We are pleased to invite you to attend this public workshop, part of the three-year research project "The Moral Economy of Social Assistance" (2023-2026), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Generation of Knowledge Projects). The project aims to draw comparisons between Ireland and Spain regarding the construction of the obligation to help others in the context of public and private assistance programs. The workshop will explore questions such as:

• How do people socially and culturally construct their obligations to aid others?
• What reciprocal relationships exist between assistance beneficiaries and institutions?
• How do assistance beneficiaries construct and express their demands?
• Which values underpin various approaches to welfare and the decision to provide aid?

ABSTRACTS
SESSION 1 (1pm-3pm)

1.Project Presentation: The Moral Economy of Social Assistance (An Ethnographic Approach to the Values and Moral Evaluations Underpinning the Social Obligation to Help Those in Need)

Ángeles Arjona
Principal Investigator.
Professor of Anthropology, University of Almería (Spain)
arjona@ual.es

A majority of citizens in Spain reject cuts in redistributive social policies, contradicting the neoliberal trend based on individual responsibility. However, this majority is reluctant to support redistributive policies for disadvantaged minorities such as immigrants.
Ethnographic studies show that the perception of the merit of ethnic groups or social classes, or both, can be more important than individual merit, contradicting the paradigm of individual merit in market ideology. Children, orphans, single mothers, and those affected by disasters continue to be considered "undeserving" if they belong to groups categorized as such.
Apart from the quantitative data provided by surveys in Spain, we know little about the values and attitudes of citizens regarding the relationship between social inequality, the redistribution of resources, and how this is organized. There is a lack of value studies based on ethnography and participant observation for data collection.
Key questions for studies of this kind—on social welfare, social assistance, and care—are "who should receive what," "who deserves and who doesn't," and "what is fair in terms of assistance exchanges."
This project investigates the shared values and moral evaluations of merit (in a global context and through comparison) that indicate how the "obligation to help those in need" is constructed, which are found in a concentrated manner in the field of social assistance and care.

2. Aid with strings attached: Reciprocity and Charity in the Assistance Programs of a local assembly of the Spanish Red Cross

Francisco Arqueros
Post-doctoral researcher, EMAS Project, University of Almería
Assistant lecturer, Anthropology, ESIC Marketing@Business School, Barcelona
arqueros@ual

NGOs across the globe believe that moving away from charity is empowering. This is considered common sense. Consequently, the Spanish Red Cross strives to create conditions from the top down that enable beneficiaries to break away from their dependency on assistance. According to my ethnographic work in assistance programs at this institution, volunteers and staff focus primarily on establishing a "fair relationship" between the institution and its beneficiaries by: (1) promoting activation as a way to end the cycle of poverty and empower recipients of aid; (2) encouraging beneficiaries to behave like "ethical citizens" who are willing to reciprocate the aid they receive. However, a segment of program users resists these ideas of reciprocation, viewing participation in workshops or employment programs as unfair rather than empowering.
The subjects of this presentation are the staff and volunteers of the Red Cross, who sometimes deliver aid with strings attached, and the beneficiaries of the assistance programs. This presentation is based on fieldwork carried out while volunteering with the Red Cross in 2015 and from May to September 2024.

3. Beyond caring: tracing the rise of ‘de-caring’ as a practice of organisations and policy

Ray Griffin
Lecturer in Strategic Management
South East Technological University
ray.griffin@setu.ie

In this empirically-driven paper, we aspire to introduce the concept of ‘de-caring’, to capture the not-uncommon practices of actively withdrawing an ethic of care in organisations, policy and practice. We situate this effort in the established feminist literature on the ethic of care, discourses on caring organisations, and care within organisations. To explore the theme, we introduce our study on the social life of a policy, drawing on our decade-long ethnography of the Irish government’s Pathway to Work policy. Our study draws on the policy document, launch and attendant materials, before exploring its social action through interviews with service users (n=156, in five waves), flaneurs of dole offices (n=83), a media corpus of all national titles (2012-2022), parliamentary debates and committees, application processes, internal Government department documents released under freedom of information, as well as expert interviews with caseworkers, academics, government department leaders and politicians. Revealed, as both a matter of policy and practice, is the withdrawal of care— a practice we identify as de-caring of organisations, working through Joan Tronto’s five stages of caring. Finally, we suggest that caring and de-caring movements are an important analytical lens to explore organisations.

4. Residence-based conditionality and Mobile EU Citizens’ Social Rights in Ireland and beyond

Majka Ryan
Associate Professor of Work and Employment Studies
Kemmy Business School
University of Limerick
Majka.Ryan@ul.ie

