The Future of Welfare State Studies

Olga Gryaznova tells about international conference in Umeå

Olga Gryaznova (senior research fellow at LCSR) presented a report at the international conference “The Future of Welfare State Studies”. Olga kindly shared her impressions of the conference with our website.

My report was entitled “Factors Affecting Welfare Attitudes in Different Types of Welfare States: Personal Interests and Values”. This research was conducted in the framework of LCSR program of the preparation of publications in peer reviewed international journals. After the presentation there was a lively discussion both on the general and on highly specific questions.

The conference was organized by the Faculty of Sociology, Umeå University, and was held in Umeå, Sweden. Researchers from 18 countries took part in the work of the conference. Presentations were devoted to the current problems of the welfare state, its historical background and possible ways how to cope with the crisis. The conference attracted researchers from different disciplines to Umeå to discuss current issues related to social policy. Not only sociologists and economists, but also political scientists, historians and anthropologists came there. The organizers of the conference considered as a primary objective not just a discussion of research projects in the highly specialized field, but an attempt to facilitate an interdisciplinary discourse and posing of non-trivial question. Such issues as the effectiveness of various social programs, new social risks, migration, social exclusion, social policy and employment, family, innovation in social policy, the role of government and the private sector to minimize the social and economic risks sociologists seem quite familiar. However, interdisciplinary discussion has identified new and often unexpected aspects of the consideration of these issues.

Key speakers were Stefan Svallfors (Umeå University, Sweden), Daniel Béland (University of Saskatchewan, Canada), Traute Meyer (University of Southampton, UK), and Jason Beckfield (Harvard University, USA). They were talking not just about the results of their researches, but also about the well-known journals in the field of social policy, the peculiarities of the academic mobility, and career chances. Despite the interdisciplinary character, the conference brought together researchers having alike scientific interests and provided conditions for a fruitful future cooperation. Many of the participants are looking forward to meet and discuss new research findings at the conference European Survey Research Association in Ljubljana in July of this year and ESPAnet conference in Poznan in September.