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Book part
Publication date: 1 June 2011

Alain Clément

The first Poor Laws date back to the 16th century. One would have to go back to 1495 and 1531 to locate the first legislation (displaying above all a repressive character), in…

Abstract

The first Poor Laws date back to the 16th century. One would have to go back to 1495 and 1531 to locate the first legislation (displaying above all a repressive character), in which vagabonds were punished, all public begging was outlawed and the poor were required to participate in public works. But an initial 1535 provision stipulated that the local authorities were required to provide for the subsistence of the sick poor. The laws of 1572, 1575, 1597 and 1601 (Tawney & Power, 1924, Vol. 2, pp. 328–329, 346–354) marked a decisive step towards the extension of assistance to the ‘deserving poor’ within the context of the parish. Throughout the whole of the 17th century, the coercive aspect continued to dominate. The law on place of residence (the Act of Settlement and Removal) of 1662 added new constraints to the old provisions attaching the poor to their respective parishes. The creation of workhouses beginning in the mid-17th century (via parliamentary decrees in 1647 and 1649) represented the most important stage in the establishment of these repressive measures. The objective was to make the poor more useful and less costly to society; the 18th century would see an increase in the number of workhouses, reaching a total of approximately 200 by the end of the century. Beginning in 1722, the parish authorities were able to create workhouses and conclude agreements with the central government for the upkeep of the poor; those who refused to participate in these institutions lost all rights to assistance.

Details

Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78052-006-3

Book part
Publication date: 5 July 2005

Larry Patriquin

The system of government-run poor relief in England, dating from the sixteenth century, was not replicated in Europe until the mid- to late 1800s. In order to understand why, poor

Abstract

The system of government-run poor relief in England, dating from the sixteenth century, was not replicated in Europe until the mid- to late 1800s. In order to understand why, poor relief must be placed within the socio-economic framework of capitalism, a system of surplus appropriation which originated in the novel class relations of English agriculture. The English way of dealing with poverty was distinctive and this distinctiveness was rooted in the unparalleled expansion of capitalism in that country in the early modern era. Assistance to the poor in England emerged alongside a qualitative social change, wherein an economy rooted in custom was transformed into one based on the competitive social relations of capitalism. The main conclusion of this article is that the welfare state was not a product of industrialization but of the class structure of agrarian capitalism.

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The Capitalist State and Its Economy: Democracy in Socialism
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-176-7

Abstract

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Rich Crime, Poor Crime: Inequality and the Rule of Law
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-83909-822-2

Article
Publication date: 21 October 2013

Stefania Servalli

Within the interface between power and charity, the purpose of this paper is to enhance an understanding of the role of charities in the administration of poor in local government…

1331

Abstract

Purpose

Within the interface between power and charity, the purpose of this paper is to enhance an understanding of the role of charities in the administration of poor in local government and to explore how accounting operates in such a context. In this investigation, the paper considers accounting, referring to both financial and non-financial information, inserted in a complex of technologies accomplishing the “government of poverty”.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper is based on a historical study referring to the case of MIA, an Italian charity, investigated during the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries, adopting Foucault's “governmentality” framework in a diachronic perspective. This approach, coordinating views coming from Anglo-Foucauldian scholars with alternative Foucault effects expressed in Dean's works, represents a novelty of this investigation.

Findings

The paper shows the interface of power (municipality) and charity (MIA) in the “government of poverty”, in a context of ancien regime, pointing out how this interplay was a key element within the “discourse of poor”. The pivotal function of MIA as an “agency of police” and the constitutive role of accounting as a technology of “government of poverty”, representing a social practice able to allow the preservation of the social equilibrium, emerge.

Research limitations/implications

The research is based on a single case study and it shows the need for both comparative and interdisciplinary analysis in order to increase an understanding of the interface of power and charity in ancien regime contexts, as well as in contemporary situations of crisis or emergencies.

