State Provisioning

The purpose of state provisioning of social welfare is to redistribute economic resources and thereby to increase social and economic equality among populations. This task has been pursued in two major ways by modern welfare states: by direct income transfers from government and by public services, such as health care, education, social services, housing, and so forth. For consumers and consumer cultures, the ways of welfare provisioning are important not only in terms of economic resources, but also in terms of social inclusion and the ability to choose between goods and services in the market. According to Zygmunt Bauman, people living in poverty in consumer society do not have free choice over marketed goods and services and are therefore in danger of becoming socially excluded. On the other hand, social inclusion for everybody and alleviation of poverty are regarded as the main duties of modern welfare states, according to Gøsta Esping-Andersen.

In sociological studies, the connection between welfare state and consumption is almost totally neglected, although it is widely accepted that a person's social identity in postindustrial societies is based less on social stratification determined by employment position and more on consumption and lifestyles. The connection between welfare state and consuming public services, in turn, has attracted more attention than the connection between the welfare state and private consumption, notes Terhi-Anna Wilska. The studies of the welfare state have almost exclusively focused on income distribution, poverty, public expenditure, and the welfare state's equalizing capacity. Those studies only implicitly refer to consumption, mainly when operationalizing poverty lines or measuring “reasonable” expenditures and subsistence minimum budgets for the assessments of income support level.

The authority and equality of independent consumers and the development of consumer cultures in different countries depend largely on the social policy views of the state. This is why the connection between private consumption and welfare state policy is crucially important.