New Publication in Special Issue on Labour and Welfare in the Global South

In his contribution to this special issue of Global Social Policy, Christof Lammer examines social policy as a knowledge process and shows how the minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao) in China and its relationship to labour changes not only through human actors’ intentions but through the sociotechnical materiality of bureaucratic targeting methods.

The relationship between labour and social policy is at the heart of the social question. Scholars often treat this link as either a causal relation out there or a conceptual connection in policy makers’ minds. This article examines its sociotechnical materiality instead. Christof Lammer follows political anthropologists who ask how bureaucrats practice policy and scholars of science and technology studies who explore how social and technical aspects are interrelated in knowledge processes.

China studies has suggested that the minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao) was originally designed as a market-oriented response to transformations of labour such as mass layoffs, peasant proletarianisation and associated unrest but later revamped to only combat extreme poverty – similar to earlier forms of social assistance during the Mao era. Ethnographic insights into dibao policy in a village in Sichuan show how its designed links to labour were erased and transformed through different methods of bureaucratic targeting, as well as expectations about the bureaucratic ability to know. For a time, dibao was even integrated into alternative rural development projects aimed at decommodification.

Studying social policy as a knowledge process uncovers how its sociotechnical links to labour reconfigure it as an answer to the social question.

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Lammer, Christof. 2024. „Social Policy as Knowledge Process: How Its Sociotechnical Links to Labour Reconfigure the Social Question.“ Global Social Policy 24(2): 166–184, https://doi.org/10.1177/14680181231210158.

Published in the Special Issue: “Reconfiguring Labour and Welfare in the Global South: How the Social Question is Framed as Market Participation”, edited by Minh Nguyen, Helle Rydstrom and Jingyu Mao.

Christof Lammer is a social anthropologist based at the Department of Society, Knowledge and Politics at the University of Klagenfurt. Currently he is a fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin’s Centre for Advanced Studies inherit – heritage in transformation.