Originality/value

For the first time in the accounting history literature, the work presents an extension of “governmentality” analysis into the domain of the “government of poor” through a series of Municipality Orders and their operationalisation by a charity, which adopted accounting to realise a control on people and resources contributing to reach local government equilibrium aims. The work also offers a reference within the contemporary accounting literature in relation to the debate about the role of charities or similar non-profit organizations in the context of the current financial crisis affecting the world, or in situations of emergencies.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 26 no. 8
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 8 May 2009

Andy Holden, Warwick Funnell and David Oldroyd

This paper aims to examine the Victorian attitude to the poor by focussing on the health care provided at a large provincial hospital, the Newcastle Infirmary.

1986

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to examine the Victorian attitude to the poor by focussing on the health care provided at a large provincial hospital, the Newcastle Infirmary.

Design/methodology/approach

The archives of the Newcastle Infirmary are reviewed alongside the local trade directories. These primary sources are examined in conjunction with the writings of contemporary social theorists on poverty.

Findings

At a time when poverty was seen as a sin, an act against God, it would be easy to assume that the Victorians faced no moral dilemma in dismissing the poor, particularly what were seen as the “undeserving poor”, out of hand. Yet, the paper observes how accounting was used both to persuade the wealthier citizens to contribute funds and to enable the hospital to exercise compassion in treating paupers despite this being prohibited under the hospital's rules. Such a policy conflicted with the dominant utilitarian view of society, which emphasised the twin pillars of economic expediency and self‐help.

Research limitations/implications

More case studies are needed of other hospitals to ascertain how typical the Newcastle Infirmary was of the voluntary hospital sector as a whole.

Originality/value

Although many histories of British hospitals exist and some have examined how accounting was used to manage within these institutions, the concern has not been with accounting as a moral practice.

Details

Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 22 no. 4
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0951-3574

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 23 October 2009

Alice Mah

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the justifying arguments of various Birmingham organisations between 1870 and 1914 in classifying and treating the unemployed. Using a…

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the justifying arguments of various Birmingham organisations between 1870 and 1914 in classifying and treating the unemployed. Using a capability approach, the paper will examine how employment policies in Birmingham during this period promoted or limited capabilities of work, life and voice. Finally, implications for labour market policies today will be discussed.

Design/methodology/approach

The theoretical framework for this paper will draw on the capability approach to a person's well‐being, developed by Amartya Sen and on theoretical and empirical developments of the capability approach by other authors such as Bonvin and Salais. This paper is based on historical archival research and analysis.

Findings

Birmingham was an exemplar of municipal social reform in late nineteenth century England, with the development of a range of public services such as education, electricity and public transport. However, the city's vision of civic reform was closely connected to the Liberal market logic of individual responsibility, and moral judgements of the unemployed served to multiply the categories and punitive treatments of the “undeserving”, separating the valid from the invalid citizen.

Originality/value

This case study of municipal employment policies in Birmingham at the turn of the twentieth century demonstrates the implications of moral judgements, classifications and treatments of the unemployed for people's capabilities in work and life, drawing connections to discourses of responsibility and citizenship today.

Details

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, vol. 29 no. 11/12
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0144-333X

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 8 April 2015

J. Daniel Hammond

This paper compares the contexts of the writing of T. R. Malthus’s first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798); its reception by William Godwin, to whom the…

Abstract

This paper compares the contexts of the writing of T. R. Malthus’s first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798); its reception by William Godwin, to whom the Essay was addressed; its interpretation by naturalists Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace; and its interpretation by modern commentators Kenneth Boulding and A. M. C. Waterman. The analysis helps explain how an essay that was written to defend social and economic institutions from critiques in utopian visions associated with the French Revolution came to be regarded as a model predicting overpopulation and exhaustion of natural resources.

