Insa Lee Koch: Personalizing the State: An Anthropology of Law, Politics, and Welfare in Austerity
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12176 |
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Author | Michael Adler |
PERS ONAL IZIN G THE ST ATE: A N ANTH ROPO LOGY O F LAW,
POLITICS, AND WELFARE IN AUSTERITY by INSA LEE KOCH
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, xiii + 274 pp., £70.00)
This long-awaited book, based on the author's DPhil thesis, is something of a
tour de force. It uses ethnographic methods to explore the relationships
between the citizen and the state on a local authority housing estate situated
on the periphery of a southern English city, to illuminate how social security,
housing, and criminal justice policies have changed over time, enabling
readers to think across policy domains that are often regarded as discrete and
separate. The method is synchronic in that the research on which it is based
was carried out over a relatively short period, but the result is diachronic, in
that the account it provides analyses changes that have taken place over a
period of 70 years.
Personalizing the State is informed by a very close and careful reading of
relevant academic literature, drawn particularly from social policy, com-
munity studies, political sociology, and criminology, from which the author
has learned a great deal, and by some quite outstanding ethnographic
fieldwork with residents on the estate. It represents a genuinely inter-
disciplinary analysis that brings ethnography to bear on issues of public
policy in a strikingly original way and provides a powerful `bottom-up'
critique of `top-down' policies. Those who doubt whether anthropology can
make a significant contribution to socio-legal studies will, I am sure, have
their doubts allayed by this book.
The author, Insa Lee Koch, divides post-war Britain into three periods:
the immediate post-war period when the welfare state was consolidated and
built (1950s±1970s); the period characterized by the decline of the post-war
settlement and the rise of neo-liberalism (1980s±1990s); and the period
associated with the turn to `law and order' under New Labour, Conservative-
led, and Conservative governments since then (2000s±2010s). Focusing on
council estates, she identifies the `model (``good'' or ``respectable'') citizen'
found in each of these periods and explores the different claims for moral
personhood and civic value associated with the `citizen-worker' (in the first
period), the `citizen-consumer' (in the second), and the `citizen-victim' (in
the third).
Based on her ethnographic fieldwork, Koch argues that a reciprocal
contract between citizens and the state emerged in the post-war years when
the residents on the newly-built estate, most of whom were two-parent,
white, working-class families, negotiated their dependence on the state by
integrating it into their on-going social relations. A climate of relative
material affluence, stable employment, and a paternalistic regime of housing
management created conditions that were conducive for this temporary
union between residents and the state. Then, with the decline of industry and
the shift towards neo-liberal economic and social policies, she demonstrates
that residents, many of whom were, by then, one-parent, black, or mixed-
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ß2019 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2019 Cardiff University Law School
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