A study, funded by the ESRC - Grant Ref: L122251010, of the attitudes and beliefs of people engaged in social security benefit fraud.
Dr. Hartley Dean is Reader in Social Policy and Margaret Melrose is a Researcher, Department of Social Studies, University of Luton, Park Square, Luton, LU1 3JU.
This paper presents preliminary findings from a study of the attitudes and beliefs of social security claimants engaged in benefit fraud. The basis for a taxonomy of such claimants is outlined and this is compared and contrasted with other theoretically drawn taxonomies, one relating to workplace crime, the other to the consumption of social care services. Finally, the paper considers whether benefit fraud is intelligible as resistance to social control. It concludes that benefit fraud does not signify a 'culture' of resistance, so much as a 'manageable' form of rule breaking.
This somewhat densely constructed paper is written for a particular academic audience and with two purposes in mind: first, to present in outline some preliminary findings from our research on social security benefit fraud; second to provoke discussion of theoretical issues arising from those findings.
The purposes of the research are disclosed in the title of the project. The aim has been to determine the extent to which benefit fraud is intelligible in terms of its economic rationality and/or in terms of a failure of welfare citizenship. We have investigated the attitudes and motivations of people engaged in benefit fraud. This has mainly involved those who are claiming means-tested social security benefits while failing to disclose earnings from work in the 'informal' economy. In one sense, what such people do makes economic sense: it is rational. At another level, however, such behaviour is significant for what it tells us about the ways in which people experience and apprehend the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
Social policy academics and the poverty lobby have hitherto been rather coy about social security fraud and have usually argued that it is a minor problem the importance of which is much exaggerated by the news media and politicians (see Golding and Middleton 1982). However, there is some evidence that media and political 'hype' tends to become a self-fulfilling prophesy, in so far that the belief that 'everybody does it' can become a justification for social security fraud (Cook 1989). Some academics would now argue that benefit fraud is a bigger issue than the poverty lobby is prepared to admit and that it must be addressed if we are to understand the survival strategies of low income households (Jordan et al 1992). Others have argued that benefit fraud may be symptomatic of an unravelling of the rights and responsibilities of welfare citizenship (Dean and Taylor-Gooby 1992).
The research has been based upon extended discursive interviews with a small sample (35 respondents) contacted through professional and community 'gatekeepers', informal contacts and 'snowballing'. The focus of the study is individual or 'petty' social security fraud, as opposed to more organised forms of fraud. In this paper, we shall generally refer to this kind of social security fraud as 'fiddling'. In so doing, we are not offering any judgement about the relative seriousness of different kinds of fraud, but are seeking to explain the phenomenon from the inside rather than the outside. Mars has made the same point in his study of work-place pilfering, which he too refers to as 'fiddling' because this allows the investigator to look not so much with complaisance as with empathy. Using the word 'fiddle', we can more readily appreciate the world-view or cosmology of the fiddler. And through its use we can then, in effect, move into the fiddler's quadrant .... If, on the other hand, we use the word 'theft' [or in this case 'fraud'] we stand outside the fiddler's view of his own actions. (1994: 164).
The principal preliminary findings of the research have been as follows (for a fuller account, see Dean and Melrose 1995).
First, social security claimants who fiddle are not especially 'street-wise' about the social security system. This is not to imply that the claimants we interviewed were not competent to deal with the system but, by and large, their behaviour was not informed by a detailed or accurate knowledge of how the system works. Some claimants suggested to us that the deterrent nature of the claiming process inhibits them from bothering to investigate the full extent of their entitlements. This is broadly consistent with other research on the beliefs of social security claimants (Dean and Taylor-Gooby 1992: 130).
Second, although people often give multiple or complex reasons for their fiddling, the predominant reason is that of economic necessity, of not obtaining sufficient income from benefits. However, although the primary motivation of the claimants we interviewed was based in economic rationality, it did not necessarily follow that all claimants had calculated or planned their fiddles with any degree of precision: often they had responded as opportunities presented themselves without a great deal of premeditation and the small amounts of additional income at stake hardly justified elaborate planning. Nearly all the claimants believed that lots of other people are also fiddling but this was rarely cited in itself as a substantive reason for fiddling. What did matter was that claimants often felt more comfortable about fiddling because they believed it to be widespread. Claimants were seldom able specifically to enumerate or identify those whom they knew to be fiddling and these 'others' seemed often to be part of an anonymous 'generalised other' (cf. Mead 1935) or some 'imagined community' (cf. Anderson 1983) from which their internalised standards of morality were drawn.