Based on the empirical findings from a case study in Ireland and a comparative analysis of the implications of residence-based conditionality for mobile EU citizens in the UK, Germany and Sweden, this presentation examines the role of residency-status in limiting mobile EU citizens’msocial rights across different welfare regimes. Built around the notion of the mobile EU citizen as a self-responsible labour-active worker, the EU Citizens’ Rights Directive 2004/38/EC discriminates against vulnerable labour-inactive groups by disregarding the needs of children, ill, elderly and victims of domestic violence as well as certain low-income precarious jobseekers and employees. Thus, fair treatment is extended to those who are socio-economically well off.
The national contextualisation of the Directive and its residency rules are being manipulated by some nation states to discourage the ‘unwanted type of migrants’ from staying and in some jurisdictions this is forcing groups of people to the margins of society and destitution. Moreover, mobile EU citizens’ social rights are impeded not only for those who do not have the EU’s right-to-reside but also those who have it. The latter practice is in direct violation with the supranational EU laws and the protections guaranteed to mobile EU citizens by the principle of free movement and equal treatment and non-discrimination. I argue that the Member States’ resistance against uncontrolled migration accommodated by the EU principle of free movement highlights the issues of distancing from the Union and heightened nationalism, and points to a rather bleak future of EU social citizenship for mobile EU citizens. Moreover, what the research from Ireland and other jurisdictions shows is that official rights, be they supranational or local, when translated into practice are shaped by divergent political, organisational and decision-making actors consequently leading to an uneven distribution of substantive rights and unequal outcomes for different groups of people, disproportionately affecting those who must prove their deservingness.

SESSION 2 (3.15pm-5pm)

5. Who deserves to care? An exploration of recent care related policy reforms in the Irish social protection system.

Fiona Dukelow
Senior Lecturer
School of Applied Social Studies
University College, Cork
f.dukelow@ucc.ie

This paper focuses on the ambivalent status of informal care and those who are informal carers in the Irish welfare state and social protection policy. Ireland is no exception when it comes to paradoxical treatment of care and carers as both reified yet denied adequate support. The particularities of the paradox in the Irish case are played out in the mix between the gendered legacies of conservativism and familism crossed with liberal welfare institutions that shapes who deserves and who does not deserve support for care. These dynamics of deservingness and undeservingness are examined in the paper with reference to two episodes of care related policy reforms/proposed reforms in the last decade. The first can be characterized as a roll back of care evident in the retrenchment of the One Parent Family Payment in the early to mid-2010s. The second concerns the more recent political interest in rolling out support for care and carers which is associated with improving payment conditions and consideration of more wholesale reform of the means tested basis for Carer’s Allowance. Using a mix of data sources, including interviews with single parents and Dáil debates, the paper will analyse these two episodes to examine contrasting constructions of deservingness in relation to care and the contrasting repertoires used to resist or promote policy reforms.

6. Experiencing Behavioural Conditionality and Sanctions

Kenny Doyle
Waterford Institute of Technology
kenny.doyle@setu.ie

This paper will examine the lived experience of being unemployed in Ireland during the roll out of a range of new Active Welfare Policy measures introduced in 2012 as part of the Pathways to Work (PTW) scheme. This paper will focus on how the introduction of more stringent measures of behavioural conditionality enforced by the threat of sanctions influenced the experience of being unemployed. The paper thus examines emergent practices of the use of sanctions as a means of eliciting job seeking behaviours. Welfare policy under PTW justifies itself using punitive logics which individualise responsibility for unemployment and posits unemployed people as being in need of guidance into employment using an array of positive and negative incentives. In practice this happens through a variety of institutional and bureaucratic practices which range from filling out forms to group engagement sessions to one on one meetings with caseworkers. This research captures the ways in which the experience of being unemployed under PTW involves being drawn into a system of close regulation which often acts to engender a series of process pains (Feely 1979) where unemployed people lose many aspects of their agency and self-determination. This research used semi-structured in depth qualitative interviews with 33 participants as its main method. Where possible, repeat interviews were carried out in an attempt to capture how attitudes evolved throughout the process of engaging with the unemployment services.

7. Categories which leave a Mark: On NEETs, Scarring and the stigmatisation of the unemployed.

Tom Boland
Senior Lecturer
Department of Sociology and Criminology
University College Cork
tom.boland@ucc.ie

Drawing inspiration from Agamben’s genealogy of kategoria as accusation and Skeggs theorisation of class as an inscription, this paper examines how social policy terms stigmatise the unemployed. While popular culture is rife with negative stereotypes of the unemployed, from spongers and skivers to chavs and welfare queens, the purportedly neutral terminology of social policy also can serve to stigmatise. There are more egregious examples, such as ‘dependency culture’ or the ‘under-class’ generated by right-wing political thinkers, but this paper focuses on accepted mainstream terms which have even found their way into economics and statistical vocabularies, NEETs and ‘scarring’. In the case of NEETs, an increasingly wide range of young people are defined in terms of what they are not doing and do not have – education or employment. The concept of unemployment scarring marks individuals as risky and vulnerable subjects, in need of intervention and incentivisation to forestall future deterrioration. Such terms stigmatise the unemployed in political discourse, preventing resistance to the abrogation of rights and entitlements through contractual logics of double marketisation. Furthermore, the implementation of welfare conditionality tends to drive down the reservation wages of the unemployed, leading to the validation of the statistical constructs of NEETs and Scarring. Beyond generating qualitative research on the experiences of the unemployed subject to these categories, unpicking the genealogy of how these terms became inscribed as normal or neutral serves to challenge the machinery of stigma, in Tyler’s phrase.

Organised by EMAS, "The Moral Economy of Social Assistance" (2023-2026), a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, at CEMYRI (Study Centre of Migrations and Intercultural Relations, University of Almería, Spain); and Department of Sociology, Maynooth University

Workshop Coordinators: Prof. Colin Coulter (MU) and Francisco Arqueros (UAL)