Housing research has yet to achieve an adequate framework to guide research into the effects of social policy. Two concepts are outlined and used in this article to analyse one local housing market; it is hoped that these will prove generally useful. The concepts are ‘housing status group’ (a modification of Rex and Moore's ‘housing classes’ model), and ‘housing pathway’, which refers to the structure of housing careers. In a low-cost study of a large sample of child-bearing families in Aberdeen, the relationship between housing tenure and occupational class, family size, and experience of housing deprivation is explored. Five principles of the local housing market's operation are abstracted by use of the status group approach, and three main housing pathways are identified. Data are presented which show that the chance of encountering bad housing conditions is strongly correlated with tenure, and that in turn, access to types of tenure is strictly rule-restricted. The local housing market appears to be rigidly stratified, with housing status groups re-inforcing other patterned social conditions, and housing pathways which are sharply differentiated. Because of this, the authors argue for a ‘constraint’ model of family housing experience which can be integrated into a general sociological theory of structured social inequality.

Between 2003 and 2005, German labour market policy was subjected to the most far-reaching reform since the 1960s. Some commentators have interpreted the changes introduced as signalling a departure from the traditional ‘Bismarckian’ paradigm in German social policy. For others, the new legislation has contributed and consolidated an ever-more pervasive trend of dualisation within the German welfare state. In this article, we contest both interpretations. First, we demonstrate that traditional social insurance principles remain a dominant element within unemployment protection. Second, we show that German labour market policy is less rather than more segmented today than it was a decade ago.

This article argues that constructions of social phenomena in social policy and welfare scholarship think about the subjects and objects of welfare practice in essentialising ways, with negativistic effects for practitioners working in ‘regulatory’ contexts such as housing and homelessness practice. It builds into debates about power, agency, social policy and welfare by bringing psychosocial and feminist theorisations of relationality to practice research. It claims that relational approaches provide a starting point for the analysis of empirical practice data, by working through the relationship between the individual and the social via an ontological unpicking and revisioning of practitioners' social worlds.

Under New Labour, partnerships have emerged to become a central mechanism of service delivery in social policy. In response to this development, a number of papers and texts have appeared that have questioned the claims made for the benefits of partnerships by politicians and policy makers. In particular, the gap between the rhetoric of inclusiveness and the practice of exclusion in partnership working has been highlighted. However, as pertinent as these insights are, it is argued here that extant research into partnerships in social policy remains theoretically undeveloped, characterised by one-sided approaches that either lack critical edge or are dismissive of the potential of partnership working. What is required is an approach that addresses the deeper contradictions of partnerships in social policy and the structuring relations of power underpinning the conceptions of partnerships. Drawing on key concepts in social and political theory, this article proposes a theoretical framework that focuses on the dynamic and contextual nature of partnership. In short, a differentiated theory of partnership is offered as a means of facilitating a more realistic understanding of the limits and possibilities of partnership working. A case study on partnerships in sport policy is used to illustrate the analysis.

Debates about the meaning of citizenship have grown since the election of the first New Labour government. These debates have tended to focus on the government's assertion of the central role of work in defining the status of citizen, a stance which has increasingly been criticised for devaluing unpaid work such as caring or volunteering. However, the position of those beyond labour market age – older people – has rarely been examined in relation to how citizenship might be defined. At the same time, the concept of social exclusion, heavily utilised by New Labour to characterise those at the margins of society, has at best an ambiguous relevance to older people. This article, based on an exploration of the social, financial and other impacts of additional benefit income for older people, examines how these two concepts might be understood in relation to the position of older people and sketches out what some of the defining characteristics of citizenship might be for them.

This study analyses the links between family policy institutions and poverty in households with pre-school children in 21 old and new welfare democracies. New institutional information which enables a separation of different family policy dimensions is combined with micro data from the Luxembourg Income Study. Through statistical multilevel modelling, individual- and country-level data are combined in a simultaneous analysis of their relationships to child poverty risks. The results show that family policy transfers are related to lower child poverty risks at the micro level. However, the mechanisms by which such transfers reduce poverty vary by type of family support. Support to dual-earner families operates by enabling both parents to work and raise market income, while support to more traditional family structures in some instances has a more direct effect on poverty risks. The analysis also renders support to the hypothesis that dual-earner transfers also alleviate poverty most effectively among single-mother households.

Using data from the 1980 General Household Survey, differences in the provision of statutory domiciliary services to disabled elderly people are explored. Domiciliary services vary in their degree of ‘substitutability’, that is, in the extent to which the care may be performed either by state services or by other members of the elderly person's household. Domestic support services are substitutable by any available carer; personal health and hygiene services are partially substitutable depending on the relationship between the carer and the cared for; and medical services are not substitutable by informal carers. The paper shows that discrimination by statutory services against women carers is dependent primarily on the household composition of the elderly person rather than on gender per se. Taking into account the level of disability of the elderly person, younger ‘single’ women carers receive no less support than ‘single’ men carers, but carers who are married women under 65 obtain the least domestic and personal health care support. Carers who are elderly receive more support than carers under 65. Among disabled elderly people who live alone, men receive somewhat more domestic and personal health services than women.

