This book seeks to explore welfare responses by questioning and going beyond the assumptions found in Esping-Andersen's broad typologies of welfare capitalism. Specifically, the project seeks to reflect how the state engages, and creates general institutionalized responses to, market mechanisms and how such responses have created path dependencies in how states approach problems of inequality. Moreover, if the neoliberal era is defined as the dissemination and extension of market values to all forms of state institutions and social action, the need arises to critically investigate not only the embeddedness of such values and modes of thought in different contexts and institutional forms, but responses and modes of resistance arising from practices that might point to new forms of resilience.

Neoliberal globalisation is understood to have a corrosive effect on the state. Reductions in economic regulatory capacities combined with an ideological attack on the public necessity of social spending has left many with the impression that the state is a weakened institution, at best. This book argues that global capitalism actually requires state institutional authority, but the legitimation of this authority is increasingly tied to cultural rather than economic means. Canada and Quebec are presented examples of how neoliberal states achieve integration.