Third, it appears that claimants who fiddle will not easily be deterred from so doing: for the claimants we interviewed low income was a bigger worry than the prospect of getting caught for fiddling. None the less, most claimants wanted to get off benefits and would readily be dissuaded from fiddling social security if only reasonably paid employment were made available (cf. Evason and Woods 1995). It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the incidence of benefit fraud is closely related to labour market policy (see also Field and Owen 1994).
Fourth, the group of claimants we interviewed had ambivalent conceptions of citizenship. Most believed they had a right to claim social security benefits, although this was not a right which was highly prized. They were generally uncomfortable with their status as claimants: it was not the status from which they would voluntarily draw their subjective sense of identity. At the same time, members of this sample were unclear about their obligations as citizens: some defined such obligations vaguely in terms of 'being a good person', or 'obeying the law', though others felt they had no particular obligations. Nor, as a group, were these claimants especially politically focused, though their discourse exhibited a relatively high incidence of general anti-government or anti-establishment sentiments.
Fifth, most claimants did not admit that fiddling was dishonest, or else they distinguished between fiddling (which they felt to be harmless) and more serious or organised forms of fraud (which they did not). This is consistent with other research findings suggesting that both social security and workplace fiddlers generally impose their own moral limits or rules upon their fiddling (Jordan et al 1992; Mars 1994), although such limits are not consistently drawn. However, in spite of their contentions that fiddling is not fundamentally dishonest, most claimants still experienced some degree of anxiety or conflict about fiddling. Subscribing to some expedient formulation of what might be legitimate was seldom enough to put claimants entirely at their ease.
The other main finding from the research is that there is no one type of fiddler. Our sample was striking for its diversity. Given the sample size and the qualitative nature of the research, no strict claims can be made as to the statistical significance of patterns within the data and considerable caution should be exercised in relation to the inferences we have been able to draw. It should also be stressed that, given the sampling methods available to the research, it will not necessarily have provided a representative cross-section of the population engaged in benefit fraud (the composition of which is, in any event, unknown). None the less, the evidence gathered is sufficiently persuasive to allow us to suggest a number of apparent trends.
There were some important differences between fiddlers with regard to age, gender and ethnicity. We noted, for example, that older people, women and black people tended to be more anxious about fiddling, to have stronger attachments to the idea of the welfare state and rather clearer conceptions of the responsibilities of citizenship than did younger people, men and white people respectively. The nature and meaning of these differences are the subject of continuing more detailed analysis (and see, inter alia, Dean 1995).
The diversity of the sample was also reflected in other ways. For the purposes of understanding the behaviour of this group of social security claimants, the most significant variations between them appeared to relate, on the one hand to the extent to which they were 'reflexive' (i.e. to which they reflected upon and articulated the meaning of their fiddling), and on the other the extent of their anxiety (i.e. of their feelings of conflict and insecurity and/or their fears about the consequences of their fiddling).
As a preliminary exercise, a taxonomy consisting of four 'ideal types' has been constructed based upon the dimensions or axes of reflexivity and anxiety. Respondents were each assigned to the ideal-type group which seemed most appropriate and intelligible. The ideal-types, the descriptive labels for which are provisional, were as follows:
SELF-CONFIDENT PHILOSOPHERS CALCULATIVE WORRIERS HIGH REFLEXIVITY, LOW ANXIETY HIGH REFLEXIVITY, HIGH ANXIETY This group had the clearest This group, though able to (if sometimes complex) rationalise their fiddles, justifications for their felt vulnerable and were the fiddles,appeared to rationalise the most uncomfortable about the or resolve the conflicts risks or compromises of prin- they experienced. ciple entailed.
MACHO SURVIVORS UNREFLEXIVE OPPORTUNISTS LOW REFLEXIVITY, LOW ANXIETY LOW REFLEXIVITY, HIGH ANXIETY This group felt little need This group offered shallow or to justify their fiddles, incoherent justifications for holding simple (if internally their fiddles, which tended contradictory) views and to be compulsive or appearing immune to impulsive in nature - conflict or anxiety. to be stressful gambles.
