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Introduction and Background to the SoP Approach Read chapter Read first chapter

2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

4. Insights from Operationalizing the Systems of Provision Approach

Authors : Kate Bayliss, Ben Fine

Published in: A Guide to the Systems of Provision Approach

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This chapter is concerned with applications of the SoP approach in practice and is oriented around the themes of social policy and social reproduction. The chapter first explores some of the contributions of the SoP approach to wider areas of scholarship, including consumption studies and understandings of social policy. The chapter then turns to explore more specific SoP applications focusing on selected areas of everyday life covering housing, water, health services and ‘fast’ fashion. The cases are mostly with reference to UK but with some case study material from South Africa, and the fashion case study relates to global supply chains. The chapter highlights the diversity in the materiality of what is provided, and the SoPs by which each of these reaches consumers or end users, across sectors and locations. This diversity across these cases clearly demonstrates that the drivers of consumption cannot be reduced to simple assumptions that are universally applicable. Furthermore, in the act of ‘consuming’, the consumer engages in an extensive chain of social relations but in ways of which they can be mostly unaware. The SoP approach unveils what is generally hidden from the consumer at the point of consumption.

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previous chapter Understanding Material Cultures
next chapter A SoP Approach to Understanding Food Consumption
Footnotes
1
See Bayliss and Fine (Eds.) (2008) for the putative rethink on privatization by the World Bank.
 
2
For economics imperialism, see Fine and Milonakis (2009) and, most recently in context of interdisciplinarity, Fine (2019).
 
3
On Marcuse as the theorist par excellence of one-dimensioning (not one-dimensional) man, see Fine (2017a).
 
4
For the distinction between horizontal and vertical (in the context of consumption), see earlier chapters. In brief, the vertical follows provisioning from production through to consumption for specific goods, whereas the horizontal emphasizes cross-society factors such as utility, emulation, distinction, psychological factors, gender and so on.
 
5
For critique of mainstream economics on consumption, see Fine (1996a, 1998). Further, sociological concepts such as conspicuous consumption, emulation and distinction tend to be overgeneralized and presence needs to both commodity- and context-specific and rooted in the conditions of provisioning and corresponding cultures. See Fine (1994) on Veblen for example. Fine and Leopold (1993) and Fine (2002) critically synthesize from across the social sciences.
 
6
Trickle-down is another concept that has been criticised from the SoP perspective, and even contrasted with trickle-up as with, for example, denim jeans—from workwear to fashion (see below), with elites not necessarily leading fashion nor sources of demand.
 
7
In the USA, there has been an interesting inversion of the meaning of consumerism, inspired by Ralph Nader—from hedonism to activism.
 
8
For a child in apartheid South Africa, it was famously ‘two dogs and freedom’.
 
9
To some degree, the preoccupation with false/true needs and the trope of achieving satisfaction or more in alienated contemporary capitalism has given way to ‘happiness’ research. This has been broached through the SoP approach, especially in addressing critically the finding that reported happiness did not tend to decline over the course of the global financial crisis. This is seen to be a consequence of heavily reduced aspirations as the target for achieving happiness, the analytical remedy to which is to examine how material culture of provisioning governs what is provided and how it is perceived through the SoP prism. See Boffo, Brown & Spencer (2013, 2017) and also Bayliss, Churchill, Fine & Robertson (2016).
 
10
For an account, drawing upon the SoP approach, and its 10Cs, of how ethics might be constructed in critical response to mainstream economics, see Fine (2013).
 
11
See earlier discussion of housing where what can be meant by entitlement/capability is irreducibly attached to forms of tenure and how they are provided. For corresponding critique of the entitlement approach to famines in part from a SoP perspective, see Fine (1997). And see Gough (2019) in bringing together the role that might be played by the SoP approach, together with ethics, sustainability and capabilities, in providing for universal basic services.
 
12
See Fine (2012, 2014, 2016, 2017b). Note that the SoP approach has been influential in research programmes on social policy for United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD)—synthesizing the developmental welfare state with the SoP approach, Fine (2016)—as well as elsewhere, in education for example and in understanding the incidence and impact of PPPs, Fine (2020b), and for economic infrastructure in the iBuild project, http://​sure-infrastructure.​leeds.​ac.​uk/​ibuild/​ The SoP approach even found its way into the UK Treasury’s way of valuing infrastructure (to support value added other than through the market), in reference to systems of infrastructure provision, see HM Treasury (2015, 11).
 
13
For an account drawing upon the SoP approach, with some emphasis upon how to understand the ‘moral historical’ determination of the value of labour power, see Fine (2020a).
 
14
And the same applies to provisioning by age and disability (Fine 2018), with disability in particular at the forefront of austerity measures. See also Ryan (2019).
 
15
Empirical investigations of such shifting (gendered) norms began in the SoP approach with consumer durables in light of their putative impact on (female) labour market participation covering, for example, cars, washing machines, central heating, dishwashers, videos, microwaves, telephones, and so on, see Chap. 1.
 
16
These were part of a broader comparative FESSUD study of housing SoPs also including Portugal, Poland and Turkey, see Robertson (2016).
 
17
See Wilson and Barton (2020).
 
19
A SoP-inspired study of Turkish housing, for example, reveals the facilitating role played by the state in stimulating both public and private housing provision, see Unsal (2017).
 
20
See Wilson and Barton (2020).
 
21
For the evolving relationship across World Bank scholarship, ideology and policy—through Washington and post-Washington Consensus and beyond—see Bayliss, Fine & Van Waeyenberge (Eds.) (2011) and Fine, Johnson, Santos & Van Waeyenberge (2016). On housing in particular, see Van Waeyenberge (2018).
 
22
See MERG (1993), which was commissioned in 1992 by Nelson Mandela but ruthlessly abandoned by the end of 1993, and Padayachee and van Niekerk (2019) for a full account of the abrupt discarding of the policies formulated in the ANC’s Freedom Charter and beyond. The framing of social and economic infrastructure provision in the MERG Report through the SoP approach was made explicit in a draft prepared for a policymaking workshop to be held in June, 1996, but it was not delivered. See Fine (1996b) for text of the presentation.
 
23
For the absence of any evidence that the new public sector management has delivered any greater efficiency, see Hood and Dixon (2015).
 
24
This section gives a brief overview of developments in the SoP for health services in England. Privatization and financialization are evident in numerous aspects of health services, including in hospital construction and maintenance via the private finance initiative, in GP and dental practices and in care homes. See Bayliss, Fine, Robertson & Saad Filho (2020) for more details.
 
25
Some African countries attempted to ban the import of second-hand clothes in an effort to strengthen their domestic industries. In the case of Rwanda, this has escalated into a trade battle with the USA (John 2018).
 
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Metadata
Title
Insights from Operationalizing the Systems of Provision Approach
Authors
Kate Bayliss
Ben Fine
Copyright Year
2020
Book
A Guide to the Systems of Provision Approach

Print ISBN: 978-3-030-54142-2

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-54143-9

Copyright Year: 2020

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54143-9_4