Working towards more equal worlds

The Work, Inequality, and Wellbeing (WIW) research group joins together scholars interested in the ways people labour in the world and the effects of their efforts at a social and personal scale.

Members

Ben Spies-Butcher (co-convenor), Eve Vincent (co-convenor), Norbert Ebert (co-convenor), Catherine Hastings, Richard Carter-White, Francesco Stolfi , Tobia Fattore, Nick Harrigan, Adam Stebbing, Amanda Wise, Shaun Wilson.

About our research

A woman working in a food factory. Image by Mark StebnickiWork, paid and unpaid, is central to our identities and wellbeing and to social inequalities. Rates of casual and piecemeal employment have risen dramatically since the 1980s. Simultaneously, work has been made more egalitarian through efforts at equal pay that have partially broken-down strong gender and racial hierarchies within the labour market. We are interested in mapping, theorising and documenting the social and lived effects of these transformations.

Social policy has undergone similar transformations that facilitate and complicate the transformation of work. Care and education have expanded and moved into the formal economy, while simultaneously being subject to competition and marketisation. Workfare disciplines labour, often via private interests, and reinforces racial and gendered inequalities.

As states govern through markets, new metrics have developed to both advance competition and challenge market prices. Wellbeing has emerged as an alternative goal to economic growth, and a measurable objective for policy makers and managers as they govern public health and encourage social investment, fostering spaces of ‘social innovation’ that seek to combine finance and wellbeing. However, wellbeing, in its definition, dimensions and delivery, remains a contested policy issue of vital interest to social scientists.

We examine the social and political implications of all these related processes, drawing together a range of social science perspectives including economic and political geography, social theory, economic and political sociology, ethnographic approaches, socio-legal studies and policy studies.

Our key areas of research strength include:

  • changes to work and employment relations
  • marketisation within the welfare state and ‘workfare’
  • housing, planning and spatial inequality
  • inequalities, marginalisation and access to justice
  • the rise of finance and inequalities of income and wealth
  • social attitudes to inequality, democracy, and welfare
  • globalisation, global inequalities, and post-colonialism
  • neoliberalism and responses to neoliberalism
  • definitions of well-being and the implication of well-being approaches to population outcomes.

Ben Spies-Butcher: My research explores the political economy of social policy, focusing on processes of liberalisation. In collaboration with Adam Stebbing, I have analysed interactions between the tax system and social spending, particularly the use of tax concessions to support social provision in less equitable and transparent ways.

A collaboration with Gareth Bryant (University of Sydney) explores how liberalisation blurs the boundaries between public and private finance, creating opportunities as well as threats for egalitarian provision. I am currently working with Just Reinvest NSW exploring financing models for Indigenous led justice reinvestment.

I am co-Director of the Australian Basic Income Lab, working with Troy Henderson (University of Sydney) and Elise Klein (ANU). I am also finalising a book examining how liberalisation changes the nature of political contestation within the Australian welfare state with Anthem Press.

Eve Vincent: My recent research has focussed on the conditional and punitive welfare system, exploring its relationship to gender, race and the unpaid work of care. More specifically, I have conducted ethnographic research into the first trial of the controversial cashless debit card. I have also conducted interviews with single mums subject to the welfare measure, ParentsNext. My book about these welfare reforms, Who Cares? Life on Welfare in Australia, is contracted to Melbourne University Publishing.

Francesco Stolfi: My current research is on the political conflict surrounding the regulation of work, studied from the standpoint of public policy and political economy. With Stella Ladi (Queen Mary University, London) and Catherine Moury (NOVA University, Lisbon), I am finishing a comparative article showing the extent to which the liberalization of pharmacies in Greece and Portugal over the past twenty years has been affected by electoral considerations.

With Oliver Fritsch (Murdoch University), I am working on a systematic review of the empirical work on the productivity impact of labour market reforms in Italy over the past twenty-five years. We show that reforms to make employment more flexible have reduced productivity and innovation.

Richard Carter-White: I am currently working on a book project, in collaboration with Claudio Minca (University of Bologna), that theorises the institution of the camp as a spatial-political technology of population governance. The book draws on Foucault's analysis of the fundamental ambivalence of modern biopolitical governance and its dedication to maintaining the ‘health’ of the population, often through the removal and segregation of individuals and groups deemed threatening to the body politic. In the book we explore how different forms of institutional camps make this operation possible, in more-or-less violent ways.

Catherine Hastings: My recent research has focussed on developing critical realist causal explanations for resource precarity, housing insecurity and homelessness of Australian families and older women, as well as work, financial and housing precarity of international students. I am working on a book project theorising homelessness in Australia as a problem of crisis events and resource loss in the context of Australia’s housing and welfare markets.

My current research is funded by a Macquarie University Research Fellowship and investigates how, why and in what context types of legal needs develop for marginalised and disadvantaged populations in Australia. It considers how socio-economic precarity, the marketisation of social and legal assistance services, wellbeing, and capability intersect to increase inequality of access to justice.

Bryant, G., B. Spies-Butcher & A. Stebbing (2022) Comparing asset-based welfare capitalism: wealth inequality, housing finance and household risk, Housing Studies.

Carter-White, R. & Minca, C. (2020) The camp and the question of community Political Geography 81 102222.

Carter-White, R. (2018) Communities of violence in the Nazi death camps. In Katz, I., Martin, D. & Minca, C. (Eds) Camps revisited: Multifaceted spatialities of a modern political technology. Rowman & Littlefield: London (177-195)

Hastings, C. (2021) How do poor families in Australia avoid homelessness? A study using fsQCA Housing, Theory and Society 39 (3), 275-295

Hastings, C., Ramia, G., Wilson, S., Mitchell, E. & Morris, A. (2021) Precarity Before and During the Pandemic: International Student Employment and Personal Finances in Australia Journal of Studies in International Education (online).

Mitchell, E. and E. Vincent. (2021) The shame of welfare? Lived experiences of welfare and culturally inflected experiences of shame. Emotion, Space and Society 41, 1-8.

Spies-Butcher, B.,Phillips, B. & Henderson, T., (2020) Between universalism and targeting: Exploring policy pathways for an Australian Basic Income. Economic and Labour Relations Review, 31 (4), 502-523.

Stolfi, Francesco and Natalia Papamakariou (2021) Border clashes: the distributive politics of professional liberalisation in Greece, 2010–2018 Journal of Public Policy 41 (1): 90-110.

Vincent, E. (2021) ‘Look After Them? Gender, Care and Welfare Reform in Aboriginal Australia.’ Ethnos. Online first.

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E: Macquarie School of Social Sciences