This article explores the interplay between state formation and voluntary action in order to describe and understand the changing scope and type of voluntary activities and the varying role of the voluntary sector. It does so by following voluntary human service organisations within the sector of social welfare in Denmark over a period of 150 years. Four different phases of voluntary-state relationships are identified. The first phase of liberal social policy supported a dual model with a strong call for self-help and philanthropic initiatives. The next phase, in which social rights and public responsibility gradually were introduced and expanded, supported a collaborative model with a strong public–private partnership. The third phase, in which the idea of a universalistic welfare state dominated, tended to marginalise voluntary service production but strengthen interest representation. Finally, the fourth phase, in which heavy critique was thrust upon the welfare state, opened up new spaces for voluntary organisations to assume civil obligations.

The new social policy demonstrates its theoretical concern with the relations between the welfare services, the economy and the state. This new found political economy of welfare leaves behind the micro-concerns of the Titmuss paradigm. Through a critical re-examination of Titmuss, the article, while welcoming the research programme of the new social policy, urges that the specific strength of the old (especially so far as women are concerned) is not prematurely abandoned. In a period of economic and political crisis, where the state is actively restructuring the provision of welfare, detailed and systematical analyses of the implications of this process for both class and gender are urgently required. The need for work on gender is underlined because of the sex blindness of influential Liberal and Left theoretical writings. It is not that such theorists are unfriendly to feminist work but rather that it stands ‘outside’ their explanation. The need to reconceptualize welfare as a service provided primarily by the paid and unpaid labour of women remains.

Teenage pregnancy rates are extremely high in the UK and extremely low in The Netherlands. Sex education is acknowledged to be a determining factor. While it is by no means the most important factor, it provides a useful comparative lens through which to examine the very different approaches of the British and Dutch to policy-making in this sensitive area.

The issue of sex education is controversial in both the UK and The Netherlands, but while the political debate has been fierce in the UK it has been largely absent in The Netherlands. Our research used documentary sources and interviews to investigate the recent history of policy-making on sex education at the central government level; compared a selection of key texts used in secondary schools; and drew on exploratory fieldwork in three English and three Dutch secondary schools. We find that the approach to the issue is in large part determined by the struggle over ideas in respect of the wider issues of change in the family and sexuality. We suggest that the adversarial nature of the politics of sex education in England and Wales results in a message that lacks coherence, which is in turn reflected in what happens in the classroom. We do not advocate any simple attempt at ‘policy borrowing’, but rather highlight the importance of understanding the differences in the nature and conduct of the debate.

European welfare states are cutting back their responsibilities for long-term care, emphasising ‘self-reliance’ and replacing care as an entitlement of citizenship with targeted services. But we do not know how former long-term care recipients cope with retrenchment and if they are able to negotiate support from their family and friends. Through an analysis of 500 telephone interviews and thirty face-to-face interviews with long-term care recipients facing reduced care rights in the Netherlands, we found that disabled and elderly persons resist increased dependence on their personal networks. Most clients who face reduced access to public long-term care do not seek alternative help despite their perceived need for it, and feel trapped between the policy definition of self-reliance and their own ideals of autonomy.

Within Europe, the Norwegian and English welfare states represent two different welfare regimes. Due to common demographic challenges of an ageing population as well as grass- roots pressures, particularly from disabled people, significant changes in the delivery of long-term care services for older and disabled people have taken place. This article focuses on the change towards personalisation policies encouraging greater choice and control in regard to care services, and uses the case of ‘cash-for-care’, which gives people an allocation of funding to meet their needs, to discuss conditions and implications of personalisation policies within different contexts. Based on a theoretical framework exploring a democratic and a market discourse of personalisation policies, the article provides a comparative analysis of the Norwegian and English cash-for-care schemes. While a crucial common change in the public sector's role towards at-arm’s-length long-term care services occurred, significant differences remain: while English residents are given greater choice and control from the beginning of the allocation of cash-for-care they also face more insecure circumstances due to the simultaneously stimulated care provider market. The Norwegian case, however, shows a possibility of increasing choice and control without a large diversity in a care provider market.

Based on the theory of Transitional Labour Markets (TLM), this article derives normative criteria for ‘active ageing’. We argue why and under what conditions more employment for older people can help to improve their quality of life and can thus be considered an important part of future social policy. To this end, the article presents a brief review of the employment situation of older workers (aged 55–64) in the different European countries so as to identify what precisely might be required at the level of labour market policy. It systematically discusses the promoting and inhibiting factors behind the significant variation in the employment of older workers across Europe, and tests their explanatory value in a simple statistical model. Finally, we put the quantitative evidence into the perspective of policy examples, summing up some general strategies for ‘active ageing’.

