2Ambiguity of welfare state change: Institutions, output and outcomes

Whereas institutional immobility was a dominant theme in welfare state theory in the 1990's, change is now on the agenda. It has become increasingly clear that welfare states in fact do change quite a lot, but our concepts of magnitude and direction of change are rather poorly developed, and some of the most commonly applied concepts often run into difficulties when they are applied in other fields than those from which they were originally derived. As a consequence, assessment of changes are often very different from one scholar to the other. This paper surveys some commonly applied notions of change and point out the multiplicity of dimensions that are ex- or implicitly involved. Most importantly, we need to distinguish between change in discourse, change in institutions, change in output and change in outcomes. As far as services is concerned, the latter involves a focus on implementation. Drawing on the classical insights of functionalism and institutionalism, it is further argued that in a "governance " world, we increasingly have to take account of "functional equivalence " between different institutional constellations (including different "welfare mixes"), but at the same time be aware of the dynamics of institutional change (what is functionally equivalent at t1 need not be functionally equivalent at t2). 1 Actually, the assumption of voter resistance was relatively new. In the 1 970's and 198 0's