Bodily metaphors and welfare regimes
pp. 83-102
in: Kathryn Ellis, Hartley Dean, Jo Campling (eds), Social policy and the body, Berlin, Springer, 2000Abstract
Discussions of welfare policy and social justice lend themselves to the use of bodily metaphors. There is a compelling "organic analogy" (Turner, 1991: 9) that is often drawn between the human body as an organic system and a society which sustains itself through systematic welfare provision. Social policy has in the past been defined as the manifestation "of society's will to survive as an organic whole" (Titmuss, 1963: 39) or, with a slightly different emphasis, as "that which is centred on institutions that create integration and discourage alienation" (Boulding, 1967: 7). The contemporary concern of European social policy with combating 'social exclusion" (e.g. Commission of the European Communities, 1993) represents in many ways a new Durkheimian preoccupation with functionalist notions of integration and solidarity (Levitas, 1996) which are implicitly predicated on notions of social wholeness and the body social.