Some fiddlers clearly do lack any sense of scruple, and there was within our sample a small unreflexive, self-confident, all-male group of eight respondents (five of whom had previously been involved in more 'serious' criminal activity), whom we have called the 'macho survivors'. However, as has been said, most claimants did experience at least some degree of anxiety. There was another group of eight respondents, whom we called 'unreflexive opportunists' for whom fiddling seemed to be a sort of gamble; part and parcel of the fatalism with which they engage with a life of uncertainty. There was then a small group of seven relatively articulate respondents, whom we called 'self-confident philosophers' for whom fiddling is, in one sense, a self-consciously subversive activity and a reaction to a sense of oppression: it should be stressed, however, that although members of this group articulated a definite sense of anger, none of them were especially radical figures. For all the other claimants in our sample fiddling was simply a calculated act of desperation: the largest group - twelve respondents - we called 'calculative worriers', since they were on the one hand reflexive and rational, but on the other highly anxious about their fiddling.
In constructing this taxonomy we were not seeking to emulate the work of Gerald Mars and his 'classification of fiddles' (1994: ch. 1). We had reached the view that Mars' analysis, which is concerned with workplace fiddling, has comparatively little direct application to an understanding of social security fiddling. Mars' classification of fiddles is a schema which stems, not from the interpretation of the differential experiences and understandings of fiddlers, but from the differential workplace situations in which workers find themselves and the opportunities for fiddling which these present. The benefits system cannot be equated with an employer since the payment of benefit on the basis of a statutory entitlement - a unilateral transaction between state and citizen - cannot be interpreted in the same light as a bilateral contractual transaction between employer and employee. Nor can the process of claiming and receiving social security benefits be equated with a workplace situation because, however rigorous the regime imposed by the benefits system, it cannot achieve the quotidian continuity of workplace culture. None the less, Mars' approach contains important insights and it is the dimensions upon which his classification is drawn which are of particular interest. The dimensions are the anthropological constructs - 'grid' and 'group', where grid refers to the extent to which social or organisational culture restricts an individual's autonomy; and group refers to the extent to which individuals' behaviour is constrained by their membership of a social group. His four ideal types, therefore, are:
VULTURES HAWKS WEAK GRID, STRONG GROUP WEAK GRID, WEAK GROUP Workers with transactional autonomy, Workers with transactional but overarching bureaucratic and operational autonomy. control/group support. Entrepreneurial operators.
WOLVES DONKEYS STRONG GRID, STRONG GROUP STRONG GRID, WEAK GROUP Workers with closely prescribed/ Workers who have both sub- stratified roles, working in ordinate and isolated, close-knit teams. undertaking routine,dis- crete and closely supervised tasks.
Mars assumes that workers' behaviour is objectively determined by their situation, and the grid/group dimensional analysis represents a situational parallel to our reflexivity/anxiety dimensional analysis. The strength of the cultural grid to which an individual is subject may be inversely related to her/his capacity for reflexivity: grid constrained fiddlers (wolves and donkeys), lacking the autonomy of more entrepreneurial fiddlers (vultures and hawks), are likely to adopt a certain indifference towards the institutions and processes through which their own and others' affairs are managed (ibid.: 221-3). The extent to which an individual is bound to a group is likely to be inversely related to the degree of anxiety or insecurity s/he experiences: isolated fiddlers (hawks and donkeys), who lack the support of group based fiddlers (vultures and wolves), are more vulnerable to conflict: it is more difficult for them to square the morality of their fiddling with the 'cosmology' of their working life (ibid.: 169-171).
Social security claimants are both 'grid' bound by the rules of the social security system and they are likely to be isolated from each other. We have seen that welfare fiddlers do tend at one and the same time to be indifferent to the higher workings of the system, yet also to be vulnerable to conflict or anxiety about their rule bending. However, there are circumstances in which some claimants can become relatively immune to benefit system surveillance and/or in which they may develop extensive support from social networks (Jordan et al 1992; Leonard 1994). Perhaps the most helpful aspect of Mars' study lies in his observations regarding the ways in which workers may resist change. For example, reforms of working practices which extinguish concealed (or even tacitly condoned) 'pilfering rights' for certain kinds of worker have often proved counterproductive in industrial relations terms: to predict workers' behaviour, it is necessary to have an understanding of their 'total rewards package', both legal and informal (ibid.: ch. 8). There is a sense in which, for social security claimants, the processes of resistance and change are the inverse of those Mars describes: the perceived erosion of rights to benefit might be reflected in the assertion of the equivalent of 'pilfering rights', as a way of re-establishing the 'total rewards package' to which claimants feel entitled. Mars' analysis speaks to questions of economic (or, at least, market) rationality and helps explain the dynamics of the processes by which ostensibly rational actors are 'morally transformed' by their material situation.
