It established a status quo, which set the limits within which the competing power blocs could compromise and reach a negotiated agreement over what and how, and by whom and for whom, welfare services and benefits were delivered. The term "settlement" in this context describes complex compromises and negotiated positions reached by the competing and most powerful groups in society. Therefore "settlement" should not be understood as implying that the frameworks through which state-controlled welfare was delivered were fully fixed and agreed by all. "Settlement" implies a set of arrangements that create a temporary period of stability, even while they remain, contested. As such, some groups will be marginalized or excluded in the negotiating process and have their welfare needs ignored by state-organised institutions or have them met in a stigmatised way. .
The organizational settlement was conceptualised by Clarke, Cochrane and Mc Laughlin (eds, 1994, quoted in Hughes 1998). The post-war organisational settlement resulted in bureau-professionalism being the dominant means of co-ordination in the operation of the welfare state. The implications of the organizational settlement as reflected in the social settlement were that recipients of welfare services were socially constructed as passive, deferential and dependent. This is because the role of the state was socially constructed as paternalistic and its bureaucrats and professionals were seen as the powerful experts whose expertise in decision-making could not be challenged. .
The demographics of the immediate post-war period suggested a specific picture of the UK population. It assumed a society composed of white nuclear families, headed by a wage-earning father with a job for life and a mother at home looking after the children. Consequently in the Beveridgean social welfare settlement the normal citizen was socially constructed as the employed, married, white, able-bodied, insured male worker.