Despite the existence of sex discrimination legislation certain social policies appear to militate against equal opportunities between the sexes. Community care policies are a case in point, especially with current interest shifting towards ‘care by the community’, and the presumed existence of ‘informal caring networks’, with a view to their effective mobilization at a time of cutbacks both in public expenditure and in domiciliary social service provision for groups such as the handicapped and the elderly. To the extent that community care policies rely on women's unpaid domestic labour and may necessitate their withdrawal from the labour market, such policies could be counter-productive to the promotion of ‘equal opportunities’. The challenge is to devise community care policies which do not disadvantage women and which give men ‘equal opportunities’ to take on caring roles usually assigned to women.

The centrality of patient choice in the recent political rhetoric of both New Labour and the Conservative Party has prompted a renewed interest in the shift towards a more consumerist conception of health care in the UK. Accordingly, this article reports on early findings from a project in the ESRC/AHRB Cultures of Consumption Programme, exploring how the ‘consumer’ is constituted in narratives of health reform, and the ways in which policy documents present a particular image of the consumer as a rationale for institutional and cultural change. The article then goes on to look at the ways in which service delivery organisations have responded to New Labour's consumerist imperative. Drawing upon a series of interviews with senior health care managers in two case study locations, the article highlights ways in which choice, responsibility and empowerment have become critical points at which a consumerist orientation is articulated with established professional cultures, and how health organisations have experienced – and attempted to resolve – the tensions that result.

The concept of institutional racism re-emerged in political discourse in the late 1990s after a long hiatus. Despite it initially seeming pivotal to New Labour's reform of policing and the antecedent of a new race equality agenda, it has remained a contested concept that has been critiqued by multiple constituencies. This paper notes the ambiguities and contradictions of the concept and considers its validity as an explanatory concept for long-observed ethnic inequalities in educational attainment and stop and search. In so doing, it argues for its retention, but only within a multilevel framework that incorporates racialisations operating at the micro, meso and macro levels.

Socioeconomic inequalities in health have moved up the policy agenda of older industrial societies. The paper turns the spotlight on this development by exploring how the goal has been represented in England's national policy documents. Rather than one approach, there appears to be a range of understandings of what it means to tackle health inequalities. These understandings can be placed on a continuum, which runs from improving the health of poor groups, through closing the health gaps between those in the poorest circumstances and better-off groups, to addressing the association between socioeconomic position and health across the population. The paper points to common ground between the three approaches to tackling health inequalities, but also to important differences in the moral arguments and causal models on which they rest, and therefore in their policy goals and anticipated policy impacts.

Gender equity and its effects on fertility vary across socio-political contexts, particularly when comparing less with more developed economies. But do subtle differences in equity within more similar contexts matter as well? Here we compare Italy and Spain, two countries with low fertility levels and institutional reliance on kinship and family, but with employment equity among women during the 1990s slightly greater in Italy than Spain. The European Community Household Panel is used to explore the effect of this difference in gender equity on the likelihood of married couples having a second birth during this time period. Women's hours of employment reduce the birth likelihood in both countries, but non-maternal sources of care offset this effect to different degrees. In Spain, private childcare significantly increases birth likelihood, whereas in Italy, father's greater childcare share increases the likelihood, particularly among employed women. These results suggest that increases in women's employment equity increase not only the degree of equity within the home, but also the beneficial effects of equity on fertility. These equity effects help to offset the negative relationship historically found between female employment and fertility.

This article seeks to evaluate how well the different welfare states of Europe perform in terms of preventing recurrent and persistent income poverty and what household and individual characteristics influence poverty duration. Because we use cross-national data on longitudinal poverty, we are able to increase our understanding of the effect of the institutional context within which poverty occurs. We show that country welfare regimes strongly influence long-run poverty, with social democratic countries reducing the level of persistent and recurrent poverty. Liberal and Southern European regime countries have both higher rates and longer durations of poverty. Despite their dissimilar patterns of poverty duration, European welfare states display rather similar patterns of exit from poverty, once we control for duration. There is some evidence that high initial exit rates from poverty in social democratic and corporatist countries decrease quickly whereas those in liberal and Southern European countries remain high, which could suggest lower levels of incentives in the former.

Ringen has advocated the use of both income and deprivation criteria in identifying those excluded from society due to lack of resources, a widely accepted definition of poverty. We illustrate with Irish data how this might be done, paying particular attention to how appropriate indicators of deprivation are to be selected. The results show that employing both income and deprivation criteria rather than income alone can make a substantial difference to both the extent and composition of measured poverty. This highlights the restrictive nature of poverty conceived in terms of exclusion rather than minimum rights to resources.

The role of the emotions in the framing of welfare policies is still relatively underexplored. This article examines the role of resentment in the construction of a particular form of ‘anti-welfare populism’ advanced by the Coalition Government in the UK after 2010. We argue that UK political parties have appropriated the discourse of fairness to promote fundamentally divisive policies which have been popular with large sections of the electorate including, paradoxically, many poorer voters. In focus group research in white working class communities in the UK undertaken just before the 2010 General Election, resentments related to perceived unfairness and loss emerged as very strong themes among our respondents. We examine such resentments in terms of an underlying ‘structure of feeling’ which fuels the reactionary populism seen in ‘anti-welfare’ discourses. These promote increasingly conditional and punitive forms of welfare in countries experiencing austerity, such as the UK, creating rivalries rather than building solidarities amongst those who ‘have little’ and drawing attention away from greater inequalities.