Details

A Research Annual
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78441-857-1

Keywords

Abstract

X = multiple interpretations

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Documents on Government and the Economy
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78052-827-4

Book part
Publication date: 17 July 2006

John G. Richardson

This chapter proposes a reconceptualization of educational formalization. By formalization I broadly mean when school attendance ceases to be voluntary, and state authority is…

Abstract

This chapter proposes a reconceptualization of educational formalization. By formalization I broadly mean when school attendance ceases to be voluntary, and state authority is elevated over local controls. Although these twin processes tend to parallel each other, there is sufficient variation that while both conditions may obtain, countries can be located on a distribution measuring centralized to decentralized control over educational dimensions (see e.g., Baker & Letendre, 2005, p. 139). Very different social origins may indeed matter as the primary source of subsequent centralized or decentralized controls, and yet countries may adopt broadly similar forms of national authority in spite of very different social origins. The former takes the more historicist strategy, concentrating on national differences that elaborate into different organizational outcomes (see especially Vaughan & Archer, 1971; Archer, 1979). The latter argues that transnational, global forces exert defining influences on countries, producing educational patterns that are visible at the global level and are independent of national differences (see especially Boli, Ramirez, & Meyer, 1985; Ramirez & Boli, 1987; Astiz, Wiseman, & Baker, 2002; Werum & Baker, 2004). Nonetheless, there is no straightforward causality that links social origins to formalization, for it is clear that each strategy needs and incorporates elements of the other. At minimum, the characterization of an educational system as centralized or decentralized remains conceptually risky. This chapter suggests an alternative conceptualization that may lighten this conceptual risk, and bridge the distance between the historicist and institutional approaches to comparative educational systems.

Details

The Impact of Comparative Education Research on Institutional Theory
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-76231-308-2

Book part
Publication date: 23 December 2010

Alan O'Day

Butt can be placed within the framework of what George Boyce (1995, pp. 18–19) terms colonial patriotism. Butt's analyses of Ireland's economy and development during the next…

Abstract

Butt can be placed within the framework of what George Boyce (1995, pp. 18–19) terms colonial patriotism. Butt's analyses of Ireland's economy and development during the next years brought together the several strands that marked out an Ireland of citizens, an Ireland of sort which has emerged at the turn of the present millennium. What were the influences on Butt and what is his place in the development of political economy? His position is best characterised as eclectic and distinct from the other early holders of the Whately Chair. Drawing upon but not endorsing classical political economy, Adam Smith, Longfield, Jean-Baptiste Say and others, Butt defies pigeonholing. His economic analysis emerged slowly, and initially, there was little hint that he would expand on Longfield's position which essentially was a theory of profit (McGovern, 2000, p. 5). However, Butt moved beyond Longfield's analysis and whereas the latter remained in the classical tradition on free trade, he did not. He expanded Longfield's approach that crucial to the determination of the price of goods was the importance of applying a unit of whatever resource to its marginal use, concluding that the factors of production were remunerated in relation to the utility they created in their least efficient, marginal employment (Boylan & Foley, 2003, Vol. 2, p. 10). His importance, it has been observed, was in drawing attention to the potential resource mobilisation and distribution aspects of protection and in assessing the benefits and weaknesses of protection in relation to the complexity of specific circumstances (Boylan and Foley, 2003, Vol. 3, p. 5). Butt's Whatley lectures have received most attention although it will be suggested that certain of his other writings were as important or even more significant as indicative of his ideas on political economy. In his first Whatley lecture (Butt, 1837a), appropriating the title ‘Introduction’, Butt outlined somewhat verbosely the scope of what he intended to address and adopted the high ground about the purpose of political economy. He declared it was ‘to teach certain truths connected with the social condition of man – it attempts to explain the nature of the causes by which is brought about that singular machinery of society by which Providence has set man to supply each other's wants, and thus receive and confer a mutual benefit’ (1837a, p. 23). Butt addressed the question of production and the creation of ‘utility’. Employing the illustration of cotton stockings, Butt demonstrated the complex interchange required to produce even the most mundane of articles (1837a, pp. 25–26). ‘When you purchase your pair of cotton stockings’, he noted, ‘you are positively commanding for your own personal comfort and accommodation, not only the services of thousands of your cotemporary fellow creatures, but the accumulated results of the labours of generations that have long since passed away’ (1837a, p. 28). Thus, he maintained, political economy ‘teaches the laws which regulate the production, distribution and consumption of wealth’ (1837a, p. 30).

Details

English, Irish and Subversives among the Dismal Scientists
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-061-3

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