Meri Koivusalo

Robert O'brien

Nicola Yeates B O B D E A C O N

Global Social Policy Forum Editors' Introduction: Global Social Policy at Six

Global Social Policy has been publishing for five years. Volume 6 sees the first change in editorship in the journal's brief history. We thought that this would be a good opportunity to reflect upon the journal's development and possible trajectory. As a result, this Forum contains five short articles looking at the journal's activities and possible directions for development. It begins with Rama Baru, a long-time Regional Editor, who has been with the journal since its founding. She discusses issues of particular importance to Regional Editors and the challenges of the journal's global reach. Next is Founding Editor Bob Deacon's reflection upon the origins and contributions of the journal. This is followed by three contributions from the incoming Editors. Meri Koivusalo stresses the need to develop the globality of the journal and considers the relationship between health and social policies. Robert O'Brien develops some ideas about the relationship between global social policy and the field of international relations. The Forum concludes with an article by Nicola Yeates, who articulates a range of ideas about the development of global social policy as a field of study and research and the role of GSP therein.

We hope these musings provoke reactions from our readers and look forward to publishing further thoughts or rejoinders to the views expressed here.

GSP the journal was conceived in the context of the first phase of the Globalism and Social Policy Programme (GASPP), which was an Anglo-Finnish project initiated in 1997 designed to analyse the impact of Global Social Policy Copyright © 20061468-0181 vol. 6(1): 7-20; 061407 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, ca and New Delhi) DOI: 10.1177/1468018106061407 http://gsp.sagepub.com gsp globalization upon social policy and to begin to articulate a more socially responsible alternative to neoliberal globalization. At this time, social policy analysts (Mishra, 1999) were warning of the threat of globalization to established social democratic welfare states, and in the wake of the WTO Ministerial in Singapore in 1996, northern reformist (and protectionist) attempts to secure a social clause in the WTO trade rules had met with opposition from many southern governments, who did not want internationally agreed and imposed labour standards to put at risk their comparative trading advantage. The journal therefore was created to 'advance the understanding of the impact of globalization upon social policy and social development'. In the minds of the first editorial team, globalization here was understood partly in terms of the global economy. The journal would 'encourage discussion of the implications for social welfare of the dynamics of the global economy.' But importantly, it was also understood in terms of the politics of globalization. Hence, an aim of the journal was to 'analyse the contribution of a range of international actors to the global social policy and social development discourse and practice'. The first international Editorial Advisory Board was convened in Helsinki in December 1999 and it was there affirmed that the journal 'is envisaged as serving not only a global academic audience but also a global policy making audience'. Indeed, as stated on the inside back page of each issue: 'The journal aims to contribute to the making of global social policy and to serve the cause of social justice within and between countries'. GSP was born, then, out of the European (some might say Anglo-Nordic) social policy school that had always been concerned to apply the analytical insights from a range of disciplines (economics, political science, sociology) to the policy fields of social protection health education, social care and housing. This was done in the belief by the Editor that this tradition had applicability to the new international struggle to embed the global economy in global institutions that would redistribute, regulate and enhance rights.

To this combined scholarly and policy-relevant end, a number of steps were taken. The Editorial Advisory Board included policy analysts working inside the ILO, WHO, UNDP, UNDESA, UNICEF and the World Bank as well as those coming from global labour and social movements and think tanks such as Social Watch, the ICSW, the ICFTU, the Trans-national Institute, Oxfam and the Breton Woods Project. To begin to ensure a global reach and global contributions, Editorial Advisory Board members were appointed from every continent and region except, it has to be said, the Arab region. Regional Editors were appointed for Africa, East Asia and Latin America. The initial board was nevertheless heavily European and North American. Additionally, the location of GSP within the GASPP framework would be important for enabling the journal, particularly in its Forum section, to draw upon the contributions of international organization and social movement actors. The seven international GASPP seminars convened between 1997 and 2004 (www.gaspp.org) informed several of the Forums and generated a number of articles. The GSP Digest was conceived from the outset as a useful crib or update for scholars and policy actors of recent developments in international social policy. In its format it echoed the UK-oriented Digest of the Journal of Social Policy and the European-oriented Digest of the Journal of European Social Policy. In terms of book reviews, it was the intention of the first Reviews Editor to ensure that we did not fall into the trap of northern scholars reviewing all the books. A range of reviews was solicited from the global South.

Within its first five years, GSP has, I believe, begun to realize its aims both in terms of the relevance of most of its articles and in terms of the content of several of its Forums and its Digest. The global discourse within and between international organizations (IOs) concerning desirable national social policy and the associated practice of IOs has been the subject of a number of articles. Global pension policy and practice was examined by Orenstein (GSP 5.2) and Ervik (GSP 5.1). Global labour market policy by Vosko (GSP 2.1), McBride and Williams (GSP 1.3) and Barrientos and Kabeer (GSP 4.2). Global health and social care policy by Lethbridge (GSP 5.2), Correa (GSP 2.3) and Holden (GSP 2.1). The twin debates concerning whether global social policy has advanced from the neoliberal hegemony of the 1990s and whether the prospects for a cosmopolitan world order have increased have been addressed by Yeates (GSP 2.1), Deacon (GSP 5.2), Mehrotra and Delamonica (GSP 5.2) and Day (GSP 2.3). Weiss (GSP 1.1) addressed the contribution of United Nations Economic and Social Ideas to global policy, while O'Brien focused upon the relationship between organizational politics in the multilateral economic organizations and social policy (GSP 2.2). Gough (GSP 4.3), however, advanced an analysis concerning the paradox that while understandings of obstacles to human well-being are increasingly universal, policy proposals to address them are increasingly local. The contribution of other non-state actors to the making of global social policy has been analysed by Stone (GSP 1.3) in terms of think tanks, by Stubbs (GSP 3.3) and Ramia (GSP 3.1) in terms of INGOs, and by several articles on global business regulation, listed in the following paragraph. Regrettably, there have been no articles addressing the contribution of global social movements to global social policy.

In terms of the three Rs of global Redistribution, Regulation and Rights, two articles addressed the issue of redistribution: Day (GSP 2.3) and Clunies-Ross (GSP 4.2); regrettably only one the issue of rights, by Oestreich (GSP 4.1); but perhaps an excess dealing with regulation and, in particular, aspects of global business regulation: Pearson and Seyfang (GSP 1.1), Whitehouse (GSP 3.3), Lewis and Macleod (GSP 4.1), Murray (GSP 4.2), Millar (GSP 4.2) and Djelic (GSP 5.1). Finally, in terms of this overview of GSP articles published between 2000 and 2005, a number have contributed to the aim of GSP to increase understanding of the impact of globalization upon social policy in particular countries. Countries and regions included in the analysis have been China (GSP 3.1, 5.3), Chile (GSP 3.1), East Asia (GSP 1.2), Korea (GSP 1.2, 2.3), Russia (GSP 1.3), the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (GSP 1.2), the former Yugoslavia (GSP 4.1), European countries (GSP 2.2, 3.2), the Arab region and Middle East (GSP 3.3, 2.3), Peru (GSP 4.3) and Bangladesh (GSP 1.1). We have not received or published any articles on Africa south of the Sahara, except one addressing internal migration in South Africa (GSP 5.3). It would appear from this analysis that one of the aims of GSP, to increase the dialogue between social policy analysts and development studies analysts, has not yet been achieved. Those concerned with the impact of globalization upon social development in the poorest countries and those dealing with the impact of globalization upon middle-income and richer countries still to a large extent occupy two parallel literatures.

