Hans Knutsson

Senior lecturer

Welfare choices : a story of market forces and social progress

Author

Hans Knutsson

Editor

Irvine Lapsley
Hans Knutsson

Summary, in English

The implementation of market solutions has been widely attempted in many different parts of the public sector. This chapter concerns a groundbreaking social reform, which introduced personal assistants for ‘functionally impaired’ people. It was a far-reaching and liberating reform aimed at making disabled people part of society. It replaced collective institutional care with individual choice, in turn built on a number of market-oriented mechanisms. The reform, though, soon grew costly and has been plagued by fraud and public mistrust. The chapter discusses how ideas of market mechanisms are not equal to ready-made solutions; they may come ill-conceived and before long be in need of revision and negotiation. The chapter provides a case of a major Swedish social reform, which illuminates, first, an experimental full-scale policy implementation and, second, how market ideas easily become confused with and substituted for the idea of individual choice.

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