There has been extensive concern about the effect of recession and of subsequent public spending austerity on the voluntary sector – but a lack of comprehensive sector-wide data to examine this empirically. We construct a unique longitudinal dataset, which follows through time the population of charitable organisations in England and Wales since 1999, and assess the impact of recession and austerity by placing organisations’ recent annual income within the context of longer-term trends. The results reveal the scale of the impact on charities’ incomes for the first time: since 2008 median real annual growth in income has been negative for six consecutive years, leading to sizeable cumulative real income decline over the period. Mid-sized charities, and those in more deprived local areas, have been most significantly affected, consistent with concerns about a ‘hollowing out’ of the charitable sector and about the uneven impact of austerity. However, there has also been considerable variation in the fortunes of charities working in different fields of activity. The analysis in this paper helps to widen our perspective on the implications of the Great Recession and of public spending austerity for social policy.

Policy perspectives of the European Union as well as those of member states currently link the concepts of social investment and social entrepreneurship in order to advocate both where and how to intervene. The argument of this article is that the explicit linking of these two notions, by policy-makers at several different levels and scales of authority, constitutes an emerging policy paradigm. The article identifies three characteristics of any paradigm, including that a policy paradigm must provide a perspective on the maintenance of the well-being of both society and individuals. Despite variation across countries and levels of authority (a characteristic of any paradigm) policy communities proffer the quasi-concepts of social investment and social entrepreneurship in combination as the appropriate ways to govern financing and the delivery of social investments. Therefore, social enterprises are targeted to receive public financing in order to deliver social investments in activation (training, employability, job support and wage supplements) as well as childcare. Reliance on this assemblage is documented across scales from the local through the national, transnational and international.

The importance of developing a system that is perceived to be ‘fair’ is a central element in debates about long-term care funding in the UK. It is therefore surprising that while previous research has established that older people tend to resent the idea of using housing equity, and other personal assets, it has often revealed little about the factors underpinning these attitudes or reflected on how they sit within a wider frame of social and political norms. Drawing on 60 semi-structured in-depth interviews with older home owners who have released equity from their homes, this paper explores why people feel that it is fair, or unfair, to require owners to use their housing equity to fund long-term care needs, once factors like reluctance to trade on the home, and mistrust of equity release products, have been excluded. While a small majority of our participants considered it unfair, a substantial minority thought it fair that they were required to use their accumulated housing equity to meet care needs. This distribution of attitudes enabled us to explore the reasons why participants held each view, and so reflect on the impact of pro-social and pro-individual norms in shaping attitudes towards intra-generational fairness and ideas about ‘responsible citizenship’. Our analysis posits that the factors that shape attitudes toward using housing assets to pay for care, and their relationship to the wider rhetorical framework of asset accumulation, management and decumulation, have been misunderstood by policy makers. We discuss the implications of our findings for policies that seek to promote the development of a housing-asset based care funding system capable of attracting widespread support.

Governments are increasingly implementing policies that encourage early father-infant bonding. However, to date, research has not systematically examined fathers’ perspectives and experiences of early bonding. Using a social constructionist embodiment perspective we argue that paternal bonding is best conceived as a process of repeated, embodied performances that are shaped by gendered parenting discourses. Drawing on 100 semi-structured interviews with a diverse group of Australian fathers of young infants, we argue that most men believe they are capable of developing early strong bonds. They assume that bonding is a product of spending sufficient time with a child, irrespective of the parent's gender. In contrast, a sizable minority of fathers assert that physiology means fathers are ‘largely useless’ to very young infants, and tend to remain distant in the early months. We conclude that social policies promoting early paternal bonding must engage with and challenge gendered/physiological discourses.

The sizeable presence of migrant care workers in the private care market in many European countries is confirmed by several studies that have explained the phenomenon through functional arguments, stressing the economic convenience of transnational markets and the crucial role played by public regulation. This paper focuses instead on the public and institutional discourses that have contributed to legitimising this private care market, characterised by the worsening of employment conditions and the decrease in care quality. The main argument of this paper is that the social recognition of these workers provides the public with the new concepts and rationales that determine the actual shape of the private care market.