From my point of view as Editor, the most challenging part of the journal to keep alive, and when it worked, the most rewarding, has been the Forum. GSP 1.1 invited a range of 'movers and shakers' of global social policy to address the desirability of a global social reform agenda and their contributions are still relevant today. The important North-South dialogue on the prospects for a socially progressive globalization was begun in GSP 1.2 and extended to embrace a South-South dialogue in GSP 1.3. The extent to which any of these ideas for global social reform were reflected at the level of UN reports and conferences was covered in GSP 2.2 in terms of the Monterray Finance for Development Conference, in GSP 4.2 in terms of the ILO's World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization. Other Forums had a specific policy focus: labour in GSP 2.1, health in GSP 2.3, migration in GSP 5.3, public service privatization in GSP 5.2, or a regional focus: Europe in GSP 3.2. GSP 4.1 assessed the contribution of the Global Development Net. GSP Forum 4.3, using the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as a focus, addressed the issue of the relationship between global policy-making at the level of IOs and local perceptions. GSP Forum 5.1 asked whether global social policy ideas did actually matter and included the challenging contribution by Rieger that perhaps they did not. This view notwithstanding, there has certainly been a shift in the global social policy discourse since 1999 towards a wider acceptance of the need for a socially responsible if not yet (!) social democratic globalization. The MDGs, despite their limitations and the articulation at the G8 in July 2005 and the UN summit of September 2005 of the need for some form of international taxation on air travel, is testimony to this. GSP has, of course, merely reflected this rather than been a significant player in its articulation. However, during this period from 1999 to 2005, the now stronger southern social movement and government voice in the globalization debate that is often concerned that the South should get out from underneath a northern, even reformist northern driven global agenda has not been reflected adequately in the pages of GSP. The applicability of the European social reform story is increasingly questioned by social development specialists even as others now point to its relevance (Mkandawire, 2004). The 'North-South dialogue on the prospects for socially progressive globalization' begun in the Forum of GSP 1.2 in 2001 is, in my view, the most important but has proved the most difficult dialogue to maintain. Ever since its inception, the Global Social Policy journal has been visualized as a collaborative effort to give voice to social policy issues from both developed and developing countries. This was institutionalized by the manner in which the editorial board was constituted, with representation from both the North and the South in the form of Regional Editors and members of the Advisory Board. This is what distinguishes GSP from most other international journals, which normally do not have representation from the southern countries on their editorial team. Over the years the content of the journal has reflected the concerns of Latin America, Africa, South Asia, East Asia and North America on various social policy issues. However, in future, there is a need to seriously review how this can be strengthened and made much more vibrant. Is it possible to consider having one issue every year that would focus on a region, which would address some major social policy concern? This would help the Regional Editors to take a more proactive role in planning and identifying potential authors and book reviews for the journal. The journal has tried to work around special themes; the one I worked on with Eeva Ollila and Meri Koivusalo on health was quite a success, and we were able to get a fairly good regional representation on health service related issues. I find that it is extremely useful for teaching and research for courses related to comparative studies in health systems. Similarly, the articles on pension reforms in Latin America, Russia and other Eastern European countries have been a valuable addition to the research in global social policy.

Books published from the different regions also need better representation in GSP. For the South Asian region, I tried to establish a link with Sage India in order to send titles to the editor of book reviews but I do not think it worked very well. Maybe one could plan for theme-based book reviews and the Regional Editors could select some suitable publications for review in GSP. Similarly, if there are special issues from the different regions then

  Mishra, R. (1999) Globalization and the Welfare State. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Mkandawire, T. (2004) Social Policy in a Development Context. Basingstoke: Palgrave. R A M A V. B A R U Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Views from the South (RAMA V. BARU is Associate Professor at the Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)

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niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

corporations. The issue of regulating or coping with influential TNCs raises a series of questions about labour and environmental standards, the provision and regulation of finance, the privatization and transnational provision of social services. The rise of the corporation as a significant actor and source of authority has led to increased attention to social policy concerns.

A case can also be made that social policy developments in one part of the world are of increasing relevance to people living in other parts of the world. Under the shadow of the Washington Consensus, policy models were exported to developing countries. However, in recent years policy models are also being imported to northern or western states. The introduction of flat taxes in some Central and Eastern European states has thrown down a challenge to the welfare states of Western Europe. After the privatization of social security systems in numerous developing states, the US under the Bush administration has advocated similar steps for its own system.

What might a deeper exchange between IR and social policy studies achieve? For IR practitioners and academics, there is a rich theoretical and empirical literature about the creation and development of social policies that are of increasing concern to many international and transnational actors. For social policy practitioners and academics, there are the insights gathered from IR work about the functioning of the global system and how that might influence the content and possibilities of social policy creation and implementation.

This exchange of information and views is a difficult undertaking. As outlined earlier, social policy and IR scholars do not often exchange views or pay attention to each other's scholarship. It takes both time and energy to read across disciplines and think about things in new ways. One of the goals of Global Social Policy is to make that task easier both for academics and practitioners in the two fields. To coincide with the journal's editorial changeover, this short article reflects on global social policy as a field of academic study and research and situates the journal therein. I contribute this short piece in the spirit of opening up rich and fruitful dialogue around the development of global social policy in the years to come. I write this as an England-based social policy scholar who has a long-standing interest in the intersection of global and transnational processes with national and subnational ones in the study of welfare states and social policies.

Over the last decade, global social policy has emerged as a vibrant field of academic study and research. It examines the ways in which globalization processes impact on the means supportive of the right to social participation, with a particular focus on international actors' discourses and practices of social policy and their national impacts. Global social policy is strongly multidisciplinary, embracing anthropology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science and sociology. With an essential focus on sectoral policies in the health, social care, social protection, housing, education and labour arenas, global social policy relates to the concerns of diverse fields of study, from migration studies through development studies to international relations, from social work to public administration and management studies, through area/regional studies and organization studies, to name but a few.

Global social policy has brought new concerns and questions into 'globalization studies' and social policy analysis alike. Globalization studies paid insufficient attention to the role of social policies and the welfare state in shaping and mediating the globalizing strategies of state and non-state entities, while social policy focused on the national and subnational dimensions of health and welfare arrangements to the neglect of the global and transnational ones. This intersection between globalization studies and social policy analysis has proved challenging and has generated much innovative work in social policy as we rethink how we construct our fields of enquiry and revisit existing conceptual and theoretical frameworks in new contexts.

As is to be expected, this is a multifaceted and long-term project, but already it has reaped dividends. It is now accepted that ostensibly 'national' welfare states are as much the creatures of transnational and global processes as they are of national and subnational ones; that accounts of social policy development need to attend to the global political geographies through which social policies are constituted and reconstituted. Much of this work shares common ground with those that would emphasize the need to incorporate the consequences of countries' imperialist past for the development of welfare regimes in colonized and colonial countries alike, before, during and after colonization itself.

Importantly, this project has helped forge connections with other fields of enquiry not heretofore regarded (or identifying themselves) as affiliating with 'social policy'. For example, the connections between 'foreign' and 'domestic' policy together with the significance of transnational dimensions to social and political action more generally as they relate to the welfare arena are now the focus of enquiry. Trade, finance, budgetary and accounting policies and practices are being examined as key elements of public policies impacting on health, welfare and livelihoods, as evidenced by the growing critical literature over private pension, health and education markets. Similarly, matters of international diplomacy, organizational change and interorganizational alliances among bodies with or without an institutionalized social dimension are treated as central to the global politics of welfare state reform and the political processes giving rise to global policies.

This journal has been the premier forum through which these developments have been given expression. But there is much scope for further work. Indeed, there is a sense in which coverage of 'core' social policy areas has only just begun. While health and social protection (in particular pensions) currently are favoured topics in global social policy, the field would benefit from extended focused attention to these areas as well as greater attention to the neglected areas of housing, social care, education and livelihoods. But we also need to broaden areas of enquiry to ask questions about a wide range of global public policies that impact on health, welfare and livelihoods. Agricultural policy is one example and the consequences of international trade agreements for the incomes and livelihoods of farmers and food security merit attention. Global water and energy policies merit similar treatment from a social policy perspective, as do the implications of developments in information and communications technology for social policy and services provision. The impacts of corporate and governmental internationalization strategies on, for example, subsistence economies, alternative economic systems, practices and arrangements, and the right to livelihood more generally also invite further analysis.

Transnational cooperation in matters of security policy is often critically commented on in relation to civil liberties and human rights but less commonly so in relation to the social rights of migrants and refugees. Much attention has been focused on the EU's institutionalized internal and external social policies but the social dimensions and impacts of other world-regional and transregional formations and alliances are less well attended to. There is now a wealth of literature on the global social justice movement(s) and their intersection with institutions of global governance, but relatively little of it concretely addresses the intersection of the movement with the development of social policy at national and global levels. Finally, there is a wealth of research into international trade diplomacy that is potentially relevant to this journal, as there is also from Future Studies with its attention to social utopias and dystopias.

These are but a few examples and in no way exhaustive of the wide range of ways in which research emerging from these different fields intersect with global social policy as a field of academic study and as a practice. Whatever the area or issue, the core concern must nonetheless clearly be with how global(ization) processes impact on collective interventions supporting the means to social participation and social development.

Perhaps one of the major challenges involved is opening up to study a far wider range of national and cultural variants of welfare arrangements. The more internationalist perspectives associated with recent work on OECD countries and the newly industrializing countries of East Asia and South America have begun this task, yet more work needs to be undertaken to extend this work to other parts of the globe. This would be of immense benefit to the field, not only enhancing knowledge and understanding of the astonishingly wide variations in social welfare relations and arrangements and the diverse responses to globalizing forces that exist worldwide, but also fulfilling the field's aspirations to globality and enriching its theoretical claims.

