To address complex social problems, such as long-term unemployment, local authorities in many countries are developing “holistic” or “integrated” services, where multiple actors and professions collaborate with a view to better meet the needs of the individual citizen. By breaking with existing practices and regulations, collaborative services must be legitimized in new ways so as to appear acceptable not only in the eyes of the public and politicians, but also to caseworkers and the long-term unemployed persons. This article examines the multifarious and sometimes neglected efforts to make these collaborative services legitimate in the eyes of this plurality of stakeholders on multiple levels of governance. Our study indicates three distinct but mutually interrelated spheres of audience that require partly conflicting justification work. We also find that the narrow pursuit of justification work to ensure legitimacy with one audience may potentially jeopardize the justification work in the other two.

Paperwork has always been a central part of bureaucratic work. Over the last few years, bureaucratic procedures have become increasingly standardised and digitalised. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork within welfare offices in Switzerland and Belgium, we reflect on the way evidence is constructed within social policy and cases built for or against noncitizen welfare recipients in order to show how paper truths are established and challenged. The focus on digital practices within public policy implementation highlights how it contributes to enhanced control mechanisms on the implementation level and how migration law continues to guide welfare governance for noncitizens. This allows targeting of the most marginalised groups, whose rights to access state support are institutionally impeded. Through database information flows, official forms, paper reports and face-to-face meetings, we further show how a hybrid form of bureaucratic work emerges, where direct contact with the client is still key, yet highly influenced by standardisation processes.

Catholics are urged to show a ‘preferential option for the poor’. For the most part debate about the exercise of such an option is primarily in terms of a justice model—righting the twin wrongs of the ‘exploitation’ and ‘oppression’ of the poor. But there is another, largely untheorised approach to helping strangers in need—Samaritanism. This paper provides an exposition of Samaritanism and a defence of its role in the modern Welfare State. In doing so it seeks to challenge non-Christians to put their rationale for helping the needy on an equally secure footing as that provided by Christianity.

The concept of autonomy is essential in the practice and study of gerontology and in long-term care policies. For older adults with expanding care needs, scores from tightly specified assessment instruments, which aim to measure the autonomy of service users, usually determine access to social services. These instruments emphasise functional independence in the performance of activities of daily living. In an effort to broaden the understanding of autonomy into needs assessment practice, the province of Québec (Canada) added social and relational elements into the assessment tool. In the wake of these changes, this article studies the interaction between the use of assessment instruments and the extent to which they alter how older adults define their autonomy as service users. This matters since the conceptualisation of autonomy shapes the formulation of long-term care policy problems, influencing both the demand and supply of services and the types of services that ought to be prioritised by governments. Relying on focus groups, this study shows that the functional autonomy frame dominates problem definitions, while social/relational framings are marginal. This reflects the more authoritative weight of functional autonomy within the assessment tool and contributes to the biomedicalisation of aging.

Across many countries, increases in inequality driven by rising top incomes and wealth have not been accompanied by growing popular concern. In fact, citizens in unequal societies are less concerned than those in more egalitarian societies. Understanding how the general public perceive richness is an essential step towards resolving this paradox. We discuss findings from focus group research in London, UK, a profoundly and visibly unequal city, which sought to explore public perceptions of richness and the rich. Participants from diverse socio-economic backgrounds discussed their views of the ‘wealthy’ and the ‘super rich’ with reference to both vast economic resources and more intangible aspects, including, crucially, security. High levels of wealth and income were perceived to be necessary for achieving security for oneself and one’s family. The security of the rich was discussed in contrast to participants’ own and others’ insecurity in the context of a (neo)liberal welfare regime – specifically, insecurity about housing, personal finances, social security, health care and the future of the welfare state. In unequal countries, where insecurity is widespread, lack of confidence in collective welfare state provision may serve in the public imagination to legitimate private wealth accumulation and richness as a form of self-protection.

There is a large discrepancy in European countries between the measured impact of immigration on the welfare state and how this impact is perceived by citizens. This study examines the determinants of individuals’ perception of the impact of immigration on the welfare state. A number of hypotheses at both the individual and contextual level are tested using a multilevel model with data from the European Social Survey. I find that the institutional features of welfare states are associated with different views on the impact of immigration on welfare states: generous contributory social welfare benefits are associated with more favourable attitudes about immigrants, while generous non-contributory benefits, by contrast, are associated with more pessimistic assessments about the fiscal impact of immigration. I argue that this can be because the latter potentially signals to natives that migrants could access generous benefits without any requisite work history. At the individual-level, the results indicate that subjective risk and general opposition to immigration are powerful individual-level predictors: people who feel more economically insecure or who are generally opposed to immigration are more likely to think that it constitutes a burden for the welfare state.

This article explores the accountability experiences and orientations of frontline workers implementing personalised activation services in the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV). The study draws on observations and interviews (2021), with three teams of employment specialists using Supported Employment as an approach to personalised service provision, in a national programme called Extended Follow-up. Adopting the theoretical lens of accountability as behaviours of account giving, three strategies on how to adopt the accountability regime at the frontline are highlighted: (i) reporting, where one team complied with accountability requirements as the perceived best practices for achieving success in work inclusion; (ii) mitigating, where accountability requirements were fulfilled but combined with attention to how to best meet jobseekers’ needs; and (iii) reframing, where accountability requirements were challenged and redefined. The study highlights how accountability requirements may be interpreted variably, promoting personalised service innovation on the one hand or stagnation on the other.

