One of the acknowledged limitations of British welfare-to-work policies has been that they do not necessarily succeed in assisting people with multiple problems and needs. This article will first examine conflicting aspects of welfare-to-work policies and the conflict between welfare-to-work and the concept of work–life balance, particularly as this may apply to people whose lives are especially difficult. Secondly, the article reports on the general findings of a small-scale qualitative study of the labour market experiences of people with multiple problems and needs and, more particularly, an analysis of the discursive strategies used by participants in the study. The article concludes with some observations about how welfare-to-work might be re-conceptualised to accommodate ontological as well as practical life needs.

Enthusiasm for the expansion of markets in welfare reflects the currency of assumptions derived from rational choice theory among policy-makers. This article reviews recent evidence from the ESRC's Economic Beliefs and Behaviour programme that calls into question the basic tenet of the rational choice approach – that individual choices are driven by instrumental rationality – and argues that welfare markets require a normative framework in which trust plays an important role. Experimental evidence from recent work in economic psychology indicates that individuals often display a level of trust in market interactions that is hard to explain on the basis of simple rationality, but that such trust is fragile and easily undermined by egoistic action. Lack of attention to the normative issues which the rational choice approach fails to capture may lead to the design of markets which are inefficient in meeting the aims of policy-makers and which deplete the moral legacy on which many welfare markets in practice depend.

Following two parental leave reforms in West Germany, this research explores how child care and housework time changed among couples who have just had a child. The reform in 1992 extended the low paid or unpaid parental leave period, whereas the 2007 reform introduced income-dependent compensation and two ‘daddy months’. This study contributes to the literature by examining different mechanisms on how these reforms were associated with domestic work time in couples. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1990–2010), the analysis applies ordinary least square (OLS) regressions and difference-in-difference estimations. The findings point to a significant reduction in paternal child care time eighteen to thirty months after childbirth among couples with children born after the 1992 reform. The 2007 reform was associated with increased child care time of fathers in the first year and eighteen to thirty months after the birth. Changes in maternal child care and both partners’ housework were not statistically significant. Alterations in maternal and paternal labour market participation, wages and leave taking accounted for most of the observed variations in paternal child care except for eighteen to thirteen months after the 2007 reform. This unexplained variance may point to a normative policy effect.

In 1998, we were witnessing major changes in frontline social service delivery across the OECD and this was theorised as the emergence of a post-Fordist welfare state. Changes in public management thinking, known as New Public Management (NPM), informed this shift, as did public choice theory. A 1998 study of Australia's then partially privatised employment assistance sector provided an ideal place to test the impact of such changes upon actual service delivery. The study concluded that frontline staff behaviour did not meet all the expectations of a post-Fordist welfare state and NPM, although some signs of specialisation, flexibility and networking were certainly evident (Considine, 1999). Ten years on, in 2008, frontline staff working in Australia's now fully privatised employment sector participated in a repeat study. These survey data showed convergent behaviour on the part of the different types of employment agencies and evidence that flexibility had decreased. In fact, in the ten years between the two studies there was a marked increase in the level of routinisation and standardisation on the frontline. This suggests that the sector did not achieve the enhanced levels of flexibility so often identified as a desirable outcome of reform. Rather, agencies adopted more conservative practices over time in response to more detailed external regulation and more exacting internal business methods.

Qualitative research is ambiguously placed as a source of evidence for policy. It provides a way of accessing the experiences and perspectives of those targeted by welfare interventions, yet it is routinely excluded from the evidence reviews undertaken to inform these interventions. The article explores what qualitative research – mapped and synthesised through a systematic review – can contribute to evidence and policy. Taking teenage motherhood as a case study, it juxtaposes the conclusions of quantitative reviews with themes emerging from a systematic review of qualitative studies of teenage mothers’ lives. It highlights how teenage motherhood, identified in quantitative reviews and in policy interventions as a route to social exclusion, emerges in these studies as an act of social inclusion. It highlights, too, how social disapproval as well as material hardship weigh on teenage mothers, and the potential role that policies could play in supporting the identities and resilient practices mothers develop in the face of material and social disadvantage.

There is currently debate in policy circles about access to ‘the upper echelons of power’ (Sir John Major, ex Prime Minister, 2013). This research explores the relationship between family background and early access to top occupations. We find that privately educated graduates are a third more likely to enter into high-status occupations than state educated graduates from similarly affluent families and neighbourhoods, largely due to differences in educational attainment and university selection. We find that although the use of networks cannot account for the private school advantage, they provide an additional advantage and this varies by the type of top occupation that the graduate enters.

This article analyses the economic disadvantage experienced by disabled persons of working age using data from the British Household Panel Survey. We argue that there are three sources of disadvantage among disabled persons: pre-existing disadvantage among those who become disabled (a ‘selection’ effect), the effect of disability onset itself, and the effects associated with remaining disabled post-onset. We show that employment rates fall with disability onset, and continue to fall the longer a disability spell lasts, whereas average income falls sharply with onset but then recovers subsequently (though not to pre-onset levels).

