The Struggle for Social Sustainability. Группа авторов

the social and economic dimensions of the crisis: ‘UN Launches COVID-19 Plan That Could “Defeat the Virus and Build a Better World”’, https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/03/1060702.

8Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General, opening remarks at 148th session of the Executive Board, 18 January 2021, https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-148th-session-of-the-executive-board.

9UN Secretary-General António Guterres (2020), for example, is calling for a ‘New Social Contract’, between Governments, people, civil society and business to integrate employment, sustainable development and social protection. Plus a ‘New Global Deal’, based on a fair globalization, to create equal opportunities for all and respect the rights and freedoms of all. The varying responses to the crisis found at national and regional levels, however, means any durable changes are likely to be understood in relation to the specific institutional features and policy legacies of each country, as Daniel Béland observes, https://www.mcgill.ca/maxbellschool/article/how-different-countries-respond-global-crises-social-policy-lessons-past.

10The challenges associated with creating and sustaining ‘social’ value in market (value) society were well recognized in the writing on political economy, including Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes (see discussions by T. H. Marshall, 1972, David Harvey, 2014, Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers, 2014). In recent work, for example, Bill Jordon (2008, 2021) makes the case for ‘social value’ based on notions of wellbeing incorporated into policy-making decisions; while Mariana Mazzucato (2018: 229–33, 264–9) discusses the idea of ‘public value’, urging us to rethink the process of value creation beyond old notions of the public and private sphere. Other initiatives are also attempting to change the way society thinks and accounts for social value: for example, www.socialvalueuk.org/. Some of the problems and challenges associated with defining and conceptualizing ‘social value’ and operationalizing it in policy terms are discussed by Dowling and Harvie (2014).

11In the classical tradition, for example, social theorists like Émile Durkheim were concerned with the study of ‘social facts’, the facts termed ‘social’ (Durkheim, [1895] 1982: 50), and with the study of ‘social solidarity’ (Durkheim, [1897] 1952). For Weber, sociology was all about the understanding of ‘social action’ (Weber, [1922] 1978: 4). Notions and conceptions of the ‘social’ are not always precisely defined, however, dealing with quite diverse problems, institutions and issues relating to governance. Jean Baudrillard, for example, marked ‘the end of the social’ with the rise of consumer capitalist society ([1978] 1983: 25, 82), while Gilles Deleuze (1979: ix) considers ‘the rise of the social’, that is, ‘social’ workers within the social service state. Nikolas Rose (1996: 327), like Baudrillard, lamented ‘the death of the social’ with the rise of New Right ideology, but at the same time, he also observes the rise of ‘social’ policies increasingly being articulated at a supra-national level in the work of international organizations.

12A ‘social question’ is usually one that concerns society and/or a social group, increasingly cast as the transnational social question in global times (see Chapters 3 and 15), that demands or provokes political reactions and institutional responses. The so-called social questions were originally conceived in terms of regulating the social. For example, ‘social control’, ‘the pauper question’ (poor relief and the workhouse), ‘the penal question’ (incarceration and the prison) and ‘the workers’ question’ that dominated thinking about the social question, conceived in terms of social welfare planning and the needs of the capitalist economy. As such, the work of social scientists, in the long history of the social sciences, has been directed at state-orientated concerns and the major political issues of the day, the social questions, as Peter Wagner (2001) suggests.

13As Adam Smith taught us, there are moral limits to markets, to naked self-interest and economic individualism: ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it’ (Smith, [1759] 2009: 13).

14BLM seeks to bring attention to police violence against African-American people in the USA after the shooting death of African-American teenager Trayvon Martin in February 2012. The Black Lives Matter Global Network is now a global movement in the fight for freedom, liberation and justice, see www.blacklivesmatter.com/. The George Floyd/BLM protests in 550 US cities began in May 2020, in reaction to the murder of George Floyd, quickly spreading worldwide.

15Article 2 of the UDHR, for example, states: ‘Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty; further details are available from the OHCHR’: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/UDHRIndex.aspx.

16The World Youth Report (WYR) found 142 million young people of upper secondary age are out of school, while upper secondary enrolment rates average only 14 per cent in low-income countries. Moreover, almost 30 per cent of the poorest 12–14 year olds have never attended school, some 71 million young people were unemployed, and many millions more are in precarious or informal work.

17A clear exception here is research looking at the formal institutions of the EU and the social question hanging over the future of a ‘Social Europe’, with the focus on sustaining social cohesion across diverse EU member states and the challenges associated with social policy development (Mahon, 2002; Jenson, 2010b; Barbier, 2013; Vandenbroucke et al, 2017).