Social policy: scholarly articles

This paper is an attempt in theorizing the welfare state institutional regimes. It is argued that, e.g., the social security schemes are concievable as more or less convincing institutional representations of reality; they can be read as a sort of "texts". Now, as a consequence of coming a "chaotic" post-modern era, bringing about a simultaneous growth of mass character and individualization of social life, the "realism", or "cogency" of these representations are challenged. The way to an institutional universalism has become complicated. Social security claims based on the status of "citizen" on one hand and on the status of "employee" on the other hand need to be reconciled in some way. Two fundamental ways of mixing these two statuses and related technologies - i.e. two ways of keeping the universal character of basic social security schemes - are discussed.