This book breaks some new ground by discussing social control issues across a variety of social policy domains, against a backdrop of major welfare restructuring under the UK coalition government and its immediate predecessors. There have been considerable challenges for the authors in trying to grasp and interpret coalition plans and programmes that were developing at speed on numerous fronts, and were still being elaborated as chapters were completed. We hope that discussions contain relatively few misunderstandings on details, but if there are limitations then these may reflect the difficulties of hitting what was sometimes a ‘moving target’, alongside the inevitable implications of compression when describing complex situations. Chapter drafts were being finalised variously from late 2012 through to the early months of 2013, and editing and selective updating then followed.

As authors chose their own conceptual frameworks and lines of argument, there is considerable variety in approaches and foci. While some passages refer to overtly oppressive disciplinary practices, others touch upon milder persuasions such as the responsibilisation inherent in some user participation arrangements. We hope that diversity of styles and scope will help make the book interesting to a range of readers. Authors were invited to create one or more summary boxes within their chapters to give swift impressions of content or themes, but these complement rather than replace the main texts. As editors, we also encouraged contributors to include appropriate sources that supplemented conventional academic ones or their own research findings. Thus, newspaper and website commentaries and reports are sometimes referred to where offering suitable illustrations or highlighting recent situations. Individual authors take responsibility for their own chapters, although we have encouraged reference to some general themes.

We are grateful to the many people who have encouraged this enterprise. Valued support has come from the publishers and the School of Sociology and Social Policy at Leeds. The reviewers appointed by Policy Press provided numerous useful suggestions. On behalf of all the authors, we also want to thank friends, colleagues, partners and other family members who have assisted or made space for the writing. An endnote to Chapter One mentions specific help generously given by Peter Dwyer, John Flint, Judy Nixon and Emma Wincup at an important stage.