As more material is brought into the field, one of the issues to be addressed is whether we can we simply add 'globalization' and stir? In other words, does global social policy essentially entail scaling up traditional concerns on a global/international level or are we required to fundamentally rethink existing approaches? How do traditional concepts such as community, altruism, reciprocity, obligation, need, choice, identity, equity, equality, rights, justice and citizenship apply to a global policy context? How do theories of social policy development fit with the emergence, development and impacts of global social policies? Do theories of social policy and regional integration, developed in the EU context, apply to other world regions and international formations, or does such a starting point unnecessarily restrict our analysis and imagination?

In all of this, we need to engage with the widest possible diversity of perspectives. This entails engaging with scholars, policy-makers and activists from all parts of the globe and working within, or influenced by, different cultural, political and social contexts and traditions. Given the inequality of resources between policy-makers, academics and publishing venues around the world, it takes considerable effort to open space for a wide range of voices.

Global social policy, like national social policy, is a site of political and ideological struggle between left and right, emancipatory and conservative, progressive and regressive social forces. Global social policy is being forged through a struggle between these political tendencies, though some of them now appear in different guises. For instance, while much of the focus in global social policy has been on neoliberalism's accompanying social policy and its manifestation through international bodies such as the World Trade Organization and World Economic Forum, regressive forces also take the form of institutionalized religions: thus, to the traditionally conservative religious social policy of Catholicism and Christian fundamentalism can be added the conservative religious social policy of Islamic and Confucian countries. An example would be cooperation between the Vatican, several Islamic states and the US to undermine reproductive rights.

This implies that global social policy cannot be solely defined by that which is produced by an 'approved' list of organizations and perspectives, i.e. those which broadly approximate or appear sympathetic to 'our' values. Numerous other organizations pursuing policies ostensibly at odds with the values of social protection have a significant impact upon social policy. Failing to recognize and engage with these forces means failing to engage with some extremely strong influences on social policy. Again, using the example of religious fundamentalism, it is an increasingly important shaper of global policy, not simply in supposed 'backward' religious-dominated states of the Middle East but also in 'developed' major world powers such as the US.

One of the key challenges that lies ahead, then, is to take the existence of such divergent perspectives as an incentive to further develop the field because eventually we need to recognize and engage with a conservative global social policy, whatever form it may take, wherever it is manifested and from whichever tradition it may emanate. The task must surely be to recognize the contributions of the widest possible range of policy actors and openly debate the issues with them.

In conclusion, global social policy is entering an exciting period of consolidation and innovation. This means more focused attention on 'core' social policy areas together with the examination of previously neglected policy areas. It involves incorporating more diverse perspectives and arguments from different disciplinary, cultural, social, political and geographical backgrounds. With your help, the journal will continue to be the principal forum for key global social policy debates and innovations in the years ahead.

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de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

developing countries would be substantively addressed under this approach, in return for the commitments that may have to be undertaken in key services. It is uncertain whether there would be a balanced outcome from such negotiations. It is thus not surprising that many developing countries and least-developed countries (LDCs) have misgivings about the complementary approach, despite assurances that the GATS' negotiating architecture would not be undermined.

But whether or not the services negotiations receive an impetus from the Hong Kong Declaration and the new modalities, the GATS negotiations provide all countries with an opportunity to take stock of and develop their domestic regulatory and institutional frameworks in services, with active involvement from all domestic stakeholders. In this regard, the plurilateral approach may put additional pressure on some of the major developing countries to assess the institutional and regulatory deficiencies in their key service sectors and to adopt a more proactive domestic reform agenda in services, which may prove to be a gain in itself. The Annex to which he refers is the infamous Annex C to the final Ministerial Declaration adopted in Hong Kong and we will come back to that, but first a little history and some context.

The current round of WTO negotiations, the so-called Doha Development Round, is posited on the 'agreement' adopted in Doha in 2001 that the new Round of negotiations would have a development focus, in which the trading and development interests of developing countries would take pride of place. Gone, for once, would be the usual mercantilist approach to negotiations, in which my country only makes concessions to yours or others if we get something equivalent in return -a 'fair deal'. Doha recognized that there can be no such fair deals when the outcome of previous rounds has been so unbalanced. This round was going to level the playing field somewhat. So, the principle of non-reciprocity was accepted -the developing countries could ask for and get deals for which they did not have to make a 'fair' offer in return.

The problem is that the North basically decided to go back on the deal and to ask that a very large number of developing countries, at least, must work on a tit-for-tat basis. That's what partially wrecked Cancún -the North was asking for very significant new concessions, notably the so-called Singapore issues, from the South.

By July 2004, it was clear that all pretence about a development round had gone and the North started to increase its demands, starting with the July Package of 2004. This certainly was evident in the intransigent positions the EU and the USA were taking over agriculture, making 'offers' that would make substantially no real difference to developing countries' market access, and in the non-Agriculture Market Access negotiations. In the latter, the North was essentially asking the South to wipe out huge swathes of their tariffs (something the North had never even contemplated at their own equivalent stage of industrial development), leading to the spectre of industries in the South being turned into graveyards and of the South foregoing any chance of its own indigenous industrial development.

To top it all off, the EU decided that the services negotiations were progressing far too slowly and they wanted to see a significant opening of services markets if they were going to be 'generous' on agricultural offers. Developing countries with whom we have met have told us that they regard this claim of slowness as ridiculous: negotiations have been going on in agriculture for over 50 years and there is still not decent market access for many developing countries. In contrast, they say, negotiations under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) have been going for only 10 years and there has been considerable work done in this area.

By early 2005, the EU and several other Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries upped the ante further. Progress is so slow, they said, that we are going to introduce a new approach to the services negotiations: 'benchmarking'. Each country would be required to make services commitments in a specified number of services (depending on the kind of country). Further, your commitments each had to make an actual difference to market access. Countries would be ranked on how they measured up and this would be used for/against them in other negotiations. In addition, they set clear targets for improvements in each mode of services trade. Crucially, under Mode 3, the opening of commercial presence, foreign equity ownership of at least 51% would be required. In other words, a takeover of developing country services sectors by Northern multinationals.

Significantly, the only area where such tough requirements were not specified in these OECD country benchmarks was Mode 4 -the opening of access for the temporary movement of service providers, the main demand of developing countries in these negotiations and one that the North did not want to open up.

The South roundly condemned this whole approach -now called 'complementary approaches', to hide the raw benchmarking tone. As the October General Council meeting, which would set the draft text for Hong Kong adoption, approached, the pressure to agree on a draft services text -which became Annex C to the final Declaration -was mounting. On 18 October, a number of trade unions and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) met with Ambassador de Mateo. We discussed benchmarking and the draft services text. He agreed that there was no convergence on quantitative benchmarking, although he maintained that there was convergence on the need to discuss it. An Indian NGO member suggested that one member state was working on the draft text. Ambassador de Mateo expressed surprise that anyone was working on a draft but said he would love to see it because he had only been the Chair for two weeks and was not sure what he wanted to write yet -had not even started.

Two days later, the full draft, translated into all the WTO languages, appears. Pretty fast work for a man who had no idea where to start! And, surprise, surprise, the text had everything the EU wanted, even though it was clear this had been totally rejected by the bulk of a membership that prides itself on working by consensus. It even included a requirement that, if a group of countries asked you to take part in plurilateral negotiations on a particular service, you had to enter negotiations. This generated a flurry of letters from NGOs and trade unions to Director General Pascal Lamy asking how he could possibly square this draft with claims about all Hong Kong texts being drawn up on the basis of consensus and GATS flexibility.

Many member state delegations also made their objections clear and told us of their support for our public correspondence with Lamy. Some met with us to discuss possible tactics.

THENCE TO HONG KONG

Here was the most contentious services text ever produced at the WTO, the most contentious issue at the Ministerial and they spent the first two days studiously refusing to discuss it. The strategy was clear: leave it until it was so late that any attempt to torpedo the text would also torpedo the entire Ministerial. Which country wanted that opprobrium?

The Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries and the G90 made their displeasure clear. An alternative text was proposed by the G90 but Hyung Chong Kim, the Korean minister facilitating the services talks, and the WTO secretariat managed to use bureaucratic tricks to keep this off the agenda for half a day. Green room discussions went on all night of 17 December and up until the morning of 18 December it was not clear that a services text would be agreed.