A quite different taxonomy of human behaviours has been offered by Ungerson and Baldock (1994). Ungerson and Baldock's analysis speaks to questions of welfare citizenship and is concerned, not with the effects of material situations, but with the effects of people's attitudes and beliefs about welfare, the state and the market. Once again, our taxonomy of benefit fiddlers in no way emulates that of Ungerson and Baldock, which addresses the different ways in which the users of community care are negotiating services in the emerging 'mixed economy' of social care. The provision of social security benefits can be equated with the provision of care services, but only in a limited sense. Although social security is being 'privatised' (through the promotion of various kinds of private insurance and pension provision and the introduction of statutory sick pay, statutory maternity pay and the child support scheme), basic social assistance provision remains axiomatically a state responsibility in which no 'mixed economy' operates. Nor can the process of claiming and receiving social security benefits be directly equated with that of seeking and obtaining social care provision. Social security and state-sponsored social care may each be subject to a means-test, but one is situated within a framework of conditions and entitlements, the other is situated within a framework based on the professional assessment of needs: 'fiddling' is not (at least at present!) an issue for social care.
The dimensions of Ungerson and Baldock's taxonomy are 'expectations' and 'participation'. Expectations are described in terms of how far people expect care to be provided from their own resources or from some kind of collective provision. Participation is described in terms of people's views of how active they should be in order to obtain services. Their four ideal types, therefore, are:
WELFARISM CLIENTALISM High Expectation, High Expectation, High Participation. Low Participation. Attitudes based in belief in Attitudes based on grateful welfare state and active and passive acceptance pursuit of entitlements. of state welfare.
CONSUMERISM PRIVATISM Low Expectation, Low Expectation, High Participation. Low Participation. Attitudes are sceptical Attitudes based on of welfare state. Active abhorence of 'dependency' readiness to exploit market and readiness passively to provision. accept market provision.
Ungerson and Baldock assume that service users' behaviour is normatively determined, that it will directly reflect opinions or ideals. The expectation/participation dimensional analysis therefore represents an attitudinal parallel to our reflexivity/anxiety dimensional analysis. The strength of a person's social democratic expectations is not necessarily directly related to the extent of her/his reflexivity (radical individualists may be highly reflexive), but arguably it will have bearing upon the breadth of her/his conceptual horizons. The strength of a person's willingness to participate in the process of obtaining services is likely to be inversely related to the degree of anxiety or insecurity s/he experiences, at least in so far that participation requires personal self-confidence and/or social support.
Ungerson and Baldock's contention is that consumerism represents the dominant ethos underpinning community care policy and that service users who subscribe to other sets of attitudes are under pressure to change. Those who subscribe to privatism tend to miss out on all forms of support, while those who subscribe to welfarism may disproportionately test the resources of a financially constrained public sector. Clientalism, though still the most common approach amongst older citizens, is increasingly inappropriate to the service regime of the mixed economy. Clientalism equates, up to a point, with the position of calculative worriers - the largest group in our sample of welfare fiddlers: this is the group which rationally justifies its needs and its expectations of the welfare state, but feels insecure in its pursuit of informal means of income support.
