An ethnography of advice: between market, society and the declining welfare state 2015-2018

James, Deborah and Davey, Ryan and Eule, Tobias and Forbess, Alice and Gutierrez Garza, Ana and Koch, Insa and Tuckett, Anna and Wilde, Matt (2025). An ethnography of advice: between market, society and the declining welfare state 2015-2018. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-853821

This two-year anthropological study, building on earlier research by the principle investigator and others, undertakes an ethnographic investigation of advice. Under conditions of continuing economic crisis, scholars and policy-makers are having to reshape their assumptions about the nature of society: particularly in respect of who receives assistance and who funds and arranges it. Where the 'usual' targets of welfare and benefits were the poor or destitute, they now include those who work but cannot make ends meet, and who experience increasing numbers of complex problems for which they need advice. And where the 'usual' provider of such things, at least in the post-war years, has been the state, this is increasingly not the case. As the economic crisis proceeds apace and the state's role is being whittled down, access to the counsel of experts is nonetheless increasingly essential. Without prejudging the outcomes, the project will investigate novel arrangements and their unintended consequences. It will explore innovations in advice giving provided by existing offices (under more traditional state-funded regimes), by new sources and novel agencies (under non-governmental and market-driven schemes), and by the social movements, self-help and informal network-based arrangements to which many are increasingly having to turn for counsel and support.
The project proposes intensive research along two axes. Firstly, it explores in detail selected sites and cases in the UK (specifically England where a very particular set of legal/welfare arrangements is in operation), 'drilling down' to examine specific institutional settings, themes and topics at a range of different scales and levels. Topics and sites include a focus on the three specific areas of housing, debt and immigration advice, both within and beyond particular institutional settings, and law courts where litigants have started to engage in self-representation. Secondly, it uses two carefully-selected cross-national comparisons in order to illuminate, and gain a critical perspective on, aspects of UK welfare-related advice processes which are often taken as natural/inevitable by local policy-makers.
Across these different settings, the project will: (1) document the ongoing effects on advice giving of the withdrawal of legal aid funds, including the rise of self-litigation; (2) explore the new roles assumed by bureaucrats, intermediaries and self-help groups, who are increasingly important in the advice encounter; (3) investigate whether funding cuts have caused the dwindling of the much-vaunted empathy that advice-givers are often required to deliver and whether, in the process, advisers are becoming less effective at shaping the behaviour of those they counsel; (4) look at how the very character of advice is changing as a result of these complex transformations; (5) explore variations between selected national settings, to illuminate the changing and context-dependent character of advice in the UK.

Data description (abstract)

This dataset results from an anthropological project that investigated the mediations that advice enables between the state, the market, charitable initiatives, families and ordinary citizens in the UK as well as selected European sites affected by austerity politics, namely Spain and Switzerland. The welfare state is not just a political-economic but a moral formation, which creates multiple boundaries of inclusion and exclusion through a variety of actors, officials and institutions. These boundaries at times challenge, and at other times reproduce, dominant logics of extraction and accumulation. Advisers are often the last call for help for their clients/dependents who find themselves increasingly at the mercy of local authorities, immigration regimes, landlords, banks and debt collection agencies. But competing visions of moral worth and social justice continue to permeate the everyday deliberations of those who administer, support and advocate advice. Struggles and dilemmas over how best to instantiate social justice, provide assistance and balance individuals’ moral judgments against the collective good frequently occur. In analyzing advice as part of a broader landscape of governing the welfare state, our research explored both the dovetailing of and divergence between political, economic and legal imperatives and domains.

To accomplish our research, four main themes (1) Empathy and expertise, (2) Brokerage or self-help, (3) Shifting advice frameworks, and (4) Comparative insights on UK-based problems, were addressed through eight research sub-projects. (2) Ryan Davey ‘Debt advice in Plymouth’; (3) Tobias Eule ‘Face-to-Face Interactions at the State/Market interface in Germany/Switzerland’; (4) Alice Forbess ‘Housing and welfare advice in Portsmouth; (5) Ana Gutierrez Garza ‘Advice as social struggle: housing and debt in Spain’; (6) Deborah James ‘Debt advice in London’; (7) Insa Koch ‘Social housing and austerity politics on council estates in England’; (8) Anna Tuckett ‘Providing immigration advice in austerity UK’; (9) Matt Wilde ‘Advice and the UK Housing Crisis’. These include statements of methodology; tables of contents of fieldnotes; anonymized ethnographic interviews and anonymized fieldnotes.

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