Finally, the text that emerged:

• Deleted the compulsory quantitative approach but preserved the idea of plurilateral negotiations There is a large palette of new thinking that has broadened and is being deepened in many of the social science disciplines. However, developments in economics, with almost unique singularity, failed to translate into different policy prescriptions of the many international economic institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO). Powerful vested interests in economic thought and its application have ensured a market fundamentalist adherence to Classical Economics. The dominance of Classical Economics in economic governance has contributed to the wholesale purging of ideas and almost extinction of some species of academic teaching, like Schumpetarianism, while less fashionable ones like Marxism have suffered ridicule, notwithstanding their impact on other disciplines and useful predictive insights. The

acknowledgement

  This article is based on an earlier piece by the author, titled 'Plurilateral Negotiations in Services: What Price?', published in the editorial section of the Indian newspaper The Financial Express, on Tuesday, 10 January 2006. Please address correspondence to: Rupa Chanda, Professor, Economics and Social Sciences Area, Indian Institute of Management, Bannerghatta Road, Bangalore-560076, India. [email: rupa@iimb.ernet.in] M I K E WA G H O R N E Public Services International, France 'I Got My Annex!' (mike waghorne is the Assistant General Secretary of Public Services International in Ferney-Voltaire, France.) That heading is the triumphant summary of the services negotiations at the sixth World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong in December 2005 by the Mexican Ambassador to the WTO, Fernando de Mateo. He also chairs the Council on Trade in Services in Special Session, the body responsible for supervising the services negotiations.

•

  Downgraded the plurilateral negotiations from compulsory to voluntary • Preserved the EU text on how the various modes of trade would be treated, as well as reaffirming a set of modal and sectoral objectives sought by the North • Mandated further discussions on domestic regulations, again on a basis not agreed by all members; and, • Established a programme of work for 2006 that will see a number of plurilateral sectoral requests developed by February, followed by a further set of offers to be developed by the end of July and then full schedules of commitments by 31 October.

	Waghorne@world-psi.org]
	R I A Z TAY O B
	Southern and Eastern African Trade Information and Negotiations Institute, South Africa
	The World Trade Organization: Hegemony and Theory in
	Practice

Please address correspondence to: Mike Waghorne, Assistant General Secretary, Public Services International, Place de l'Eglise, 29770 Esquibien, France. [email: Mike. (riaz tayob is the Country Director of the Southern and Eastern African Trade Information and Negotiations Institute [SEATINI] in South Africa; http//www. seatini.org)


Global Social Policy Forum

Editor's Introduction: Hong Kong, WTO and Global Social Policy This Forum is based on reflections on the results and future of trade negotiations after the Hong Kong Ministerial Conference. Contributions to this Forum present views and analyses from different perspectives and positions. The contributions provided illuminate distinctive priorities and approaches, but also raise a number of common issues. Rudolf Adlung's contribution discusses services negotiations and their relevance for social services. He points out the flexibility in the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and limited commitments in sectors relevant to social development. Rupa Chanda addresses the question of whether the Hong Kong Ministerial Declaration on services -and Annex C -will generate momentum for the services negotiations and if so, in what direction and in whose interests? Annex C is also the starting point for Mike Waghorne's account of the Hong Kong meeting. He explores the ways in which the negotiations took place, and the concerns expressed by non-gonvernmental organizations (NGOs) and delegations about approved negotiation practices that are incompatible with GATS flexibility -the very feature emphasized in Rudolf Adlungs' contribution.

Moving from the particular debates on GATS, Riaz Tayob returns the discussion to the basic assumptions and expectations driving further trade negotiations, imbalances, the lack of recognition of different types of economic activity and decreasing return activities. The issue regarding the current negotiations is therefore not about details or particular issues with respect to social and health sectors, but more systemic and fundamental. Among other issues he raises are the imbalances concerning intellectual property rights. This is also the issue Susan Sell tackles in the context of the differing interests of the North and the South. She also discusses the extent to which there is a danger of even more stringent approaches to intellectual property rights and the so-called 'TRIPS-plus' conditions being applied in other fora and bilateral agreements. Trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS) negotiations, forum shifting and the historical The Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong, in December 2005, was the sixth such meeting since the World Trade Organization's (WTO's) inception in 1995. Its essential purpose was to provide guidance for the continuation and completion of the negotiations under the Doha Development Agenda, which covers virtually all areas within the remit of the WTO. Although services attracted more attention than in most preceding conferences, issues related to agricultural and other merchandise trade continued to prove more controversial. As on previous occasions, there was an apparent contrast between negotiators' perception and the apprehensions voiced by a significant number of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Which factors could explain the different perspectives?

The GATS: Broad, Deep -and Flexible One possible explanation relates to the structural peculiarities of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). It is not only broad in sector coverage, applying to virtually all services except so-called governmental services, but has potentially deeper policy implications than the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), its counterpart in merchandise trade. The definition of services trade reaches far beyond cross-border exchanges to capture three more modes of supply: (1) services provided to consumers that have moved abroad (tourists, students, patients, etc.) as well as services supplied in the consumers' home country by (2) foreign-established companies and (3) foreign service professionals. This implies, inter alia, that 'domestic' policies

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  E R I K O I V U S A L O Globalism and Social Policy Program (GASPP), Helsinki, Finland R U D O L F A D L U N G World Trade Organization, Switzerland Services Negotiations, Social Development and Public Policy (rudolf adlung is Senior Economist in the Trade and Services Division, WTO Secretariat)

  of Hong Kong negotiations with other fora, such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), is once again the focus of Carlos Correa's contribution to the Forum, bringing up the broader complexity of TRIPS and intellectual property standards in the broader context of global policy making.

Global Social Policy Copyright © 2006 1468-0181 vol. 6(2): 133-153; 065341 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, ca and New Delhi) DOI: 10.1177/1468018106065341 http://gsp.sagepub.com gsp context and relationship


The Origins and Essence of US Social Policy

On Taxonomies, Time and Transfers N I C K M A N N I N G Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust and University of Nottingham, UK abstract Our understanding of US social policy has not been advanced by the classification of welfare states that has dominated social policy analysis in recent years. But in biology and cosmology we can find useful examples of the way in which we can develop more theoretically informed and dynamic classifications. A common feature has been the incorporation of time and developmental paths into classification. The way in which social and political developments unfold over time is particularly important in social policy and, in the case of the USA, this has enabled us to understand that social policies can and have changed, with a rich mix of progressive and regressive policies evolving and receding over the decades. In view of the dominance of the USA in world affairs and the global transfer of resources, ideas and polices across regions, this more subtle analysis of the nature of US social policy is essential. In the social sciences it has not been acceptable to conceptualize an area of social life in terms of essences, or even origins, since the 'constructionist turn' that stressed the plastic and contingent nature of social institutions and processes. Recursive practices that give rise to the structures which we find in social life are often hidden from view and, it is argued, have in the past misled us into thinking that those structures were more permanent or anchored than is in fact the case. This is not confined to social science. In Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter (1980) showed how recursive processes occur in a wide range of phenomena, but that they are difficult to identify: they lie at the heart of Bach's intricate canons, Escher's self-engulfing pictures, and mathematician Kurt Gödel's radical 'Incompleteness Theorem' (1931), which stated that every closed system contains propositions that are not provable within the system itself. We seem to have an uncomfortable choice: to examine a system from the outside, which may help us to understand recursive processes that reproduce it, but that has tended to reduce each case to a fairly undifferentiated 'essence' or type; or to examine the system from the inside, which may help us to appreciate its complex and contradictory make up, yet blind us to those recursive processes that reproduce it.

There is a vast range of scholarship on US social policy, yet it exhibits something of this analytic dilemma. As a social institution that is to be explained, social policy in the USA has been the subject of a wide range of analysis that has divided between those approaches that view the USA 'from outside the system', such as comparative sociology, and those that view the USA from 'within the system', such as the historical sociology of the USA as a single case. The comparative view has often fixed the USA as a residualist, liberal welfare model. From this point of view the essence of US social policy is that it is an 'exceptional case' driven by a number of unique aspects of US society, such as high wages, early democratization, weak labour mobilization, and a highly fractured federal structure. The historical view, however, has attempted to unpack different recursive processes that have shaped early welfare policies and also explain the recent paths that US social policy has taken. In particular, this approach has attempted to identify different origins of an uneven pattern of social policies within the USA, not all of which have been residual in extent, indeed some of which have been exceptionally generous.

