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Welfare governance has changed expressively in the past decade. The administration and implementation of welfare involve a wide diversity of state organizations, private commercial organizations and non-profit organizations. However, the roles and positions of these states, private and non-profit organizations in administering and implementing social policies vary significantly between countries. This inconsistency is commonly accredited to the differences in welfare systems. However, in the era of welfare reform, everything is in instability. This includes the role and position of state, private and non-profit actors in social policies. The concept of governance, which is widely gaining popularity in social policies, refers to these changing relations between government and society. Governance is about ‘sustaining co-ordination and coherence among a wide variety of actors with different purposes and objectives such as political actors and institutions, corporate interests, civil society, and transnational organizations. So there are many reasons to assume that welfare reform has affected the involvement of state, private and non-profit actors in administering and implementing social policy.

The book, Restructuring Welfare Governance, tries to figure out the mechanisms by which good governance and economic order influence economic outcome. As the system of social welfare governance faces continued, radical change, this important book argues that this change is so extensive that we should consider it a fundamental transformation or revolution. This monograph shows how a new public governance perspective has replaced the dominance of public management, reflecting the increasingly plural and fragmented nature of public policy implementation. Drawing on studies across a range of policy areas, this comprehensive book unravels the complex ways in which changes in social policy and governance interact in the delivery of social welfare, making it essential reading for welfare researchers, students, and policy makers.

With the development of formally free labor markets, market forces became the chief mode of capitalist economic coordination. The concept of governance is very useful in analyzing welfare regimes as it enables us to classify regimes in terms of their typical combinations of modes of coordination. In particular, the new governance models not only clash with traditional ideas of bureaucratic regulation but also with the norms and standards of professional service delivery.