Migrant care workers are usually, compared to other migrant workers, more welcome in the host society and less targeted by xenophobic attitudes, especially where their labour helps to meet a lack of public provision as is happening in Southern European countries. Nevertheless, their rights are not fully granted either as citizens or as workers: basic requirements in this migrant care market include for instance reduced wages, great flexibility, and informal contracts.

Our hypothesis is tested through the reconstruction of the public regulation and a content analysis of the public discourse that has accompanied this regulation for ten years (2002–2012) in Italy. The two main national newspapers have been taken into account. This analysis provides evidence on how market dynamics have been shaped by a deliberate political construction, which has relieved governments of the task of finding a public solution to care needs and has relegated migrant care workers to a subordinate social position, which is functional in making the care market work.

Of all the social sciences, social policy is one of the most obviously policy-orientated. One might, therefore, expect a research and funding agenda which prioritises and rewards policy relevance to garner an enthusiastic response among social policy scholars. Yet, the social policy response to the way in which major funders and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) are now prioritising ‘impact’ has been remarkably muted. Elsewhere in the social sciences, ‘research impact’ is being widely debated and a wealth of concerns about the way in which this agenda is being pursued are being articulated. Here, we argue there is an urgent need for social policy academics to join this debate. First, we employ interviews with academics involved in health inequalities research, undertaken between 2004 and 2015, to explore perceptions, and experiences, of the ‘impact agenda’ (an analysis which is informed by a review of guidelines for assessing ‘impact’ and relevant academic literature). Next, we analyse high- and low-scoring REF2014 impact case studies to assess whether these concerns appear justified. We conclude by outlining how social policy expertise might usefully contribute to efforts to encourage, measure and reward research ‘impact’.

This article critically reflects on the administration of activation services in the UK. It describes the welfare-to-work quasi-market and focuses on the impact of 2008 commissioning reforms that advocated amalgamating small contracts into larger ‘lots’, creating a top tier of prime providers to manage subcontractors, and increasing outcome-based funding. Drawing on transaction cost theory and empirical case study research, it is demonstrated that these changes led to an increase in a range of activities and costs for competing service providers that undermine government rhetoric of choice and efficiency. This article adds to the existing literature on welfare-to-work contracting by demonstrating the difficulties some organisations face in the context of welfare markets and questioning public service out-sourcing processes. It concludes by reflecting on the implications for future market-based social policy reforms.

The way that welfare policies influence the interpretative processes of social actors is attracting increasing attention. In this article, we investigate policy change impacts on ideas mothers have about the best form of care for their children. The data are taken from representative surveys among mothers of preschool-age children in 2002 and 2010 in Norway. The surveys cover a decade of marked reforms in childcare services with regard to the supply of places, parents’ fees and the right to be given a place in care. Policy change gave rise to major shifts in attitude. From conditional attitudes to the suitability of institutional care, the majority view shifted towards ‘childcare services only’ being considered the best form of care for preschool-age children. This occurred among mothers in all socio-economic groups and in all parts of the country. Based on policy feedback theories, mechanisms likely to have caused this shift – policy visibility, proximity and timing – are considered.

The concept of commissioning has risen in prominence in recent years as a result of ongoing reforms to the funding and delivery of public services in the UK. The model of commissioning constructed by policy has however been overlaid on existing practices, which themselves differ between different service areas. This paper, focusing on commissioning of third sector organisations (TSOs) in the field of community mental health services, shows that its introduction has not led to the straightforward public sector ‘marketisation’ that advocates desire or that critics fear. Instead, commissioning has led to an indeterminate outcome or ‘halfway house’ position in which the status and role of commissioning remains somewhat muddled – both internally to participants within public sector organisations and externally in terms of the experience of the interface by TSOs. We found that commissioning as it is actually practiced remains contested and political – it is a highly relational process dependent on personal practices and skills and on personal relationships between stakeholders – and is therefore not fully managerialised or marketised. This has implications for the policy and practice of commissioning and the interpretation of more ‘open’ public services.