Missing in Action: Bridging capital and cross-boundary discourse
The regulatory welfare state illuminates path dependencies and tendencies to mutual growth in markets, welfare, and regulation. This article uses two specific welfare -to- work programs, one in Korea and one in Australia, to illustrate the institutional interconnections that are in play within the regulatory welfare state. Governance of these programs is hampered by lack of discursive capacity to identify where problems exist and how they can be fixed. When faced with new programs, implementers look to higher authorities to make sense of and to solve the problems on the ground, but authorities are blinded by old institutional categories that pit market mentalities against welfare mentalities with regulation as an ideological tool, rather than an integral part of solutions. Transparency and cross-boundary listening are necessary to create the bridging capital to make these programs work and reconnect democratically elected governments with their citizens.
Valerie Braithwaite is an emeritus professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance, Australian National University . She is the author of Defiance in Taxation and
Governance (Edward Elgar 2009), editor of The ANNALS special issue 592, “Hope Power and Governance,” and co-editor (with Gale Burford and John Braithwaite) of Restorative and Responsive Human Services (Taylor & Francis 2019).
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Sora Lee is a doctoral student in the Menzies Centre for
Health Governance, School of Regulation and Global
Governance, Australian National University. Her doctoral
thesis is on values governance for health equity
in the elderly in Korea. She was an affiliated scholar
with the Korean Women’s Institute at Ewha Womans
University.