All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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The Business of Social Policy. Commercial Insurers and the Development of Welfare States in Comparative Perspective (1890-1970)
| This paper will analyze a domain that is currently neglected by current scholarship on social policy development, namely the role of commercial insurers in the development of various social insurance branches in four Western industrialized countries (Switzerland, Netherlands, United States, Great Britain). This paper adopts a long term perspective that covers the foundational, formative, and expansion periods of modern welfare states (1890s to the 1970s).
My main hypothesis is the following: the development of welfare states based on a dense intertwining of public and private forms of provision is closely linked to the existence of well-developed and politically active insurance companies. This paper thus delves on the interactions between the development of the commercial insurance sector and the making of social policy as well as the ensuing struggles waged to delineate the respective realm of the state and of the private sector in the organization of social provision. I aim to demonstrate that blends of public and private social provision are not only the preserve of the United States and Great Britain, but also of small continental European countries with well-developed financial establishments such as the Netherlands and Switzerland. This viewpoint thus questions the traditional dichotomies that are often established between so-called «Anglo-Saxon» and «Continental European» welfare trajectories.
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