The population of refugees in the UK is expanding and will expand further given the UK Government's response to the European refugee crisis. This paper breaks new ground by undertaking a gender analysis of integration outcomes across a range of areas, namely social networks, language proficiency, health, education, employment and housing, that are highly relevant for social policy. Using the UK's only longitudinal survey on refugees, we conduct secondary data analysis to examine the factors associated with integration outcomes. We find significant gender differences in language, self-reported health, ability to budget for household expenses and access to formal social networks and quality housing, with women generally faring worse than men and some inequalities enduring or intensifying over time. We call for the recording of refugee outcomes in institutional monitoring data to enable inequalities to be identified and addressed. The findings also enable the identification of social policy areas in which a gender sensitive approach might be necessary.

This article analyses recent developments in policies to promote the employability of unemployed and economically inactive people in the UK. It discusses the extent to which these policies reflect the dominant approaches of ‘Work First’, where programmes focus mainly on compulsory job search and short-term interventions to facilitate a quick return to work, or human capital development (HCD), where programmes tailor services to promote longer-term skills and personal development. Specifically, the article reports on case-study research into two recent pilot initiatives: Working Neighbourhoods (which targeted a range of intensive services in neighbourhoods characterised by high levels of inactivity) and Pathways to Work (which combines employability services and cognitive behaviour therapy-type approaches to help clients to manage health problems). While both pilots have retained strong Work First features, they potentially represent a shift towards a more HCD-oriented approach, through the delivery of more holistic ‘coping and enabling’ services. However, there remain concerns that, as with previous progressive policy initiatives, the positive lessons of these pilots will not be fully mainstreamed. We conclude that, if the UK is to balance Work First compulsion with high-quality services delivering progress in the labour market and HCD, a strengthening of ‘coping and enabling’ interventions is required, alongside a renewed commitment to training.

Authors such as Dryzek, Gough and Meadowcroft have indicated that social-democratic welfare states could be in a better position to deal with development of the ‘green’ or ‘eco’ state, and the intersection of social and environmental policies, than conservative or liberal welfare regimes (synergy hypothesis). However, this hypothesis has as yet not been examined in comparative empirical research. Based on comparative empirical data from EUROSTAT, the World Bank, the OECD, the Global Footprint Network and the International Social Survey Programme, we are carrying out two research operations: First, by applying correspondence analysis, we contrast the macro-structural welfare and sustainability indicators of thirty countries and ask whether clusters largely follow the synergy hypothesis. Second, we raise the issue of whether differences in the institutional and organisational capabilities of combining welfare with environmental policies are reflected in people's attitudes and opinions. With regard to the first issue, our results suggest that there is no ‘automatic’ development of the ecostate based on already existing advanced welfare institutions. Representatives of all welfare regimes are spread across established, deadlocked, failing, emerging and endangered ecostates. As for the second issue, the results are mixed. While responses to the statements ‘economic growth always harms the environment’ and ‘governments should pass laws to make ordinary people protect the environment, even if it interferes with people's rights to make their own decisions’ did not vary according to welfare regimes, people from social-democratic countries expressed more often than average their willingness to accept cuts in their standard of living in order to protect the environment.

It is commonly argued that council housing in Britain is becoming a residual service. This paper explores the various dimensions of residualization such as the size of the council house sector, the quality of the service, the characteristics of tenants and the nature of the stock. Whilst changes in these areas are significant it is suggested that we must look beyond housing processes to fully understand the downgrading of council housing. Specifically it is argued that explanations must take account of questions of economic and political powerlessness, the marginalization of certain sections of the working class from the labour market and the uneven impact of the recession.

Paradoxically, the focus on teen motherhood as an object of concern in the West has coincided with declining rates of teen birth. This suggests that the view of teenage motherhood as problematic is underpinned by changing social and political imperatives regarding the role of women in these countries. This article examines the literature surrounding teenage motherhood from the United States, United Kingdom and New Zealand, and explores the way in which normative perceptions of motherhood have shifted over the past few decades to position teenage mothers as stigmatised and marginalised. Two specific discourses – those of welfare dependency and social exclusion – are highlighted, and their mediation through scientific discourses examined. The increasing trend to evidence-based policy development has masked the ideological basis of much policy in this area and highlights the importance of critical evaluation of the discourses surrounding teenage motherhood. A critical examination of the literature suggests that teenage mothers are vilified, not because the evidence of poor outcomes for teen mothers and their children is particularly compelling, but because these young women resist the typical life trajectory of their middle-class peers which conforms to the current governmental objectives of economic growth through higher education and increased female workforce participation.