In this article these two approaches to understanding US social policy will be contrasted. The comparative view has placed the US in the context of other industrializing nations, where it has been seen as a reluctant or late welfare modernizer, and subsequently a welfare regime type of its own. In this case the key focus has been on the construction of welfare taxonomies. The historical view in contrast has attempted to understand US social policy on its own, but with a detailed appreciation of its uneven nature, and in particular the reasons for the developmental patterns that different parts of social policy have exhibited. In this case the key focus has been on the analysis of social policy over time.

Finally, in view of the influence of US social policy around the world, the consequences of these two analyses for our understanding of the way in which policies travel outside their own country will be reviewed through a brief excursion into policy transfers.

Taxonomies

What are taxonomies, and why are they a problem in analysing social policy? The first point to notice is that there are many areas of science that suffer from multiple dimensions that are difficult to resolve into clean and clear types. For example, one of the earliest, and probably the most extensively reworked, is the classification of plants. Initially these were grouped on the basis of limited commonalities, such as medicinal utility, or the synthesis of multiple natural characteristics. But the biggest change was the identification of evolutionary connections around the time of the Darwinian revolution. Two key aspects became the organizing principles: plants with common ancestors were linked, and in addition the assumption that simple = primitive enabled time to take a central place in the classification, for example, in separating unisexual from bisexual plants. Recent developments, such as genetic decoding, have built on this system, but not challenged the general analysis.

A more recent example, but one that illustrates the difficulties of dimensions that also interact, is the attempt to classify types of galaxies by De Vaucouleurs (http://bama.ua.edu/~rbuta/gvatlas/node2.html). This uses three dimensions, rings, spirals and bars. However, these do not separate cleanly, and there is, as with plants (and welfare states), a tension between the classification system and the empirical reality. Nevertheless astronomers are now trying to unpick the underlying processes that give rise to these patterns through the measurement of the composition and density of the gases involved, and the modelling of the evolution universe, particularly its rapid expansion immediately after the big-bang some 14 billion years ago, which gave rise to the uneven spread of matter across space.

These two examples illustrate the way in which classifications are constructed: first some potential dimensions are identified, then empirical observations are made as to fit and completeness, then the possible meaning (usually involving a model or theory of causality) of the types is examined, and finally the types are settled. This process has been systematized as 'general morphological analysis' by Fritz [START_REF] Zwicky | Discovery, Invention, Research through the Morphological Approach[END_REF]. He argued that analysing complex policy fields presents us with a number of difficult methodological problems: many factors are non-quantifiable; uncertainties are often in principle non-reducible; and the actual process by which conclusions are drawn in such studies is often difficult to trace, i.e. we seldom have an adequate audit trail describing the process of getting from initial problem formulation to specific solutions or conclusions.

Morphological analysis identifies and defines the dimensions (or parameters) of the problem complex to be investigated and assigns each of these a range of relevant values or conditions. A morphological box -known as a Zwicky box -is constructed by setting the parameters against each other in an n-dimensional parameter space. Each cell of the parameter space contains one particular value or condition from each of the parameters, and thus marks out a particular state or configuration of the problem complex (for discussion, see http://www.swemorph.com/ma.html).

The point is to examine all of the configurations in the field, in order to establish which of them are possible, viable, practical, interesting, and so on, and which are not. In doing this, we mark out in the field a solution space. The solution space of a Zwickian morphological field consists of the subset of configurations, which satisfy some criteria.

We could illustrate this for example with Esping-Andersen's (1990) typology if we were to divide his dimensions into 5 levels of de-commodification, 5 levels of stratification, and 3 levels of state intervention. This would give us 75 different possible solutions, as in the figure, even though Esping-Anderson only identifies three. Have the other 72 possible types been properly thought through and decision criteria established as to their viability? If not, there may be alternative formulations, or at least, particular states may fall into different compartments of the drawers that can be pulled out of the box.

The comparative analysis of welfare states has operated from the assumption that each welfare state can be characterized as a whole unit -traditionally measured by the proportion of GDP devoted through state expenditure to social security and other public programmes. This in itself raises questions about private, non-state expenditure, and about the coherence of social polices across the state, to which we will return [START_REF] Kasza | The Illusion of Welfare "Regimes[END_REF]. In this tradition of analysis, states were compared in terms of their 'welfare effort' [START_REF] Wilensky | The Welfare State and Equality, Structural and Ideological Roots of Public Expenditure[END_REF], and this was regressed on to other possible factors, such as level of GDP, demography, and so on. Clearly the sample chosen was likely to affect the findings; in particular a large variation in GDP was likely to crowd out other possible factors. Indeed it was this effect that led to a new emphasis on politics in comparative analysis: when states with relatively similar levels of GDP were analysed (e.g. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD] members) it was found that political rather than economic differences were crucial [START_REF] Castles | Public Welfare Provision, Scandinavia and the Sheer Futility of the Sociological Approach to Politics[END_REF].

In the initial comparative work there was an implicit classification of states between high and low spenders on a single dimension. With the turn to political explanations, more dimensions came into play: the strength of the left, the weakness of the right, the nature of inter-class alliances, the centralization of state institutions, and so on. Nevertheless with the Esping-Andersen (1990) 'three worlds' publication, there was a powerful resolution of this analytic work around a classically Weberian ideal typology, which extracted pure forms of welfare state types, with empirical examples of states that were more or less closely aligned with these types. This has been the dominant solution space of a Zwickian morphological field for comparative social policy analysis since the subset of configurations (three worlds of welfare capitalism) satisfies in certain respects both an economic and a political set of dimensions. Much work has been undertaken to develop the classification (for example, [START_REF] Abrahamson | The Welfare Modelling Business[END_REF][START_REF] Andreß | Four Worlds of Welfare State Attitudes? A Comparison of Germany, Norway, and the United States[END_REF].

However, this process does not necessarily stop at one solution. We have seen how plant classifications have taken on board an increasingly powerful and compelling causal model to tie the classification together (evolution and genetics). Astronomy has done the same through the analysis of gas composition, and the modelling of the post big-bang rapid expansion of the universe.

The relevance of these processes to the classification and analysis of US social policy is compelling. Historians of US social policy have dismissed welfare state classifications as 'comparative statics' [START_REF] Orloff | Social Provision and Regulation: Theories of States, Social Policies and Modernity[END_REF]. The implication is that the system has yet to derive a satisfactory solution that entails a plausible causal model. The unspoken problem is that this is not a 'theory driven classification'. The critical issue is the evolutionary assumptions that underlie the classification of any welfare state, and in this case the USA.

The original model for the USA was that it was 'exceptional' (from a European perspective). It had a different economy that delivered high wages in the north and a slave based planter economy in the south. It had a different polity, highly federalized, with an active constitution. It had a different society, without a feudal past, and with an ideology of liberal individualism, and a weak labour movement. [START_REF] Pierson | The "Exceptional" United States: First New Nation or Last Welfare State?[END_REF] has collected 20 examples in this genre. However, a number of problems have been raised in the case of the USA. The list of exceptions is not systematically theorized, with no clear means of attributing causal weight to the factors, or detailing their specific and general effects on social policies. Indeed the very notion of exceptionality implied that the USA was not a viable system in its own right.

This single solution (i.e. that the USA is not European) was a poor classification, which Esping-Anderson resolved by suggesting there are alternative solutions to the normal dilemmas for welfare states such as market insulation, inequality, and political intervention. In turn, a growing number of writers have been trying out alternative taxonomies: some have argued that where states fit into other parts of the box (e.g. the 'Latin' rim, or socialist states) there should be more solutions; others have argued that the box's three dimensions should be expanded to a fourth (gender issues -particularly de-familialization), or a fifth dimension (race) [START_REF] Abrahamson | The Welfare Modelling Business[END_REF].

Of course, as [START_REF] Abrahamson | The Welfare Modelling Business[END_REF] has argued, this 'welfare modelling business' can continue for a very long time, since the number of potential solutions in the box expands rapidly as dimensions are added. What is the way to sort through the options? As we have seen, the approach in plant science and astronomy was to identify an evolutionary process that combines time and classification. If we use the same strategy, we may develop our analysis of welfare state classifications, and indeed our view of US social policy. For example, [START_REF] Amenta | US Social Policy in Comparative and Historical Perspective: Concepts, Images, Arguments and Research Strategies[END_REF] suggest that it would be useful to combine comparative and historical work, to try to identify the way in which US social policy has evolved, particularly to trace the paths along which both unsuccessful and successful policy initiatives have travelled, and why.

