A. Figueroa, T. Altamirano and D. Sulmont, Social Exclusion and Inequality in Peru, International Institute for Labour Studies Research Series, No. 104, ILO, Geneva, 1996, 96 pp., 17.50 Swiss francs.

M. H. Hashem, Goals for Social Integration and Realities of Social Exclusion in the Republic of Yemen, International Institute for Labour Studies Research Series, No. 105, ILO, Geneva, 1996, 116 pp., 20 Swiss francs.

P. Appasamay, S. Guhan, R. Hema, M. Majumdar and A. Vaidyanathan, Social Exclusion from a Welfare Rights Perspective in India, International Institute for Labour Studies Research Series, No. 106, ILO, Geneva, 1996, 133 pp., 22.50 Swiss francs.

P. Phongpaichit, S. Piriyarangsanan, and N. Treerat, Challenging Social Exclusion: Rights and Livelihood in Thailand, International Institute for Labour Studies Research Series, No. 107, ILO, Geneva, 1996, 122 pp., 20 Swiss francs.

N. Tchernina, Economic Transition and Social Exclusion in Russia, International Institute for Labour Studies Research Series, No. 108, ILO, Geneva, 1996, 103 pp., 17.50 Swiss francs.

F. Kaijage and A. Tibaijuka, Poverty and Social Exclusion in Tanzania, International Institute for Labour Studies Research Series, No. 109, ILO, Geneva, 1996, 202 pp., 25 Swiss francs.

(All published for the International Institute for Labour Studies/United Nations Development Programme by the International Labour Organisation, Geneva, Switzerland.)

These volumes were commissioned as part of an International Labour Organisation/UN Development Programme research series to explore the relevance and the value of the notion of social exclusion in a global context.

During the years following the Boer War, infant mortality became an issue of national importance, and increasing emphasis was placed on the provision of infant welfare clinics and health visitors. The infant mortality rate declined steadily throughout the period, and officials attributed the improvement to the new services. But just as the causes of infant mortality were complex, so were the reasons for the decline in the mortality rate. What needs explanation therefore is why health officials concentrated so exclusively on one particular form of solution. It is argued that this was a consequence of, first, the way in which infant welfare was perceived as a problem of mortality and especially as a problem of diarrhoeal mortality and, secondly, the philosophy of the infant welfare movement, which held that responsibility for infant mortality rested with the individual mother. Infant welfare services were thus compartmentalized as a set of personal social services, and kept separate from broader socio-economic issues.

Alan Deacon (ed.), From Welfare to Work, IEA Health & Welfare Unit, 1997, 155 pp., £8.00 paper.

Karen Gardiner, Bridges from Benefit, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York, 1997, 60 pp., £11.95 paper.

Alex Bryson, Reuben Ford and Michael White, Making Work Pay, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York, 1997, 89 pp., £11.95 paper.

Jane Millar, Steven Webb and Martin Kemp, Combining Work and Welfare, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York, 1997, 59 pp., £11.95 paper.

For the new Labour government, employment is the key to the reform of welfare. While the same could be said of the first post-war Labour government, the words have a rather different meaning. It is true that Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, has alluded to the concept of full employment that Keynes, Beveridge and, latterly, Attlee's government foresaw was essential to fund the development of the Welfare State. But the strategy that Brown set out in his first two budgets has a more narrow focus. Employment is to provide a route out of dependency, a mechanism for social inclusion, that enables expenditure on social security to be diverted to investment in education and health that is likely to attract a greater political dividend. More specifically, in his 1997 budget he used income generated from a windfall tax on the privatised utilities to fund the New Deal, a programme of counselling and work experience schemes with a large element of compulsion (Table 1), and supported this with a National Child Care Strategy and a commitment to introduce a minimum wage. He complemented these moves in his 1998 budget by increasing Child Benefit and announcing a Working Families Tax Credit, and one for disabled persons to replace Family Credit and Disability Working Allowance and also a Childcare Tax Credit.

Social security provision for young people has been cut back by a succession of reforms since 1980 culminating in the almost complete withdrawal of income support from 16 and 17 year olds by the Social Security Act 1988. Conservative government policy seems to indicate a desire that families assume greater responsibility for young people until either they find work or reach their mid-twenties. It is assumed that until young unemployed people reach this stage they are dependants, to be treated as such by the social security system (and, to a large extent, by the training schemes). But the twentieth century has seen a progressive growth of young people's independence and expectations of it among young people and their families. The enforced dependency produced by recent government policy runs counter to this trend. More importantly, it may be having a profound effect on the progress of the transition to adulthood.

The article emphasises the urgent need for a reconsideration of potential sources of income for the National Health Service which could supplement rather than replace those from general taxation. They include local taxation, earmarked taxes, patient charges (hotel, prescription and other charges for non-clinical items), a lottery, income generation, charitable donations and patient ‘opting out’ of the NHS with private insurance. Analysis is set within the position statement provided by the 1989 White Paper Working for Patients and within a more general analytical framework paying attention to equity, accountability, value for money, management incentives and other criteria.

