the modern welfare state in existence.
In Poverty, Riches and Social Citizenship, Hartley Dean and Margaret Melrose underscore the importance of social citizenship in building a contented majority, but they also highlight the various social inequalities that exist in a white male dominated patriarchal social construct where inequality and exclusion for the poor and minorities seem part and parcel of that particularly imposed paradigm. The authors argues this has created an insecure middle-class as opposed to Galbraith’s concept of a contented majority. They also argue that there is a dichotomy between leaders of society (i.e., the wealthy, status quo) and women and minorities (i.e., the poor, marginalized groups in society) with respect to what values social citizenship in the modern welfare state encompass:
The recognition of the value of care is one element in contemporary feminist attempts to refashion citizenship on more inclusive lines. Another key challenge is the accommodation of diversity and difference into what is an expression of universalism…Women and minority ethnic groups face the options of assimilation to dominant white masculine paradigms or ghettoisation in the private sphere or ethnic community. These represent ‘equality’ and ‘difference’ strategies, neither of which offers, on its own, a satisfactory path to a more genuinely inclusive model and practice of citizenship. There is a third option: the renegotiation of ‘the basis of citizenship by insisting on changes in publicly defined assumptions and universal values’. This is an example of how we need to transcend the dichotomous thinking that places an obstacle in the way of more creative thinking about how to forge a more inclusive model of citizenship.
Dean and Melrose argue that by addressing this dichotomy, a normative discussion is enabled on the concept of social citizenship which views it as a strategic and evolving concept dep...