, social and cultural conditions of membership. Analysing economically inactive Union citizens’ access to social assistance benefits, it argues that earned citizenship has been visible since the Court’s early citizenship jurisprudence, but has been reconstructed with the recent Dano-line of case law.

This paper develops a sociological critique of the pre-eminence of humanism in dementia care policy and practice. Throughout the centuries, humanism has served as something of a double-edged sword in relation to the care and treatment of people living with progressive neurocognitive conditions. On the one hand, humanism has provided an intellectual vehicle for recognising people with dementia as sentient beings with inalienable human rights. On the other hand, humanist approaches have relied upon and re-enforced normative understandings of what it means to be human; understandings that serve to position people with dementia as deficient. Two posthumanist approaches to dementia care policy and practice are explored in this paper: transhumanism and critical posthumanism. The former seeks, primarily, to use advances in 21st-century technologies to eradicate dementia. The latter seeks to de-centre anthropomorphic interpretations of what it means to be a person (with dementia), so as to create space for more diverse human–non-human relationships to emerge. The paper concludes with some tentative suggestions as to what a critically posthumanist approach to dementia care policy and practice might look like, as we move closer towards the middle of the 21st century.