There is an emerging interest within social and policy studies in the potential connections between linguistic practices and broader social processes. It is, however, difficult to find examples of research which take a fully discursive approach to policy analysis. Such a discursive approach might focus on how the use of language in the policy process is involved with social practices, such as the legitimisation of social relations or the construction of ‘knowledge’ of social reality. The article begins by exploring theoretical and methodological issues in relation to connecting micro aspects of language use, such as grammar and lexis, with the social construction of knowledge. It then uses discourse analysis to explore how the linguistic resources of a key British urban policy document, New Life for Urban Scotland, are involved with reproducing and sustaining a particular ‘knowledge’ or discourse about the causes of urban decline.

Social impact bonds are payment by results contracts that leverage private social investment to cover the up-front expenditure associated with welfare services. The introduction of private principles and actors through outcome-based commissioning has received a great deal of attention in social policy research. However, there has been much less attention given to the introduction of private capital and its relation to more established forms of quasi-marketisation. This paper examines what effect private social investment has on outcome-based commissioning and whether the alternative forms of performance measurement and management, that social impact bonds bring to bear on service operations, demonstrate the capacity to engender: innovation in service delivery; improved social outcomes; future cost savings; and additionality. This paper draws on an in-depth study of four social impact bonds in the UK context, as the welfare regime at the vanguard of this policy development. The findings suggest that the introduction of private capital in outcome-based commissioning has had a number of unique and unintended effects on service providers, operations and outcomes. The paper concludes by considering whether social impact bonds represent a risk or an opportunity for public service reform both in the UK and further afield.

Governance is now quite widely used as a frame of analysis, although not in social policy. This article elaborates some of the different roots and usages of governance and interrogates the utility of the concept for the discipline and study of social policy. Having traced the concept's diverse origins and contemporary usages, the article goes on to develop from them a framework for the analysis of developments in public policy in the UK under New Labour. This is then applied to consider in turn the nature of the public sphere, policy-making, policy implementation and societal incorporation. This leads to a discussion of the various strengths and weaknesses of governance. The former include its direct interest in policy-making, its focus on power and the state and the fact that it can connect different levels of action and analysis. On the negative side, though, one must question to what extent a governance perspective finds social policy interesting in its own right and whether its over-riding focus on state and government leads it to residualise both social policy and society.

There has been significant recent research and policy interest in issues of young people's occupational aspirations, transitions to employment and the antecedents of NEET (not in employment, education or training) status. Many have argued that changes to the youth labour market over the past 30 years have led to transitions to work becoming more individualised, complex and troublesome for many, particularly those from poorer backgrounds. However, little research has examined the connection between early uncertainty or misalignment in occupational aspirations and entry into NEET status. This paper draws on the British Cohort Study to investigate these issues, and finds that young people with uncertain occupational aspirations or ones misaligned with their educational expectations are considerably more likely to become NEET by age 18. Uncertainty and misalignment are both more widespread and more detrimental for those from poorer backgrounds. These findings are discussed in the context of recent research and debates on emerging adulthood and the youth labour market.

Although Britain has never had a set of policies explicitly labelled ‘family policies’, most if not all social policies are implicitly family policies because they are based on certain assumptions about the nature of relationships between the sexes and the generations. By careful examination of the detail of the legislation and administrative rules, together with the way in which services are allocated and used, it is possible to expose these assumptions and show that they are not only consistent between policies but very persistent over time. This paper first examines the assumptions concerning the division of unpaid labour within the family whereby women care for the young, the sick and the old and for able-bodied adult men (their husbands). The examples are selected from a variety of income maintenance systems and services for children, the old and the disabled. Particular attention is focused on the extent to which it is recognized that women are at the same time workers in the labour market and unpaid domestic workers in the home. The second part of the paper analyses the impact on their participation and opportunities in the labour market of the ideology which accords to women the primary responsibilities for caring for other members of their family. The perpetuation of such an ideology favours the interests of men and frequently the interests of the economically powerful, but it is not assumed that these interests always coincide.

The 1970s saw a wide ranging debate in Britain, initiated by Sir Keith Joseph, on the apparent existence of a ‘cycle of deprivation’. Most participants viewed this debate as having originated in the 1960s, but in fact versions of the general concept of an inter-generational ‘underclass’ have figured prominently in social debates during the past one hundred years. In particular, in the inter-war period there were several investigations of an hereditary ‘social problem group’, investigations which were crucial to a wider conservative social reformist strategy. These investigations produced inconclusive results, however, because ultimately the underclass is a statistical artefact, the existence of which can only be argued by the use of several serious methodological contradictions.

The aim of this article is to widen the grounds of the debate on the relationship between values, social change and welfare reform. In the public debate on welfare reform and the Third Way the significance of the welfare politics and campaigns of civil society in challenging the old welfare order has received little acknowledgement. The article argues that these politics and campaigns have, along with both the New Right and New Labour, attempted to construct a new vision of an ‘active welfare subject’. In the process they have also expanded the moral repertoire for understanding people's engagement with welfare beyond the self-interest/altruism dichotomy. The article uses this new repertoire to propose seven key principles for a reordering of the social relations of welfare.

