Book review: Social Security and the Politics of Deservingness
| DOI | 10.1177/1388262717746208 |
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| Author | Jackie Gulland |
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
EJSS
European Journal of Social Security
2017, Vol. 19(4) 369–370
Book reviews
ª The Author(s) 2017
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Susan Beechey, Social Security and the Politics of Deservingness, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016,
122 pages, ISBN: 978-1-349-91889-8.
Reviewed by: Jackie Gulland, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, UK
DOI: 10.1177/1388262717746208
This important book is based on an analysis of debates on social security in the United States in
2005. At first glance this may seem to speak only to a particular period in a particular country, but
the book has much wider significance in helping us to understand the often-unspoken assumptions
about the nature of social security.
Beechey’s work analyses Congressional debates on the proposed privatisation of the US (insur-
ance based) Social Security scheme in 2005. Readers may feel overwhelmed at the prospect of
reading a detailed analysis of a debate now more than ten years old. However, this book takes the
reader carefully through the background and outcome of the debate, focussing on the language,
narratives and assumptions behind it. Beechey’s analysis shows that uncovering these assumptions
can be at least as revealing as focussing closely on the outcome or the politics of policy development.
Beechey shows that insurance-based social security is inherently gendered (through the male
breadwinner model) and racialised through definitions of eligible ‘work’ as the kind of jobs carried
out by white men, rather than black men, or by women of any ethnicity (p. 6). She focusses mainly
on retirement and survivors’ pensions and shows that these pensions are highly segregated by
gender, age, race and class, albeit portrayed as universal. Actual payments are differentiated by
gender and race because of different patterns of earning in a lifetime, leading to white men
receiving the highest average payments and Hispanic...
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