Overview
- Winner of The Richard Titmuss Book Award 2020, awarded by The Social Policy Association
- Provides the historical context for the current debate on incapacity benefits and conditionality
- Offers new insights into the different forms that conditionality can take in benefit decision making
- Examines the gendered nature of decision making on incapacity benefits
Part of the book series: Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies (PSLS)
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About this book
This book uses previously unknown archive materials to explore the meaning of the term ‘incapable of work’ over a hundred years (1911–present). Nowadays, people claiming disability benefits must undergo medical tests to assess whether or not they are capable of work. Media reports and high profile campaigns highlight the problems with this system and question whether the process is fair. These debates are not new and, in this book, Jackie Gulland looks at similar questions about how to assess people’s capacity for work from the beginning of the welfare state in the early 20th century. Amongst many subject areas, she explores women’s roles in the domestic sphere and how these were used to consider their capacity for work in the labour market. The book concludes that incapacity benefit decision making is really about work: what work is, what it is not, who should do it, who should be compensated when work does not provide a sufficient income and who should be exempted from any requirement to look for it.
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Keywords
Table of contents (10 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“Gender, Work and Social Control: A Century of Disability Benefits is a carefully researched book that will be of interest to Critical Social Policy readers. Its strength lies in the extensive use of appeal hearing notes and decisions to bring to life the struggles over an extended period that sick and disabled people have had in accessing incapacity benefits. In doing so, it demonstrates various means through which the state and, under the National Insurance Act 1911 its proxies, have sought to limit the number of incapacity benefit claims by denying claimants were incapacitated for wage-labour, but, in contrast, were malingering, hiding their displeasure for wage-labour behind claims of sickness and disablement” (Critical Social Policy, Chris Grover, Lancaster University, UK)
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Jackie Gulland is Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her work is inter-disciplinary and crosses the fields of social policy, sociology, social work, history and law. She has held a series of lectureships and research posts in higher education, crossing the disciplines of social policy, sociology and law, with a continuing focus on socio-legal issues and research methods.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Gender, Work and Social Control
Book Subtitle: A Century of Disability Benefits
Authors: Jackie Gulland
Series Title: Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-60564-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Law and Criminology, Law and Criminology (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Limited 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-137-60562-7Published: 18 July 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-60564-1Published: 17 July 2019
Series ISSN: 2947-9274
Series E-ISSN: 2947-9282
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVII, 241
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Gender, Sexuality and Law, Human Rights and Crime , Disability Studies, Gender Studies, Social Work and Community Development, Ethnicity, Class, Gender and Crime