The official figures which appear to show a widening of class differences in health in England and Wales during the post-war period have been controversial partly because they do not fit with common perceptions of what has happened to differences in the standard of living. As a result, a great deal of effort has gone into investigating suggested weaknesses in the decennial social class mortality data. Though initially plausible, the artifactual and selective explanations of the widening mortality differences which were put forward have not usually been borne out by closer investigations. The only fault in the broad picture presented by the official data which we do perhaps need to bear in mind is the tendency for a narrowing of mortality differentials among younger women to be masked by the widening among older women. This paper is an attempt to look at the other side of the coin—namely, to investigate trends in differences in the standard of living in relation to mortality differentials. It concludes that trends in mortality differences have not been related to trends in class differences in average earnings, but have been fairly clearly related to trends in relative poverty. Relative poverty and class differences in mortality declined before the war but have both increased, decade by decade, since the war. Younger women have perhaps been protected from the increase in relative poverty during much of the post-war period by their increased economic activity rates and the relative improvement in earnings of women in poorly paid manual occupations.

This article discusses reforms of the design of the organisational arena for policy implementation and service provision in European welfare states, focusing on the policy areas of income protection and activation. First, it discusses and compares recent reform programmes in four countries: the UK, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. The comparison shows that these reforms share some common characteristics: the establishment of one-stop agencies, decentralisation, the introduction of quasi-markets for the provision of activation services, a reduction of the role and influence of social partners and the use of new public management instruments in managing public agencies. Secondly, the article argues that these reforms are not merely reflecting new ways of thinking about organising the public sector and providing public services, but should also be interpreted as responses to policy administration and implementation problems arising in the process of making welfare states more activating.

Lone mothers are a key target group for government policies to increase employment participation rates. Employment sustainability is central to achieving this goal and thus it is important to understand the factors that affect sustainability. When the lone mother starts work, her daily life changes in various ways, and so do the lives of her children, and perhaps also other family members who may become involved in childcare, or in other forms of help. These social relationships – at home, in work, in care settings, at school – may be a key element in employment sustainability, and one that has not yet been systematically explored in research. This article draws on data from an ongoing longitudinal qualitative study of lone mothers and their children, which has been following the families from the point that the mothers left income support and started working for at least 16 hours per week. The analysis starts from the assumption that sustaining work over time is a process that actively involves the family as a whole and not just the individual lone mother. In this article we explore how social relationships, inside and outside the family, are central to the ‘family–work project’ of sustaining employment.

A consensus has developed in political and also media circles that in Britain over recent decades social mobility has been in decline. According to the consensus view, as construed in political circles, educational policy is seen as the crucial instrument for increasing mobility. This article shows how the consensus emerged from the research of a group of economists into intergenerational income mobility. It is argued that, primarily on account of various limitations of the available data, the economists’ finding of declining mobility is open to question; and, further, that, because no explicit distinction is made in their work between absolute and relative rates of mobility, its reception, among politicians especially, has been attended by considerable confusion. An alternative to the consensus view is put forward, based on extensive research by sociologists into social class mobility, which is seen as better capturing the intergenerational transmission of economic advantage and disadvantage. This research indicates that the only recent change of note is that the rising rates of upward, absolute mobility of the middle decades of the last century have levelled out. Relative rates have remained more or less constant back to the inter-war years. According to this alternative view, what can be achieved through education, whether in regard to absolute or relative mobility, appears limited.

Wellbeing is increasingly supplanting welfare as a central political goal for social and public policy. In academic social policy, some writers have suggested that a focus on wellbeing allows us to consider a ‘fully rounded humanity’ whereas welfare focuses on economic utility. This article avoids this polarisation and proposes a generative and relational view of wellbeing and welfare as mutually constitutive. It adopts a trans-disciplinary critical psychosocial perspective to reveal highly normative views of wellbeing and agency employed in these political and academic discourses. It proposes a view of agency for wellbeing which is contextual, includes non-rational action and is oriented to being well enough with others. Instead of a concern with outcome measures such as happiness, it proposes a view of wellbeing as a process which varies according to context. Drawing on the notion of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ needs, the specific content of wellbeing is seen as generated through ‘close’ and ‘distant’ relationships. This approach challenges contemporary policy responses to wellbeing which are individualised and market-led and suggests that a question for social policy is: which relationships and contexts are generative of individual wellbeing and welfare?

Mainsteam poverty analysis is deficient because it ignores important within-household aspects. This point has been made by many, and stressed by feminists especially, yet mainstream poverty measurement practice remains unchanged. Why is this? What should we be doing? This paper examines anew the case for taking within-household factors into account in poverty measurement. The analysis reveals a number of unresolved issues including some problems with recent feminist arguments, but concludes that there is a good case for changing current practice. To demonstrate that this is feasible, four research projects are described. These are my agenda for action.