The idea of the welfare state is commonly grounded in the principles of social rights, universality and solidarity. Over the past twenty years, welfare reforms have challenged the salience of this conceptualisation. This article argues that changes such as austerity measures, pension reform, administrative decentralisation and efforts to revive the obligation of citizenship have fostered a more discursive conception of social rights. When rights are discursive, the relative power of various clientele interests plays a greater role in the distribution of benefits than objective conditions of need. Also, such notions as universality and solidarity are giving way to selectivity and individual responsibility as the paramount principles of the welfare state.

Since the late 1970s, the developed welfare states of the European Union have been recasting the policy mix on which their systems of social protection were built. They have adopted a new policy orthodoxy that could be summarised as the ‘social investment strategy’. Here we trace its origins and major developments. The shift is characterised by a move away from passive transfers and towards the maximalisation of employability and employment, but there are significant national distinctions and regime specific trajectories. We discuss some caveats, focusing on the question whether the new policy paradigm has been established at the expense of social policies that mitigate poverty and inequality.

In this article, we suggest that social policy may be on the cusp of a large-scale adoption of the notion of lived experience. However, within social policy and allied disciplines, the growing use of the term ‘lived experience’ is unaccompanied by discussion of what it may mean or imply. We argue that now is a good time to consider what this term could mean for social policy analysis. The peculiarities of Anglo-centric usage of the broader term ‘experience’ are explored, before we identify and discuss several roots from which understandings of ‘lived experience’ as a concept and a research strategy have grown: namely, phenomenology, feminist writing and ethnography. Drawing on multiple historical and contemporary international literatures, we identify a set of dilemmas and propositions around: assumed authenticity, questioning taken-for-grantedness, intercorporeality, embodied subjectivity; political strategies of recognition, risks of essentialising, and immediacy of unique personal experiences versus inscription of discourse. We argue that lived experience can inform sharp critique and offer an innovative window on aspects of the ‘shared typical’. Our central intention is to encourage and frame debate over what lived experience could mean theoretically and methodologically within social policy contexts and what the implications may be for its continued use.

This article argues that existing typologies on production and welfare regimes should be combined into a typology unifying the study of production and distribution in advanced capitalist countries. The article utilises a principal component and cluster analysis to show that such a typology indeed reflects the empirical diversity of countries. This is further illustrated by a brief literature review of different typologies. It is then shown how the integration of the two approaches helps to resolve problems addressed in the new literature on the varieties of capitalism approach, notably how welfare arrangements relate to production systems. Thereby, the relevance of an integrated typology for policy-makers in the fields of welfare and production will be illustrated. Lastly, some thoughts follow on how an integrated typology allows for a perspective that explains the development of various welfare and production regimes based on the common historical heritage of families of nations.

The introduction of social care markets was one of the main planks of the Conservative government's community care reforms of 1990. The Labour government, whilst emphasising collaboration rather than competition, has not sought to reverse this policy. What have been the consequences? We discuss a decade of market-related change under five heads: purchasers, providers, commissioning, care planning and delivery, and users and carers. There have been quite substantial changes effected by social care markets in each domain, in turn generating a number of pertinent questions for the future success of social care policy in England. One is the very suitability of market-like arrangements in social care. Another is whether transaction costs are too high. More generally, are social care markets structured in a way that will generate the efficiency improvements that successive governments expect of them? Fourth, to what extent will price competition damage quality of care? Finally, will commissioning arrangements mature so as to achieve a better balance between competitive and collaborative modes of working?

This article reports on the findings and policy implications of a UK study that used both qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate mothers' decision-making with respect to the interlinked issues of the care of their pre-school children and their own employment. Mothers were found to have both internal and external constraints on their decisions. In the three areas of finances, childcare and working time, both personal identities and external circumstances limited mothers' choices. However, neither external circumstances nor identities were fixed. Behaviour and identities were therefore adjusted to each other, giving rise to feedback effects at both the individual and the social level.

While the constraints of identity limit the direct effectiveness of some policies, the long-term effectiveness of others may be enhanced by positive feedback arising from attitudes changing along with behaviour. A ‘policy multiplier’ is defined as the ratio of such indirect to direct effects. This is likely to be greater for enabling policies that lift existing constraints and enable choices that were previously not available, than for coercive policies that impose new constraints on behaviour. The article examines the implications of such feedback effects for developing policy that expands the choices available to mothers in the short term, reduces the costs of motherhood, and meets the government's long-term objectives of reducing child poverty and increasing employment.

Much social and economic policy is based upon units such as the tax unit or the household, and much of it makes certain assumptions about flows of resources within these units. This article focuses on the control and allocation of financial resources within households, drawing on work done in the past and on original material taken from a study of the problems of a group of women whose marriages had broken down because of violence. Concentrating on the household type which is composed of a married couple and their dependent children, the article outlines three broad types of allocation system – the whole wage system, the allowance system and the pooling system. It is suggested that there are links between the system of allocation within the family, the stage in the life cycle which the family has reached, the income level of the household, and the occupational, regional and ethnic culture within which the household is located. The article concludes by suggesting that a better knowledge of intra-household money flows would be relevant to discussion concerned with the distribution of poverty, the allocation of welfare benefits, and the contribution made by married women's earnings to family living standards, and that it would also contribute to a better understanding of marital tension and marital breakdown.