Each funding method is considered in terms of its consistency with the criteria of both the analytical framework and the White Paper. The differences between some of the alternative sources are found to be more apparent than real. Rather than providing a panacea for the perceived funding and rationing problems of the NHS, the danger is that new supplementary sources of finance may simply replace one set of problems with another. The new set may pose even more intractable problems and involve considerable short to medium term disruption of NHS finances. The inescapable fact is that decisions about the levels and quality of public service provision and their financing are ultimately matters of democratic accountability, decisions which cannot and should not be sidestepped by the convenience of income sources.

The abolition in 1982 of the Earnings-Related Supplement (ERS) to unemployment benefit, which had been introduced in 1966, left the UK with no element of income support for the unemployed linked to previous earnings. The ERS scheme represents an important case study of economic and social policy but it has been little researched hitherto. The paper examines the history of ERS, showing how the original legislation and subsequent development produced a benefit that bore little relation to schemes in other countries. Unpublished administrative data on the receipt of ERS are used to help document the scheme's failings, and the paper closes by placing ERS within the context of the development of unemployment insurance in Britain.

The extreme dispersion of authority and power in the American political system fosters a politics of bargaining, negotiation, and compromise. Nevertheless, technical-rational analysis plays a major role in the identification of public problems and in the legitimation of official responses. We explore this apparent paradox through an examination of the interaction between politics, ideology and analysis in the current crisis of the American public retirement system. Two analytical approaches are employed: an interpretation of the historical evolution of the programme through three relatively distinct phases; and an evaluation of the reports of three recent national commissions which have studied the social security crisis. We argue that in the American system policy must be made through either subsystem or consensual politics. Social security has benefited from the unusual conjunction of these two conditions through most of its history. Policy has been made by a small subsystem dominated by the social security bureaucracy itself and the programme has received widespread bipartisan support. Analysis has been central to this process, but its impact has differed over time. Analysis exerted a decisive influence on the initial shape of the programme even in the absence of an ideological consensus because it enjoyed a quasi-monopoly position in the President's Committee on Economic Security. During the long expansionary phase of the programme, subsystem autonomy and bipartisan consensus together fostered the emergence of a technocratic policy style, but the independent effects of analysis were more apparent than real. The contemporary commissions fail to provide an adequate response to the crisis because their technically competent proposals no longer rest on an underlying consensus and because the institutional autonomy of the old social security policymaking subsystem has broken down.

This paper looks critically at a central notion of the Marxist analysis of social policy – the contradictions of welfare. Two main variants of the argument are identified: the ‘paradox’ and ‘opposite effect’ contradictions respectively. Serious doubts are raised about the viability of a Marxist analysis of social policy which relies on the concept of the contradictions of the welfare state.

In conducting his research for The Last Refuge (1962), Peter Townsend visited 173 public, voluntary and private residential care homes for older people in England and Wales. Drawing on his data, now archived at the University of Essex, we traced the subsequent history of these homes and revisited a sample that were still functioning as care homes in 2006. In this article, we focus on the 42 private homes he visited, some of which remain open and were revisited by us in 2005–06. The pre-1980 history of private sector residential care provision for older people is an elusive and poorly charted topic. Drawing on the two data sets for then and now, this article contributes new insights into this area of UK policy and practice.

Family is one of the major principles of welfare state redistribution. It has, however, rarely been at the centre of welfare state research. This contribution intends to help remedy the research gap in family-related redistribution. By examining the German welfare state which is known to be both redistributive and family-oriented, we want to answer the question of how and how far the German welfare state institutionalises family as a redistributive principle. Our case-study of German welfare state regulations in terms of family is based on the tax-benefit microsimulation model EUROMOD and its Hypothetical Household Tool (HHoT). We differentiate 54 family forms to adequately reflect our three theoretical assumptions, which are: (1) redistributive logics differ across family forms, and in part markedly; (2) these differences are not the result of one coherent set of regulations, but of an interplay of partially contradictory regulations; (3) family as a redistributive principle manifests itself not only in terms of additional benefits to families, but also in terms of particular obligations of families to financially support family members before they are entitled to public support. These aspects have hardly been analysed before and combining them allows a clear evaluation of family-related redistribution.

The so-called ‘hunger marches’ are a familiar feature of the depression and unemployment of the inter-war years. Their inspirer was the National Unemployed Workers' Movement (N.U.W.M.) which between 1922 and 1936 organized six national demonstrations consisting of contingents from various parts of the country, converging on London. They were protesting against unemployment and low rates of assistance, ‘work or full maintenance at trade union rates’ being the recurrent demand. There were also many local demonstrations and the organization won considerable support, particularly from younger unemployed workers frustrated by the inertia of the official labour and trade union leadership.

The article examines the impact of the redundancy payments legislation on women workers. The legislation's adequacy and appropriateness for women is assessed and the assumptions and values enshrined within it are analysed. The article demonstrates that the provisions of the legislation are disadvantageous to women in comparison to men, and that they in effect discriminate against them both directly and indirectly. Moreover, it is suggested that women's particular vulnerability to unemployment and redundancy may be partly explained by the actual mechanics of the redundancy legislation. It is argued that the legislation is based upon a male-dominated conceptualization of work and so fails to consider the position of women in the labour market — a market which by its very nature leads to gender inequalities.

