Deservingness in Welfare Policy and Practice

Book excerpt: This book discusses and illustrates how deservingness can be approached as a discursively and rhetorically accomplished phenomenon having varied empirical consequences with regard to welfare, poverty, class and care arrangements. Providing a thorough analysis of how deservingness representations are generated in the twenty-first century by focusing on the analysis of discourse and rhetoric of policymakers, reality TV participants, frontline workers and unemployed individuals, it shows that different actors actively participate in constructing representations of deservingness through which variety of political, practical and social implications and objectives are achieved and performed. The book addresses key themes such as: • What kinds of rhetorical and discursive tactics can be associated with un/deservingness? • How deservingness is accomplished as a speech act? • How different actors such as policymakers, reality TV programme participants, frontline workers and individual citizens participate in constructing un/deservingness? • What kind of practical implications and consequences deservingness representations have for policy making, frontline work and research This book will be of interest to all scholars and students of social policy, social work, sociology, social psychology, political science and media studies.