The change of ethos which has affected the sphere of means-tested social security provision, though similarly ideologically inspired, has not been in the direction of consumerism, but in the direction of retrenchment and deterrence (Andrews and Jacobs 1990; Dean 1991). It too requires people to change in ways which run 'against the grain' of dominant expectations by pressuring people into low-paid or uncongenial employment and/or into greater dependency on family, ex-partners or kin (Dean and Taylor-Gooby 1992). Ungerson and Baldock's analysis helps explain the dynamics of the process by which changes in welfare provision are likely to effect transformations of belief. Our reflexivity/anxiety taxonomy in contrast refers, not to the attitudes of welfare recipients, but to the experiences and understandings of welfare fiddlers, of people who are resisting the dominant ethos of state policy. The claimants in our sample may have had welfarist, clientalist, consumerist or privatist beliefs, but what has shaped their behaviour has been their unwillingness or inability to accept the living-standards and rules attaching to the receipt of social security benefits. Jordan and Redley have made the point, based on their interviews with both low and high income households, that social democratic discourses are still widely deployed in discussions over specific issues of public provision, but that most decisions about work and family welfare use other repertoires. (1994: 167) [emphasis added]
Jordan and Redley's thesis is that, for poor households in the 1980s and '90s, the 'hypercasualisation' of employment has interacted with complexity and rationing in the administration of means-tested benefits to generate particular kinds of survival strategy and 'cultures of resistance'. Our evidence supports the contention that there is a gap between people's expectations of the welfare state and the way in which their experience of it dictates their behaviour. Poor people on benefits can and do offer practical resistance to the increasing parsimony of the benefits system and the rigour of its rules. However, what we have not found any evidence for is a culture of resistance, for a systematic alternative value system.
Our taxonomy of fiddlers emerged from the data as what might justifiably be termed 'grounded theory' (Glaser and Straus 1967). It was not constructed as a taxonomy of differential resistance strategies informed by a putative counter-culture. None the less, it does help to explain the nature and extent of resistance by poor people to change. To pursue this, however, it is necessary to revisit an earlier theoretical analysis (Dean 1991) which draws on the work of Michel Foucault.
The basis for that analysis had been a re-examination of the history of the welfare state, not as a story of progress towards the development of universal social rights, but as a story of developing state power and increasingly sophisticated methods of social control. Administrative state power has had as much to do with the regulation of human behaviour as the 'dull compulsion' of economic forces. The development of welfare citizenship has involved new technologies of power and pervasive new disciplinary techniques. What is more, far from dismantling state power, recent policies of welfare retrenchment have often involved refinements to the disciplinary mechanisms which underpin our rights to welfare.
It is possible to identify three intersecting processes by which citizens of the modern welfare state have been constructed. First, there has been an historical process of transition 'from begging bowl to social wage' (ibid.: 37). In place of the indiscriminate giving of alms to the anonymous poor there has been erected the complex panoply of the welfare state. The settlement of the social wage functions to achieve social harmony by removing welfare from the political sphere of capital-labour relations and vesting it in technical administrative processes with the capacity to scrutinise and document individuals as 'clients' or 'cases'. Second, there has been an historical process of transition 'from corporal to pecuniary sanctions' (ibid.: 43). In place of random terror instilled by the public whipping and branding of vagrants there have emerged more discreet and less violent forms of coercion based on benefit penalties and disqualifications, the effectiveness of which depends upon the universal fear of predictable consequences. Third, there has been an historical process of transition 'from oppression to discipline' (ibid.: 51). In place of crude processes of classification and surveillance associated with the workhouse and the Poor Laws there have been constructed administrative systems based on legal definitions, regulations and a voluntaristic discourse of 'rights'. Confering social rights constructs the citizen as a welfare subject and it requires welfare subjects to submit themselves to more or less meticulous processes of classification and control through the exercise of such rights. It is the medium of welfare citizenship which sustains a visible and a manageable form of poverty in which 'the poor' remain subject to the dominant discourses and culture of a disciplinary society and indeed, by their very presence, help to sustain them.
Arising from this analysis there are three ways of thinking about benefit fraud. The first way in which fiddling can be understood is as defiance to the system's rule; as a rejection of the social wage and its associated terms and conditions; as resistance to the prevailing political settlement. The second way is as deviance; as the breaking of the rules of the system; as a failure of the efficacy of the penalties and sanctions by which rules are enforced. The third way would be as cultural resistance or counter-hegemony; as a fundamental failure of the disciplinary mechanisms by which claimants are isolated, individuated and accommodated; as the emergence of social practices beyond the scope of dominant discourse.