This article discusses the particular characteristics of men with schizophrenia or personality disorder and it compares these two categories with one another and with the destitute population as a whole. On a number of variables, no significant differences are discerned, the category as a whole sharing a background of considerable material and social deprivation. However, with reference to place of birth, loss of mother, and father's occupation, significant differences do appear. The two categories also show distinctly different patterns in the process of becoming destitute and they use existing agencies differently. Finally, the type of service most suitable for these men is discussed together with other issues raised by the question, ‘How can we improve the lot of the homeless single person?’

During the second half of the 1970s, the practice of the closed shop became widespread in some parts of the British public sector, but was resisted in others. This paper examines the issue in relation to the National Health Service, where trade unionists made frequent demands for the closed shop and where many managers were apparently not unwilling to concede it. Yet very few closed shops actually resulted. The paper examines the origin and patterns of these demands, health authority policies towards them, and their outcomes in terms both of the operation of the closed shops which were agreed, and the reasons for failure to agree. The conclusion is that although NHS industrial relations had apparently matured very rapidly between 1973 and 1977, the trade unions were neither strong enough nor united enough to enforce the closed shop; nor were industrial relations so far developed as to make the practice a natural next step.

This paper examines the incomes of men retiring before age 65, using FES data for years 1970–77. The findings are that such men generally rely on state benefits for most of their income. In particular, it seems that many of the early retired are receiving benefits related to ill-health which suggests that early retirement decisions are attributable more to poor health than to any voluntary desire for increased leisure by those who can afford not to work. It is found that the incomes of the early retired improved over the 1970s relative to average eararnings, but this may be due to a rise in levels of state benefit rather than private sources of income. Incomes of this group have generally been lower than for men over age 65. There is, however, a small number of early retired men with very high incomes and extensive private support, but this is only about ten per cent of the group.

This article attempts to describe a major debate in turn of the century social reform through a close reading of the published works of Charles Booth, J.A. Hobson, William Beveridge, A.C. Pigou and others. My aim is to reconstruct the emergence and elaboration of a theory of labour market disorganisation, understood as the absence of effective norms governing employment relationships in urban labour markets subject to chronic over-supply. In so doing I shall take issue with a tendency in the historiography of social policy to fragment this debate into the development of two distinct conceptual frameworks corresponding to the social problems of poverty and unemployment more or less as we know them today.

Policymakers in liberal welfare states like the UK have prioritised extending the reach of compulsory activation to target vulnerable jobseeker groups, such as lone parents. However, such interventions – especially when combined with intensified welfare conditionality – appear to have had limited positive effects on lone parents’ employability, while often negatively impacting wellbeing. This article argues that the problem is a disconnect between the complex barriers to employability faced by lone parents (including their need to balance work and caring) and the content of ‘work-first’ activation favoured by successive UK Governments. We report positive findings from in-depth interviews with lone parents and key stakeholders involved in more person-centred, non-compulsory local employability services. Multi-agency service delivery, collaborative governance and a clear role for user voice in programme design were important facilitators of positive experiences. Our analysis points to the need for services that empower lone parents to make choices to progress towards employment while supporting family life.

This article illustrates how the term “social innovation” is used in the public policy domain in Hong Kong in relation to the new public management (NPM) reform of the social service sector, which originated in the early 2000s. Through document reviews and interviews, the role that social innovation policy has played in instigating changes in the contemporary social service field in the post-NPM era is identified. This includes facilitating emergence of “new” forms of social entrepreneurial activities to fill unmet social needs, empowering new actors in entering the social service sector, and reinforcing the government’s position in the NPM reform. Adopting historical institutionalism as the analytical framework, multiple path-dependent characteristics arising from the historical legacies of the incumbent social service environment – such as the longstanding partnership between the state and non-profits – are highlighted. These historical factors have weakened the efficacy of the policy efforts aimed at enacting institutional change. Overall, this article demonstrates how historical context matters in the emergence and framing of social innovation policy. It contributes to the theorisation of the role of social innovation in social service sector development in East Asia.

The scholarship on state-building has devoted a significant amount of attention to the role of taxation in building state institutions and capacities. It has also emphasised the crucial role of taxation in driving state-society relations. Scholars have argued that the linkage between taxation and state building also applies to the area of social policy. In this paper, we draw on a fiscal-centred perspective on welfare state development that highlights the fiscal policy role of social insurance as a revenue raising institution to study the fiscal relationship between social insurance and state-building in Israel and Canada – two ‘most dissimilar cases’ that nonetheless feature strikingly similar patterns with regard to this relationship. As our findings show, in both cases, social insurance programmes were introduced, designed, and utilized to advance fiscal and economic policy capacity and thereby promote state building. Using these programmes and the commitments they created, political actors could legitimize the generation of revenues, build institutional infrastructure for tax collection, and create capital reserves for investing in the economy.