Time

The idea of including evolution within taxonomies suggests that our understanding of types of welfare state, including US social policy, will be enhanced to the extent that we understand the evolution of those policies over time.

Historical work on US social policy has grown out of a wider tradition of historical sociology, for which social policies have provided a useful empirical field of study, but which is not per se focused on this area, and is often overlooked by social policy analysts. This work has elevated the significance of time for social policy analysis to a central position.

An early example of this point can be drawn from [START_REF] Merton | The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action[END_REF] essay on the unintended consequences of 'purposive social action'. Policies over time may not bring about the changes intended. He observes that there are a number of reasons why action as intended does not always result in anticipated outcomes. The first two -and the most pervasive -were ignorance and error. The third was a wilful avoidance of the unanticipated, because of an overwhelming commitment to the intended consequence. The fourth was where value commitments are self-contradictory, and the last where prediction can result in self-defeating changes. All these sources of error can divert policy intentions over time.

Policy analysts are familiar with the effects of the non take-up of discretionary benefits (and the converse -the over-consumption of welfare goods, such as health care, by eager claimants), or the high marginal tax rates generated by benefit withdrawal. A second order of such effects can be seen where policies generate feedback that diverts the original aims, such as the producer capture of public services by self-interested professionals, or free riders, or the expansion of risky behaviour by individuals who feel insurance brings them security. Those on the right of the political spectrum have used such arguments to suggest that intervention should be abandoned, for example [START_REF] Murray | Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980[END_REF] thought experiments over smoking or welfare interventions, [START_REF] Sieber | Fatal Remedies: The Ironies of Social Intervention[END_REF] enumeration of 'fatal remedies', and more recently a series of books by [START_REF] Furedi | Paranoid Parenting[END_REF][START_REF] Furedi | Culture of Fear: Risk Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation[END_REF][START_REF] Furedi | Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age[END_REF]. However, these observations have been used more rigorously to suggest that interventions and the policies that support them may generate their own politics [START_REF] Orloff | Social Provision and Regulation: Theories of States, Social Policies and Modernity[END_REF], such that our understanding of social policies cannot be adequate unless we understand the way that they have evolved over time. Why do some policies remain remarkably intact, even in the face of severe pressures, while others seem to fade away without trace?

Of course there has always been history; but a new body of scholarship has been building a more detailed argument that change over time is essential to understanding policies. In this work, perhaps best known through the idea of path-dependence, the way in which specific 'mechanisms' result in particular patterns of subsequent actions has been used to give a more complete, and indeed in many cases a new, explanation.

The general starting point is that 'time matters'. In his new book on Politics in Time, [START_REF] Pierson | Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis[END_REF] begins with a presentation of the 'Polya Urn' thought experiment, drawing from the economics of [START_REF] North | Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance[END_REF], [START_REF] Arthur | Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy[END_REF] and others. In this demonstration, there is a large urn with two balls, one black and one red. One ball is removed, and then returned with an additional ball of the same colour. This is repeated until the urn is full. The result is that small changes in the balance of colours in the urn early on will have a powerful effect on the final mix of balls that are in the urn when full. This idea illustrates the effects of path-dependence. [START_REF] Arthur | Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy[END_REF] suggests that this process of positive feedback can be characterized in several ways. It is unpredictable because random early events have large effects on the end state, and these early events do not tend to cancel out. It is also increasingly inflexible as time passes, such that alternatives can no longer be reached, even if the path is inefficient. Positive feedback typically exhibits rising rates of return, such that the costs and likelihood of changing paths, once one has been set, reduce over time. This is particularly the case where set-up costs are large at the beginning, and where benefits grow in use as a result of growing knowledge, the coordination of others onto the path, and the self-fulfilling character of expectations for future gains from staying on the path. For example, the chance of which party was in power when the stock market crashed in 1929 may have been crucial to subsequent events and the birth of the New Deal in the 1930s. The Republicans had dominated the 1920s; but with the crash this was sufficiently discrediting not only to hand power to the democrats, but to give them the political space to fashion a new path, the New Deal, that was to last for the rest of the century. However, technological examples of path-dependence are more commonly presented in this literature, such as video systems, information technology platforms, and the humble QWERTY keyboard.

Pierson suggests that path-dependency is particularly relevant to politics and policies, and that these can have effects over long periods of time, which are difficult to include in cross-sectional analyses typical of comparative models of welfare state explanation. For example, slow demographic changes, such as life expectancy, or family size, or migration patterns can have cumulative impacts over time that tend to be missed in conventional studies that try to build causal models by linking contemporaneous variables. Moreover, it is not merely that time matters; sequences, that is the order in which changes occur, are also held to be a neglected mechanism of effect in this literature. Abbott has made this point strongly in his work on professions [START_REF] Abbott | The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor[END_REF] and a more general review of methodology [START_REF] Abbott | Time Matters: On Theory and Method[END_REF]. It may be that some sequences have strongly path-stabilizing effects, while others will tend to disrupt paths and lead to change. Thus, for example, those occupations that are successful in developing their professional status appear to have gone through a common sequence of development. The 'natural experiment' of the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe has provided vivid examples of alternative sequences of economic and social change. For example, Poland opted for deep labour market adjustments and high unemployment, which led to high inequality but a rapid return to economic growth. The Czech Republic was more cautious in this respect, and has lower inequality, but slower growth. Russia was at the opposite end of this sequencing, with a retention of labour market protection, but poor economic recovery (Manning, 2004b).

The significance of time for understanding the nature of US social policy has been of growing influence in recent years. Adams et al. (2004) in an extensive review have reflected on two 'waves' of historical sociology, in which the mechanisms of sequencing over time and the subject of social policy have come to occupy a central focus in the effort to develop satisfactory explanations of US society. The first wave is defined as the history of the US from the works of [START_REF] Kerr | Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth[END_REF], [START_REF] Rostow | The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto[END_REF] and [START_REF] Wilensky | The Welfare State and Equality, Structural and Ideological Roots of Public Expenditure[END_REF], who are seen as identifying the growth of social policy as an inevitable outcome of industrial development (although to be fair, Kerr was careful to identify different configurations of elite industrializers -the American, the Japanese, the Russian, etc.). It is against this backdrop that the exceptional nature of the USA as welfare laggard was originally noted. The second wave took issue with the programmatic elements of the industrial society model, posing the challenge that in social science the quest for explanation must seek to identify the way in which real societies actually develop. In the case of the USA, the challenge was to understand US social policy as it had actually developed, rather than as an exception to a general and abstract model of industrial society.

A common feature of the second wave has therefore been to seek ways in which US social policy has developed positively, rather than as a reluctant exception. Much of this writing has deliberately set out to identify and explain periods and areas of US social policy that are expansionist and progressive. A number of significant examples have now been written up. [START_REF] Skocpol | Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States[END_REF] celebration of welfare for soldiers and mothers has become a landmark study in defining the second wave. She demonstrated that the general model of 'welfare laggard' was entirely inappropriate in the case of veterans' services, and mothers' support. A number of other studies have followed in this vein. [START_REF] Amenta | Bold Relief: Institutional Politics and the Origins of Modern American Social Policy[END_REF] has analysed the generous reaction to the eruption of acute need generated by the early depression years, and the newly elected democratic President taking office in March 1933, bringing with him experience of dealing with poverty as Mayor of New York since 1929: the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Civil Works Administration, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Roosevelt famously said that 'we should quit this business of relief' precisely because the previous three years had generated such a generous welfare effort.

Making a similar point, but not in the same tradition, is the celebration of the upsurge in social policies in Lyndon Johnson's Big Society programmes of the 1960s, where the number of those on welfare rose rapidly, and the amendments to the 1935 Social Security Act brought health care to the poor and the elderly [START_REF] Schwarz | America's Hidden Success: A Reassessment of Twenty Years of Public Policy[END_REF]. More recently, [START_REF] Pierson | Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher and the Politics of Retrenchment[END_REF] study of the resistance of social policies to retrenchment, followed by the expansion of newer innovations such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Lifeline Universal Telephone Service, dubbed 'stealth welfare' by [START_REF] Newman | When Opportunity Knocks: Economic Liberalisation and Stealth Welfare in the United States[END_REF], have continued the theme of positive achievements in US social policy, which either explicitly or implicitly challenges the exceptionalism model. My own favourite example is the positive effect of the US constitution on rights for people with disabilities, which in some respects have a security as yet unavailable in the UK or indeed in Sweden. The positive leverage of the US constitution on social policy would be a suitable case study in this tradition, and may well have been done.

