Over the past three decades social science has brought institutional change into focus. The debate on the transformation of the welfare state is part of it. Whether the welfare state has been dismantled or not under the impact of economic globalization in particular, that has been the question. In order to develop concepts to grasp overall the transformation of the welfare state, this paper examines, first, the concept of the great transformation, which was originally developed by Karl Polanyi and has been in recent years applied by Mark Blyth, Eiichi Kato, and others to the era of globalization since the 1980s. Blyth argues that Polanyi's double movement, which explains the great transformation and is defined as disembedding market (marketization) and labor's counter movement against it that uses state to protect themselves, is "the motor of institutional change," and that the contemporary neoliberal economic order can be seen as another double movement, but in reverse, which attempts once again to disembed market from society and to roll back the institution of the welfare state. Kato also defines globalization since the 1980s as another great transformation and argues that its essence is privatization, historical meaning of which is that it has functioned as a propelling power to dismantle the welfare state. Although there are many coinages for post-welfare state, Kato says that Neil Gilbert's "enabling state" best expresses a paradigm shift of state. While Kato's overall view, including his stage theory based on Kozo Uno's, is distinguished, I think that the competition state, which was originally developed by Philip G. Cerny and has been used by scholars such as Ronan Palan, Tore Fougner, and others, seems to be better concept than the enabling state, because the concept of the competition state expresses overall strategy of state and the zeitgeist in the era of globalization and includes the concept of the enabling state. Therefore, this paper examines, second, the concept, limitations and potential crises of the competition state. Furthermore, it takes a look at historically specific nature of "competition" in the era of globalization, which is pointed out by Fougner. Third, the transformation of the French welfare state is examined. The French political economy, which had been characterized by dirigisme (state interventionism), has changed rapidly into a market-oriented one since the mid-1980s. According to Jonah D. Levy, however, the French state has not rolled back and in fact its interventionism has redeployed in social policy. The French welfare state has undergone structural changes as Bruno Palier points out and its roll has been converted to market-supporting one. According to Levy, the dirigist state has become the social anesthesia state. Vivian A. Schmidt says that the welfare state increasingly takes a back seat to the competitve state. I think that just as the night-watchman state was subsumed under the welfare state, the welfare state has been subsumed under the competition state.
抄録全体を表示