Social Welfare

About: Social Welfare is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 19028 publications have been published within this topic receiving 308701 citations.

Strategy and society: the link between competitive advantage and corporate social responsibility.

Abstract: Governments, activists, and the media have become adept at holding companies to account for the social consequences of their actions. In response, corporate social responsibility has emerged as an inescapable priority for business leaders in every country. Frequently, though, CSR efforts are counterproductive, for two reasons. First, they pit business against society, when in reality the two are interdependent. Second, they pressure companies to think of corporate social responsibility in generic ways instead of in the way most appropriate to their individual strategies. The fact is, the prevailing approaches to CSR are so disconnected from strategy as to obscure many great opportunities for companies to benefit society. What a terrible waste. If corporations were to analyze their opportunities for social responsibility using the same frameworks that guide their core business choices, they would discover, as Whole Foods Market, Toyota, and Volvo have done, that CSR can be much more than a cost, a constraint, or a charitable deed--it can be a potent source of innovation and competitive advantage. In this article, Michael Porter and Mark Kramer propose a fundamentally new way to look at the relationship between business and society that does not treat corporate growth and social welfare as a zero-sum game. They introduce a framework that individual companies can use to identify the social consequences of their actions; to discover opportunities to benefit society and themselves by strengthening the competitive context in which they operate; to determine which CSR initiatives they should address; and to find the most effective ways of doing so. Perceiving social responsibility as an opportunity rather than as damage control or a PR campaign requires dramatically different thinking--a mind-set, the authors warn, that will become increasingly important to competitive success.

Collective Choice and Social Welfare

Abstract: Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen's first great book, now reissued in a fully revised and expanded second edition 'Can the values which individual members of society attach to different alternatives be aggregated into values for society as a whole, in a way that is both fair and theoretically sound? Is the majority principle a workable rule for making decisions? How should income inequality be measured? When and how can we compare the distribution of welfare in different societies?' These questions, from the citation by the Swedish Academy of Sciences when Amartya Sen was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, refer to his work in Collective Choice and Social Welfare, the most important of all his early books. Originally published in 1970, this classic work in welfare economics has been recognized for its ground-breaking role in integrating economics and ethics, and for its influence in opening up new areas of research in social choice, including aggregative assessment. It has also had a large influence on international organizations, including the United Nations, particularly in its work on human development. In its original version, the book showed that the 'impossibility theorems' in social choice theory-led by the pioneering work of Kenneth Arrow-need not be seen as destructive of the possibility of reasoned and democratic social choice. Sen's ideas about social choice, welfare economics, inequality, poverty and human rights have continued to evolve since the book's first appearance. This expanded edition, which begins by reproducing the 1970 edition in its entirety, goes on to present eleven new chapters of new arguments and results. As in the original version, the new chapters alternate between non-mathematical chapters completely accessible to all, and those which present mathematical arguments and proofs. The reader who prefers to shun mathematics can follow all the non-mathematical chapters on their own, to receive a full, informal understanding. There is also a substantial new introduction which gives a superb overview of the whole subject of social choice.

Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility

Abstract: The naive concept of social welfare as a sum of intuitively measurable and comparable individual cardinal utilities has been found unable to withstand the methodological criticism of the Pareto school. Professor Bergson2 has therefore recommended its replacement by the more general concept of. a social welfare function, defined as an arbitrary mathematical function of economic (and other social) variables, of a form freely chosen according to one’s personal ethical (or political) value judgments. Of course, in this terminology everybody will have a social welfare function of his own, different from that of everybody else except to the extent to which different individuals’ value judgments happen to coincide with one another. Actually, owing to the prevalence of individualistic value judgments in our society, it has been generally agreed that a social welfare function should be an increasing function of the utilities of individuals: if a certain situation, X, is preferred by an individual to another situation, y, and if none of the other individuals prefers Y to X, then X should be regarded as socially preferable to y. But no other restriction is to be imposed on the mathematical form of a social welfare function.

The Quality of American Life: Perceptions, Evaluations, and Satisfactions

Abstract: benefits require a fundamental recasting of economic and sociopolitical structures lest permanent stagflation erode the impact of present and future allocations. Clearly, when social welfare expenditures in the United States have increased from under $9,000 million in 1940 to over $200,000 million in 1973, and when total government spending exclusive of defense now absorbs roughly 32 percent of national income, it is obvious that further advances in welfare require basic structural changes. Without these, further extension of the welfare state will become counterproductive. Far from limiting himself to the decline of economic surplus, the author discusses a variety of other issues, such as changes in the stratification system, the weakening of political regimes and the emergence of an ethic of hedonistic consumerism, which are connected with the rise of the welfare state. He shows, for example, that the format of conventional interest-group politics has been undermined by the welfare state. While it is true that the claims and expectations rooted in a person's occupation remain central, they are now crisscrossed by contradictory or competing pulls that arise out of claims for welfare benefits. It is much more difficult than in the past for a person to calculate rationally where his political interests lie. "A person's linkage to the mode of production . . . is (now) based both on his occupation and on the institutions of social welfare" (p. 83). This may help account for the decline of relatively stable class-based politics, and the increase of independent voters in recent decades, as well as for the strains in the functioning of electoral and parliamentary institutions in the recent period. Janowitz concludes with a series of observations on the need to increase a welfare society's ability to deal with the problems he has outlined. Though somewhat vague in detail, one nevertheless gathers that he favors both large-scale planning efforts and increasing citizens' participation through self-regulation. Space does not allow me to even indicate the many areas in which I differ from Janowitz; for example, his definition of the welfare state as any state that allocates "at least 8 to 1o percent of the gross national product to welfare" (p. 2) seems inadequate, since this definition would make Kuwait and Albania into welfare states. But my main object is to alert the reader that this work is indispensable for any social scientist concerned with our current predicaments, and especially for those among us who are committed to the idea of the welfare system and yet have begun to realize that spending is not enough. LEwIs A. COSER State University of New York at Stony Brook

A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare

Abstract: IN A capitalist democracy there are essentially two methods by which social choices can be made: voting, typically used to make "political" decisions, and the market mechanism, typically used to make "economic" decisions. In the emerging democracies with mixed economic systems, Great Britain, France, and Scandinavia, the same two modes of making social choices prevail, though more scope is given to the method of voting and to decisions based directly or indirectly on it and less to the rule of the price mechanism. Elsewhere in the world, and even in smaller social units within the democracies, the social decisions are sometimes made by single individuals or small groups and sometimes (more and more rarely in this modern world) by a widely encompassing set of traditional rules for making the so-