Theoretical Framework, Literature Review, and Contributions

The chapter establishes a theoretical justification and identifies gaps in the literature to formulate the two research questions of the study. It also explains the study’s contributions attained through answering the research questions. The chapter organisation is as follows: part one of the chapter provides the theoretical framework guiding this study. This part starts with a discussion on the Esping-Andersen’s seminal work entitled “Three worlds of welfare capitalism”, followed by a critique on his work. Later, this part describes how Gough et al. extended Esping-Andersen’s work to develop a global welfare regime framework for examining social policy outside high income industrialized countries. The global welfare regime theoretical framework is discussed in order to identify the role of the community within the institutional responsibility matrix (IRM) in shaping the welfare outcomes. This will provide a theoretical justification for the formulation of the first research question, i.e. the role of religious organizations, a form of community, in realizing the welfare needs of the poor in a developing country context. Part two of the chapter provides a literature review on the welfare regime framework to identify gaps in the literature and to develop two research questions. The last part of the chapter offers the contributions of the research.