However, this optimistic combination of the injection of time into social policy analysis, and an appreciation of the hidden success of US social policy is of course insufficient. If this is indeed an advance in our understanding then it should also be able to reveal the dependent paths and sequences that have given rise to less progressive aspects of US social policy, and there are in fact a number of studies of this type. A cogently argued example was [START_REF] Quadagno | The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty[END_REF] study of race, and particularly the sequences of political interaction between the southern states, and the federal government in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the subsequent politics of race in the urban north. She shows that these have been defining features of the stark bifurcation of social policies between welfare and the rest, and have shaped the politics of education (after the 'Brown' cases) and urban planning. There has recently been an upsurge in this literature filling out the analysis in a variety of ways (see the nine books reviewed by [START_REF] Manza | Race and the Underdevelopment of the American Welfare State[END_REF].

Another strong theme in this tradition has been the effect of business interests on social policy. This can be traced in several ways. A key paper was the extended analysis by [START_REF] Gordon | New Deal, Old Deck: Business and the Origins of Social Security, 1920-1935[END_REF] of the way in which business organizations, such as the American Association for Labor Legislation, worked to both extend welfare legislation to collectivize and limit business legal liability over workplace accidents in the 1920s, and also to limit the pensions liabilities that were under discussion in the build up to the 1935 Social Security Act. More recently [START_REF] Hacker | The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States[END_REF][START_REF] Hacker | Business Power and Social Policy: Employers and the Formation of the American Welfare State[END_REF] has worked on the argument that there is considerable provision, and specific structuring, of social policy through the private market, which has been badly overlooked in the historical institutionalism of sociologists such as Skocpol and Orloff, who have concentrated on state provision. Adding in private provision shows that the USA is much more on a par with other industrial societies than appears to be the case for state expenditures alone. Although the USA only spends around 15% of GDP on publicly funded social programmes compared with 25% in Sweden and Germany, when publicly regulated private expenditure is included, these totals come to 24%, 27% and 28% respectively (for more extensive data that supports this point, see also OECD, 2005).

However, business interests are not stimulated by the meeting of social needs; or at least they are not stimulated unless there are market opportunities to be had in the meeting of them. This is hardly a new point. Food and housing are for the most part privately produced and consumed in all societies. In the USA this extends to most medical care, and substantial parts of education. The issue is not so much what is the state doing, but how are social risks overall being met in a society, and what is the balance between the collective and individual meeting of these risks? Moreover, there is the question of how new risks are being met (Manning and Shaw, 2000;[START_REF] Daguerre | Neglecting Europe[END_REF]. For the US case, [START_REF] Hacker | Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of Social Policy Retrenchment in the United States[END_REF] has argued that there is a dark side to the positive notion of 'stealth welfare' in which new risks are being quietly and disproportionately privatized, while arguments about old risks draw our attention elsewhere, in a parallel process of 'stealth privatization'. For example, stable policies provide less and less cover for the total risks faced by citizens, as new risks appear, and tax breaks and occupational welfare are expanded.

The impact of time, sequencing, and slow processes can therefore include contemporary developments as well as those from the past, in the quest to unravel a more complex view of the state of US social policy.

Transfers

The nature of US social policy discussed so far is of consequence not merely for those in the USA, but for many societies that are influenced by the way in which the USA has developed. The extent of this influence has become the subject of a relatively new specialism within the analysis of social policypolicy transfer. These remarks on taxonomies and time have much to offer here, but not until some preliminary remarks have been made about the nature of policy transfer.

Policies and innovations are manifold, but only taken up where they 'fit' and solve local problems. This fit depends on the particular welfare solution that has been adopted in a society or the particular policy area. For example, the injection of market mechanisms may or may not solve particular policy problems, or more specifically may or may not generate unanticipated consequences of 'purposive social action'. Take, for example, the injection of markets into state socialism in the late 1980s, in the face of declining productivity and public disaffection with existing economic and social relations. In a society whose dictum was 'we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us', markets were unlikely to transform existing industrial relations, because the additional components of structural and behavioural supports that are the necessary conditions for markets to work did not exist. And markets did not work: the unanticipated consequences were far-reaching, with a rapid growth of economic corruption, and before too long the collapse of the whole system.

A recent detailed study of social policy advice by the OECD, over 25 years to 16 countries, shows that in all these countries policy advice was almost universally rejected by countries unless they were already in the process of looking for that particular kind of solution (Manning, 2004a). Why is this? Following our earlier discussion, we might surmise that policies will only fit depending on their place in policy sequences, dependent paths, and slow processes. A transferred policy might have quite different consequences depending on how, when and where it is adopted into a particular setting, and this cannot simply be read off from the particular welfare regime characterizing the whole state, or from what has worked elsewhere or in the past.

What are the key factors here? Much of this recent literature [START_REF] Daguerre | Neglecting Europe[END_REF][START_REF] Dolowitz | The Europeanisation of Policy Transfer: The EU as a Policy Mediator[END_REF][START_REF] Walker | The Welfare We Want? The British Challenge for American Reform[END_REF] draws without acknowledgement on the sociological study of the diffusion of innovations. This started from a classic article by James [START_REF] Coleman | The Diffusion of an Innovation Among Physicians[END_REF], reporting on a study of the adoption of innovations among American physicians. He identified a pattern, the 'S' curve (Figure 1), that was shaped by the three key aspects reported in the policy transfer literature: values for or against the innovation; networks of contacts between those interested; and definitions of the problem to be solved. This distinguished early, typical and late adopters, and has been found to fit numerous studies of innovation diffusion. [START_REF] Nutley | Learning from the Diffusion of Innovations[END_REF] identified 14,600 articles on the diffusion of innovation between 1990 and 2002. The seminal work on this area [START_REF] Rogers | Diffusion of Innovations[END_REF], running over four editions, identified eight dimensions of diffusion research, summarized by [START_REF] Nutley | Learning from the Diffusion of Innovations[END_REF] as:

1. Earliness of knowing about innovations: Addressing the means by which initial knowledge of an innovation is communicated within social systems. 2. Rate of adoption of different innovations in a social system: The classic studies aiming to explain patterns of diffusion focused on the nature of the innovation (e.g. seminal studies on the uptake of new agricultural practices). 3. Innovativeness: Empirical research that examines the characteristics of individuals or organizations perceived as being innovative. 4. Opinion leadership: Research focusing on the role of opinion leaders and change agents in ensuring diffusion. 5. Diffusion networks: Work exploring the social interconnectedness of the actors in the social system where diffusion is being examined. 6. Rate of adoption in different social systems: An extension of the work in the previous category, attempting to explain differing rates of uptake by the characteristics of the social system and the context within which it is embedded.

→ years after innovation

↑ % final users

f i g u r e 1 'S-Curve'

Communication channels:

The focus here is on the various communication channels which seem to be most effective either at different times in the diffusion process, or with different categories of potential adopters. 8. Consequences of innovation: Research attempting to assess the potential impacts as innovations diffuse through social systems. (Nutley et al., 2002: 4) Existing policy transfer research has focused on 5, 6 and 7, but has overlooked the other elements. For example, questions as to what innovativeness actually is: the rate of diffusion, the difference between early, middle and late adopters, and the consequences of innovation are yet to be explored in much detail.

The diffusion of innovations literature tends to focus on the rational adoption or rejection of innovation; it captures less well some other dynamics of policy transfer, especially what we might term, after Etzioni (1961), 'coercive' and'ideological' transfer. Etzioni (1961) suggested a threefold model for organizational power in which actors might comply for three possible reasons: first, they strongly believe in the issue or principle, and are positively motivated to adopt any suggested actions (ideological); second, they can be entirely instrumental, and respond where they see some benefit/cost advantage in doing so; finally, they can acquiesce because they have no choice, but are being coerced to comply. We can see immediately how policy transfer might occur under these different conditions -for example poverty reduction strategies required in return for International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans to poorer countries. There can also be movement between one of these aspects and another. Max [START_REF] Weber | The Theory of Social and Economic Organization[END_REF], for example, described the 'routinisation of charisma', suggesting that ideological commitment tends to decay into either instrumental use or tradition over time.

Economists have also observed that policy advice on international trade (for example the innovation of lowering trade barriers, and the movement from import substitution to export as an economic policy for poorer states), either imposed or adopted instrumentally, tends to result in 'herding' over periods of repeated iterations of policy transfer. Herding means that policy adopters converge on a common solution, not always or necessarily the best, because of the mutual influence of policy debates on each other [START_REF] Milner | Learning, Herding or Coercion? The Case of the "Trade Policy Revolution[END_REF][START_REF] Morrissey | Characterizing International Policy Learning[END_REF]. This is in fact the equivalent of path-dependency.

