Personal Lives & Social Policy

Personal Lives & Social Policy



Personal Lives & Social Policy

Introduction

The central question that this paper addresses is, Personal Lives of people and Social Policy in British context. Still better would be to rephrase the question like “How the social movements do affects the social policy outcomes?” (Bagguley, 2002). The poor are widely perceived as uninvolved and virtually powerless, and there is plenty of empirical evidence that most measures of political participation and influence decrease as socio-economic status decreases.

However, the needs of the poor do get attention from policy-makers. The federal government currently spends a substantial, albeit declining, amount on programs directed at their needs. Do the poor speak for themselves in demanding this attention, or do others speak for them? Does government action aimed at the poor flow directly from concern for their needs, or do their needs get met as a byproduct of other concerns?

These issues are addressed by examining what might seem to be the most improbable mechanism for the expression of the needs of the poor—the interest group system. Most of the evidence suggests that mobilising any collection of citizens in an organised group that can exercise sustained pressure on the national government is a formidable task, requiring organisers to amass substantial financial resources and to overcome the potent psychological barriers to participation implicit in what Mancur Olson identified as the “free rider” problem (Alberoni, 2000). Since the poor are, by definition, a group possessing few of the resources necessary for group formation, their lack of representation in the interest group system would seem to be so “over-determined” as to require little investigation. One could safely assume that they have little or no representation and move on to another question. (Bagguley, 2002)History of Social Movements

The history of social movements is generally treated in two separate divisions. We know something about the ancient and medieval ones: slave revolts, social heresies and sects, peasant risings, and the like. (Bagguley, 2002)To say that we possess a ''history'' of them is perhaps misleading, for in the past they have been treated largely as a series of episodes, punctuating the general story of humanity, though historians have disagreed on their importance in the historical process and still debate their precise relationship to it. (Bagguley, 2002)So far as modern times are concerned such agitations have been regarded by all, except anthropologists who are obliged to deal with pre-capitalist or imperfectly capitalist societies, simply as ''forerunners'' or odd survivals. On the other hand ''modern'' social movements, that is to say those of Western Europe from the later 18th century, and those of increasingly large sectors of the world in subsequent periods, have normally been treated according to a long-established and reasonably sound scheme. (Ackerman, 2001)

Fortunately, the sociological community has long since emerged from the bog of despair concerning collective behaviour and social movement. The change of thought is evident in the progression of terminology from mob to crowd to collective behaviour, mass movement, and finally, social ...