Changing Citizen-Oriented Social Policy in Changing Competitive Environments

The cooperative economy is, because it operates in the middle ground between the state and market capitalism, in addition to its economic aspirations, an effective citizen-oriented means of pre-venting and treating social problems which are produced by a hard market economy or which cannot be solved with market-oriented measures. The most significant difference between the various market-based organisations and the organisations that operate in the fields of social economy, which includes cooperatives, mutual societies, non-profit organisations, organisations and foundations, is that the decision-making power is based on the person-vote principle instead of the owner-ship based on shares. Nowadays, the organisations of the cooperative economy also carry out a wide range of tasks in the field of social policy in society. The author Juhani Laurinkari is a professor emeritus of social policy and an experienced social economy researcher and influencer. He examines in this publication e.g. income transfers and the production of social and health services in the conditions of a competitive economy. The first edition of this publication was published in Finnish in 2021 and it was the first comprehensive review of the social policy of the cooperative economy. The field of social policy activity and its challenges have changed significantly since the Finnish publication, so this work is much more than a renewed edition in many respects. This publication is suitable as a textbook for universities and as reading for anyone interested in European and Finnish social social policy and economics.