Policy transfer thus interacts with taxonomies and time. Positive or ideological commitment is likely to lead to a rising rate of return: knowledge about the policy in use will grow; attitudes in favour of policy use will spread; there will be wider support across the policy community ('herding', as remarked in the economic literature); and possible spin-offs will come to light. Alternative paths will, as a consequence, retreat. Detailed reviews of the adoption of US 'welfare to work' innovations in the UK reveal all of these processes [START_REF] Duncan | Is there an Emerging Consensus in Making Work Pay Policies?[END_REF].

Where transfer is for instrumental reasons, then the policies may or may not fit depending particularly on the sequencing of several factors. Possibly the most significant is the prior existence of a problem to be solved. The high rate of rejection of OECD advice was the result of a misalignment between the problems identified by OECD staff and the perceptions of local policy actors. There also have to be appropriate instruments in place. For example, a key element in the passage of new members into the EU is the construction of policy instruments that can then convey and support EU policy innovations. This is clear in the period after the accession of Portugal and Spain, described by [START_REF] Guillén | Does Europe Matter? Accession to EU and Social Policy Developments in Recent and New Member States[END_REF] as 'cognitive Europeanisation', and can be seen already in the preparation of the Central and East European states before membership (Manning, 2004b). A curious early example of this was the adoption of British and German social policies by the Bolsheviks in Russia at their 1912 convention, and subsequently implemented after the 1917 revolution [START_REF] George | Socialism, Social Welfare and the Soviet Union[END_REF]. A negative example is the explicit fear of German ideas in the 1930s as potentially 'contaminating' US health policy with instruments that might undermine established interests, and which effectively blocked the inclusion of health care in the 1935 Social Security Act [START_REF] Anderson | The Uneasy Equilibrium: Private and Public Financing of Health Services in the United States, 1875-1965[END_REF]. Instrumental policy transfer will also be affected by local political coalitions and resources.

Finally, there is coercive policy transfer. The OECD is a very mild version of this, which as we have commented has been widely rejected. There are stronger examples. Perhaps the biggest and most sustained example of coercive social policy transfer was the imposition of Soviet policies on republics within the USSR, and the nation states of Central Europe. This resulted in relative uniformity, but also surprisingly persistent unevenness, and a remarkable diversity has reappeared within ten years of the collapse of state socialism (Manning, 2004b). Mechanisms of path-dependence such as the development of coalitions of support (e.g. the communist party), and rising rates of return do not seem to have sustained the old policies. The USA has its share of such examples: the attempt by the northern states to impose citizenship in the south after the civil war, but which was effectively undermined well into the middle of the twentieth century, and for some analysts right up to the current period; the failure to organize health care insurance for the whole of the population, despite repeated federal attempts to do so. The use of coercive policy transfer by the IMF and the World Bank may thus in the longer run be futile.

Conclusion

The development of welfare state analysis has been remarkable in the last 40 years. However, within this work, our understanding of US social policy has not been easy to assimilate or progress. The comparison of states, and the refinement of data based and analytic approaches has enabled the accumulation of knowledge that is the hallmark of the sciences in general, but not easy to undertake in social science. Central to this effort has been the classification of welfare states, but this is difficult as well as fundamental. In biology and cosmology we can find useful examples of the way in which knowledge had accumulated and how we can develop more theoretically informed and dynamic classifications.

A common feature of the way in which all these classifications have been developed has been the incorporation of time and developmental paths into classification. This is true for understanding stellar evolution, plant classification and, I argue, also necessary for welfare state classifications. Indeed the way in which social and political developments unfold over time is particularly important in social policy, since social institutions and processes are highly plastic and mutable. In the case of the USA, this has enabled us to understand that social policies can and have changed, with a rich mix of both progressive and less progressive policies evolving and receding over the decades. In view of the dominance of the USA in world affairs and increasingly in the global transfer of resources, ideas and polices across regions, this more subtle analysis of the nature and performance of US social policy is essential. What types of 'essence and origins' of US social policy can we draw out of this analysis, and how might this relate to the way in which US policies transfer to other states?

The transferability of policies depends on their viability. But policies imported into any welfare state cannot just be grafted on -they will not take effectively and may well be rejected without the right conditions. Holmwood (2000) has suggested, for example, that the tension between UK and mainstream European social policies is far more deeply rooted than a question of policy networks, general social values, or particular crises argued by [START_REF] Daguerre | Neglecting Europe[END_REF]. Similarly, [START_REF] Huber | State Economic and Social Policy in Global Capitalism[END_REF] suggest that economic policy change in Latin America and the Caribbean is not merely crisis driven, but also mediated by local political elites. And again, [START_REF] Orenstein | Mapping the Diffusion of Pension Innovation[END_REF] study of international pension reforms in the same region strongly supports a diffusion of innovation model, with almost no support for crisis origins, and develops the idea of the 'politics of attention' to highlight the idea that regional policy players are the key drivers of policy trends rather than national policy players, which explains the strongly regional pattern to policy change.

The EU accession process, whereby policy instruments and capacities are developed first, suggests a process of 'stealth policy' transfer, in which prior conditions are exported first. For example, [START_REF] Prince | How Social is Social Policy? Fiscal and Market Discourse in North American Welfare States[END_REF] has argued that the USA has been more adept at exporting discursive practices about welfare, such as 'fiscalization' and 'marketization' than specific policies per se, which would be compatible with Orenstein's politics of attention model.

It seems clear, then, that arguments couched in terms of exceptionalism are now dead. Types of welfare state must include an account of their evolution, and increasingly their 'DNA', such as the mechanisms that can account for the paths on which their policies have travelled, the sequences of events involved in their development, and the slower changes shaping their underlying constraints. This is as true of the USA as of any other welfare state.

r É sumÉ

Les Origines et l'essense de la Politique Sociale Américaine: Sur les Taxonomies, le Temps, and les Transfères Nos connaissances de la politique sociale concernant les États-unis n'ont pas été avancées par la classification de 1'État providence qui a dominé 1'analyse de la politique sociale dans les années récentes. Mais la biologie et la cosmologie nous offrent des exemples utiles de la façon dont nous pouvons développés des classifications plus théoriques et dynamiques. Une caractéristique commune a été 1'incorporation du temps, et des chemins de développement en classification. La manière dont les développements sociaux et politiques sont dévoilés au long du temps est particulièrement importante pour la politique sociale et, dans le cas des États-unis nous permet de comprendre que les politiques sociales peuvent et ont changé, avec un mélange riche de politiques progressives et régressives qui ont évolués et reculés pendant des décennies. Prenant en considération la dominance de les États-unis dans les affaires mondiales et dans le transfère internationale des resources, idées et politiques à travers des régions, cette analyse subtile de la nature et de la politique sociale Américaine est essentielle.

resumen Orígenes y Esencia de la Política Social Norteamericana: Sobre Taxonomías, Tiempo y Transferencias Nuestra interpretación de la política social norteamericana no ha avanzado gracias a la clasificación de los estados del bienestar que ha dominado los análisis de política social durante los últimos años. A pesar de ello, en biología y cosmología pueden encontrarse ejemplos útiles para desarrollar clasificaciones major informadas teóricamente y más dinámicas. Una característica común a dichos ejemplos ha sido la incorporación del factor tiempo (diacronía) a la clasificación. La comprensión de cómo el desarrollo social y político se despliega a través del tiempo es particularmente importante en política social. En el case de los Estados Unidos, esto nos ha permitido comprender que las políticas sociale pueden cambiar (y, de hecho, que han cambiado) a lo largo del tiempo, con una interesante mezcla de políticas progresistas y regresivas que se han sucedido a lo largo de las décadas. Teniendo en cuenta la hegemonía de los Estados Unidos en el mundo de los negocios y en la transferencia global de recursos, ideas y políticas, un análisis más sutil de la naturaleza de la política social norteamericana es esencial. Nottingham,NG3 6AA. [email: nick.manning@nottingham.ac.uk]

  K M A N N I N G is Professor of Social Policy and Sociology at the University of Nottingham, UK. He has undertaken a range of comparative and international research on the development of welfare states in Europe. His books include Poverty and Social Exclusion in the New Russia (Ashgate, 2004), and he is an editor of the forthcoming threevolume International Encyclopedia of Social Policy (Routledge, 2006). Please address correspondence to: Professor Nick Manning, Head of Research and University Liaison, Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, Duncan Macmillan House, Porchester Road,