Functional recalibration
Functional recalibration concerns the changing nature of social risks and the kinds of intervention that are required. Population ageing, declining fertility, deindustrialization, shifting international competitive relations, technological change, structural unemployment, changing family structures and gender relations, the transformation of life course patterns, with longer education and delayed reproduction, and the erosion of tenured life-time jobs, have recently altered social risk profiles and thereby the capabilities of welfare institutions to mitigate them. Functional recalibration involves acts of rebalancing both within and across the established functions of social protection.
The need for functional recalibration today is often described in terms of the shift from 'old' to 'new' social risks confronting people as a result of the transition from a 'male-breadwinner' industrial to a 'dual-earner' post-industrial society (Esping-Andersen et al., 2002; Taylor-Gooby, 2004; Bonoli, 2005,2006). The risk structure has shifted down the life cycle to young adults and families with children (especially lone parents) and those with insufficient skills.
Achieving a satisfactory work-life balance probably constitutes the most significant challenge of functional recalibration. Across the European Union it is still far from easy to combine paid employment and caring obligations towards children and frail relatives. Given the persistence of gendered roles, reconciling work and family care is particularly challenging for women. Without family support, many women and couples today opt for either restricting their caring obligations, by having fewer children than they wish or by providing less informal care to frail relatives, or reducing their participation in the labour market. These responses are suboptimal from an individual, gender, and the societal point of view. Another prime example of functional recalibration concerns the long-term evolution of old age pensions. What originally took root as pension insurance in the early twentieth century is surely no longer an insurance scheme but rather a savings policy for old age. When old age pensions were first introduced at the beginning of the century, the average life expectancy of a woman born in Western Europe was 48 and that of a man was 45 years. Today, they expect to live to 82 and 77 years, respectively, far beyond the official retirement age.
An important aspect of functional recalibration is the use of information- feedback, reality testing to raise the public attention to hard questions of adaptive change, and also to muster some consensus on problem perception. Expertise plays a central role here of clarifying issues, sorting through alternative problem diagnoses, developing new knowledge, and comparing policy options. New evidence on accumulated problems of unemployment hysteresis, the deficiencies of demand management under globalization, moral hazard and adverse selection problems in comprehensive social insurance, fiscal strain resulting from ageing, productivity losses due to rising rates of early school drop-out, unsatisfactory work-life balance for many working mothers, and many other pieces of intelligence have over the past decade advocated an alternative new welfare edifice for the twenty-first century (OECD, 1996, 1999a, 2006b, 2008,
2010b; NESC, 2005; Kangas, Lundberg, and Ploug, 2006; WRR, 2006; European Commission, 2008a). Reasoning from a life-course perspective on the interconnectedness of social risks and needs across time, from early childhood, education, career, and family life to old age, these expert publications have called for a paradigm shift from a static perspective of the welfare state, one that is focused on social protection, to one that is geared towards social promotion and social investment in human capital (see Chapter 5).