A paradigm shift in pension policy decided by the German red–green coalition government will considerably affect the level and structure of pension benefits as well as the mix of public and private old-age security arrangements. The article starts with a brief outline of the pension schemes as they had been designed before the recent decisions, and with a few remarks on the reasons for current reform debates. The major measures of the 2001 Pension Reform are then described. The focus of the article is on the effects of the reform for (personal) income distribution and institutional design. A partial shift from (mandatory) public (pay-as-you-go financed) pensions to (voluntary) private (capital-funded) pensions and from defined benefit towards defined contribution will, among other things, reduce the benefit level in the social pension insurance. A large number of contributors – even after many years of paying contributions – will only receive benefits below the social assistance level. It can be expected that this development will transform the present earnings-related statutory pension scheme – which has a strong contribution–benefit link and is aimed at income smoothing over the lifecycle – into a basic, highly redistributive pension scheme, aimed mainly at avoiding poverty. Income inequality in old age is expected to increase as a result of the new strategy in pension policy.

This article recounts the methodological story of a qualitative research project that investigated the work of the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain and the news media's deconstruction of the Commission's report – the Parekh Report – which was published on 11 October 2000. Our project used a multi-method fieldwork approach, combining textual analysis of news media coverage and the extensive documentary archives of the Commission, along with semi-structured interviews with Commissioners and other figures involved in the publication of the Report. The article attempts to offer a reflexive account of the experiences of interviewing a particular public policy-making elite and examines how a particular ‘public trauma’ – that is, the damaging political fall-out of extremely negative news media coverage of the Parekh Report – inflected our research encounters. We argue that the openness with which many of the participants spoke about this traumatic experience suggests that the production of policy documents can constitute highly emotional labour for participants. We extend this argument by examining how this openness also reveals the instabilities and uncertainties of power within the research interviewee/interviewer relationship. In this way the article seeks to contribute to debates about the problems of defining the category ‘elites’ in both public policy and social research worlds.

This article examines police complaints reform in England and Wales during the course of the last 40 years. In that time, four separate complaints systems have been in operation and each has been established at the end of a reform cycle characterised by stages of mounting public concern, appointment of formal inquiries, the legislative process and inception. Recurrent themes identified over the decades have been the trend towards independence, under-representation of complainants’ interests, the longevity of the reform process, and changing police priorities. It is argued that marginalisation of complainants’ interests in the reform process is the principal reason for the endurance of the police complaints problematic.

This article describes trends in Dutch (un)employment from the 1980s onwards, it reviews activation measures that were taken in the field of social security and labour market policies, and it critically discusses the successfulness of these measures. It concludes that it may not be justified to attribute the ‘Dutch miracle’ – the recent decrease in unemployment and the explosive growth of employment – directly to the measures taken, and that activation policies have endangered social rights and citizenship, especially of those groups which traditionally are most vulnerable. The ‘Dutch miracle’ is further put into the perspective of a small employment growth in terms of the total of hours worked annually, the large proportion of part-time employment, and the large degree of hidden unemployment. If a future recession hits the Netherlands, the miracle will turn into a nightmare for many due to the significant overall loss of social protection.

The basic income (BI) scheme is a fundamental reform of the welfare state that has recently gained widespread attention. Proposals for different variants of BI schemes have emerged to account for varying political and societal goals. This study investigates what citizens think about the idea of a BI, and to what extent citizens’ perceptions depend on the exact design of such a scheme and the context in which this policy is embedded. Empirically, we rely on conjoint experiments conducted in Finland and Switzerland – the two countries in which the introduction of a BI scheme has recently been discussed most intensely. We find that the level of public support for BI is higher in Finland than it is in Switzerland. Moreover, despite the contrasting designs of the BI proposals in the two countries, both Finnish and Swiss citizens tend to favor more generous schemes restricting non-nationals’ access to the provision.

This article presents a series of measures of the extent to which social policies in twenty-one OECD countries are oriented towards the support of elderly (over 65 or in formal retirement) and non-elderly (under 65 and not retired) population groups. Employing breakdowns by age in spending on social insurance, education and health, tax expenditures on welfare substituting goods, and housing policy outcomes, this article shows that countries tend to demonstrate a consistent age-orientation across a variety of policy areas and instruments. After correcting for the demographic structure of the population, Greece, Japan, Italy, Spain and the United States have the most elderly-oriented social policy regimes, while the Netherlands, Ireland, Canada and the Nordic countries have a more age-neutral repertoire of social policies. In identifying the age-orientation of social policy as a dimension of distributive politics that is not captured by other welfare state typologies, this article suggests the need to develop new accounts of the development of welfare states that include the dimension of age.

In popular and political debate there is currently a theme which dominates discussion about the family and this is the theme of decline and destabilisation caused by the rise of individualism and lack of moral fibre. There is a wishful thinking intrinsic to these debates in which it is hoped that the family can be returned to an idealised state, unaffected by other social changes. Recent sociological work on the family interprets changes to family life rather differently and therefore offers an important counter-discourse. Although there are certain limitations to the new theoretical work on the family provided by Giddens and Beck, it is argued here that their work provides a broad understanding of change which is not reducible to individual motivations and moral decline. These perspectives are particularly important at a time when family law is engineering policies to change the very nature of post-divorce family life. Because these changes are based on a narrow understanding of change, it is suggested that they amount to harmful tinkerings which misconstrue the wider context within which families are being transformed.