Research Note: Decommodification and the worlds of welfare revisited

By C. Bambra. 2006

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper critically examines the theoretical, empirical and methodological limitations of Esping-Andersen’s Three Worlds of Welfare decommodification index. It highlights an, to date, overlooked error in Esping-Andersen’s original calculations that led to the incorrect positioning of three borderline countries (Japan, the UK and Ireland) and resulted in the empirically erroneous composition of the Three Worlds of Welfare. Updated decommodification data from 1998/99 are used to explore the influential role of variable weighting in the creation of the three worlds typology. Finally, the paper revisits the decommodification index to examine how the relationships between the countries have changed since 1980. The paper concludes by questioning the extent to which the Three Worlds of Welfare still exist, and indeed, at least in empirical terms, the extent to which they ever did.

Subfields: Finance, General Health Professions, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f1c8dfb0f7636d49c12cd12480cb75ebe55e33f9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Finance

1. A. Barrientos
2. M. Powell
3. Maria Gjølberg
4. C. Bambra

In General Health Professions

1. M. Powell
2. A. Barrientos
3. Maria Gjølberg
4. C. Bambra
5. C. Jensen

In Political Science and International Relations

1. M. Powell
2. A. Barrientos
3. Maria Gjølberg
4. C. Bambra
5. C. Jensen
6. Steve Rogowski

Citations in the corpus

• Health Status and the Worlds of Welfare (2006, methodology): “Esping-Andersen’s methodology has been widely critiqued (Kangas, 1994; Ragin, 1994; Shalev, 1996; Fawcett and Papadopoulos, 1997; Pitruzzello, 1999; Bambra, 2006) and the use of cluster analysis has also suggested that there could be four or five ‘worlds of welfare’ (Pitruzello, 1999: 23–50).”
• The origin of corporate social responsibility: global forces or national legacies? (2009, background): “Second, his index has been criticized for the lack of Mediterranean category (Arts and Gelissen, 2002) and misplacement of several countries (Bambra, 2006).”
• Labour markets and the (hyphenated) welfare regime in Latin America (2009, background): “Bambra (2006, 2007) provides a recent examination of these two concepts and their empirical counterparts.”
• Defamilisation and welfare state regimes: a cluster analysis (2007, methodology): “Previous attempts at welfare state classification, especially in terms of defamilisation (Esping-Andersen, 1999; Bambra, 2006), have been undermined by the limited methods used (Bambra, 2006) and the prominent reliance upon eyeballing the data (Gough, 2001) and fitting it to a priori assumptions…”
• An Audit of the Welfare Modelling Business (2011, methodology): “There are problems with operationalising and measuring de-commodification (Bambra; Scruggs and Allan 2006) and defamililism (Bambra 2006).”