Here we have a three rather than a two dimensional theoretical model. The first two dimensions can be mapped on to the reflexivity and anxiety dimensions of our taxonomy of fiddlers; the third cannot. Recent reforms of the benefits system have been experienced by claimants as an erosion of the political settlement by which the social wage compensates for the diswelfares of capitalism and as a corresponding increase in the powers of benefit administrators. To resist that erosion and defy those powers clearly demands a degree of reflexivity; some element of political consciousness or sense that legitimate expectations have been betrayed. On the other hand, for claimants to become deviant and to break the rules requires that they should lack or suppress the fear upon which the efficacy of penalties and sanctions depends. What our findings have shown is that, with some of its claimants or subjects, the social security system is failing to sustain the degree of consent or complaisance, and/or the level of anxiety or insecurity that is necessary to the smooth running of the system. The ways in which individual claimants experience and understand the system are admittedly complex, but we do not seem to have detected any evidence for resistance in the third of the dimensions outlined above. Even the most 'subversive' fiddlers (those exhibiting high reflexivity and low anxiety) did not aspire to a different set of cultural values.
One respondent, a 24 year old African-Caribbean woman, had once held a reasonably paid clerical job and lived in her own flat but, since being made redundant had been forced to give up the flat and returned to live with her mother. She was claiming income support but, to pay off the debts she has built up, was also doing two part-time jobs - one as a cleaner the other as a shop assistant. So far as she is concerned 'they took enough money out of me, so I'm just getting some back'. The problem, however, is: 'social's not giving you the money for the standard of living now, today. They're not doing it, so the only other choice is either to work [i.e. while claiming] or crime, innit? .... they say, okay, social security have worked it out and this is what you need to live on. I think it's a damn cheek really to say I can live on every two weeks. .... No, its not right. .... so I'm not gonna like go by the rule. Its just a bit of extra money for me really. Not extra money where I'm gonna buy clothes, it helps pay my bills, every penny helps me right now.'
Her preoccupation was with finding a job that would pay as well as the one she had before. Fiddling social security was not what she wanted to do: 'if I found a full-time job now that paid me enough, I wouldn't sign on because its a waste of time, a waste of money. You don't get nothing, so its a waste of time signing on'. There are three things which can be said about this young woman's behaviour: first, it is ruthlessly rational; second, it is in part informed by normative beliefs in the contributory social security principle and the principle that benefits should be adequate to meet reasonable (as opposed to extravagant) needs; third, that it stems from cultural aspirations which are entirely conventional, being focused upon her wish for a well paid job and a contemporary life style.
This paper has argued, from the evidence of the authors' study, that social security benefit fraud, though economically rational, is motivated and constrained by factors which stem from contradictory expectations and beliefs. Claimants who 'fiddle' appear by and large to have expectations about the rewards to which they are entitled, but fears and beliefs which stem less from the values of welfare citizenship than from cultural values about work and consumption; values which require that a certain level of consumption be sustained through work of an acceptable qualitative and quantitative nature. We have sought to understand the behaviour of benefit fiddlers with regard to the intersecting dimensions of reflexivity and anxiety; dimensions which capture elements of the ways in which their thinking and feelings are constructed, both situationally and ideologically. This has revealed a diversity of patterns of resistance to change; resistance which is expressed both to the rule of the welfare state as a political entity and to the rules of the benefit system as a mechanism of control.
However, we have been unable to discover what might amount to a 'culture' of resistance. We would speculate that it is the absence of resistance in this third dimension - the dimension of individualised social discipline - which accounts both for fiddlers' diversity and for their conformity to the dominant discourses of work and consumption. The cacophony of attitudes and beliefs exhibited by the claimants we spoke to becomes more intelligible when the third dimension is brought into play. Though they were fiddling in a variety of keys, they were playing the same tune: their actions were dictated from a common score. (The pun is dreadful, but the metaphor is apposite.)
Whether benefit fraud is a problem depends upon your point of view. If a tacitly state subsidised, low paid, informal economic sector represents an acceptable way of keeping peripheral labour minimally economically active, without damaging people's commitment to work and customary consumption patterns, benefit fraud (providing it is ritually condemned) would not seem to be a problem, regardless of its actual extent. If on the other hand the benefit system were intended to provide an unequivocal guarantee of security and protection from exploitation, without damaging people's sense of social responsibility, benefit fraud would threaten the integrity of that system: there must be doubt, however, as to whether the benefit system has ever been allowed to fulfill such a function. All that does seem clear from the individual perpetrators whom we have interviewed is that benefit fraud is a problem for those who commit it, since it is by and large a stressful and unrewarding activity. Benefit fraud, therefore, does not necessarily represent a failure of the social security system. It could also represent a manageable kind of discord; a symbolicly significant component to the strategic orchestration of discipline in an increasingly polarised society.
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