The triumph of George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election is further evidence of the waning viability of the American welfare state. Since 1980 various strains of conservatism have vied for control of domestic policy through the Republican party, the most recent variant being ‘compassionate conservatism’. Democrats have responded by disavowing their liberal heritage and moving toward the centre. This reflects the replacement of a ‘social model’ with an ‘economic model’ for social policy. The Left can be rejuvenated by adopting three themes for domestic policy: mobility, empowerment and restructuring. These are consistent with the ‘third way’ in social policy, as centrists have advocated in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Marxist accounts of welfare have been characterized by a critical view of social administration and an uncritical view of the concept of the ‘welfare state’. In this paper both these views are questioned. We explore the problems associated with basing analyses of welfare on the ‘welfare state’ and the limitations of certain criticisms of the ‘social administration tradition’. We conclude that whatever the merits of the more substantive elements in Marxist accounts of welfare, there are problems associated with their assumptions about social administration and the ‘welfare state’.

This article examines state provision of unemployment insurance (UI) in Britain. State intervention in insurance is normally perceived as stemming from the failure of private markets to meet socially expressed needs, but an examination of the historical development of state provision, and present practice, of UI in Britain suggest that this was not a central concern of state intervention. It is argued that an alternative explanation must stem from a theoretical model of the actions of the state, and various models primarily within a Marxist framework are described. The problems inherent in approaches which emphasize the relation between the needs of capitalist accumulation and the actions of the state are discussed, and it is argued that a more realistic account must take note of the heterogenous nature of the labour market in capitalist society and how, in such a society, the ideology which underpins social welfare policy is constructed. The article briefly examines recent political developments and argues that proposals for reform of UI must be located within a broader political strategy for economic and political transformation.

The paper looks at the relative importance of state benefits, employer benefits and private sources in supporting early retired men. Using data from various administrative sources, the General Household Survey and the Family Expenditure Survey, it shows how the increase in early retirement which occurred between 1979 and 1986 went hand in hand both with a greater reliance on means-tested benefits and a greater reliance on employer benefits. Although the income of the early retired was well above the minimum accorded by the ‘income support’ system, there were major differences between subgroups of the early retired—those dependent solely on state benefits and those with other sources of income, private and personal—and these differences have become more pronounced over time. Finally, the paper looks at the total costs of early retirement: to the state, to employers and to the early retired themselves. Total costs ballooned between 1979 and 1986. Much of the extra expenditure on benefits fell on employers, but the early retired themselves, through accepting a considerable reduction in their income, bore the bulk of the costs of early retirement.

This article reports on comparative research into the living standards of unemployed couples claiming Income Support, couples claiming in-work benefits and couples in receipt of a male median wage. The data reveal high levels of debt and credit dependence across the whole sample, which have a particularly damaging impact on the daily consumption patterns of the unemployed group. The problems this raises for comparative judgements about living standards are discussed, most notably the need for a longitudinal perspective in both the analysis of financial circumstances and the interpretation of data on current standards of living.

Liberal economists argue that in general the market system promotes social welfare; but they usually accept that governments should relieve extreme poverty, even where this arises out of individuals' failure to insure themselves. A particularly common argument is that income maintenance is justified because more fortunate people feel compassion or obligation towards the poor. But this position is inconsistent. Given the assumptions necessary to support the claim that markets promote social welfare, there is no reason for anyone to suppose that the uninsured, however poor, are in special need; and so neither compassion nor obligation can arise.

This paper addresses the positions of unions and employer associations towards the level of unemployment benefits and active labour market policy (ALMP). These are prominent examples of social compensation and social investment policies respectively. The new dataset ‘Reform Monitor on Political Conflict’ (ReMoPo) is based on expert interviews and a systematic text analysis of all relevant press releases. Over a time-span of 14 years (2000-2014) the data clearly shows conflict between social partners on the level of unemployment benefits whilst there is consensus towards ALMP. I show that, for unemployment benefits, different motivations do lead to different positions. However, for ALMP, different motivations combine with overlapping interests, resulting in a common positive stance. The main theoretical implications of these findings were two-fold: firstly, the type of organisation does not predict positioning on welfare state issues, whereas pragmatic considerations do. Secondly, I suspect that the divergence of motivational factors combined with a consensus towards particular measures is specific to the concept of social investment. This is because social investments (training and qualification measures in this case) were expected to have the most far-reaching and long-lasting positive effects on both individuals and companies and were therefore supported by unions and employer associations.

The rapidly ageing population and increasing care needs provide the rationale for care systems progressively shaped by a growing market in a global context. In China the approach to policy making, which has been largely experimental, has involved market-oriented reforms since the 1980s. While marketisation processes have been well studied in various European care systems, very little is known about their implementation in the Chinese context. Based on qualitative interviews with local government officials and care providers in Shanghai, this article discusses the Chinese policy process in the field of care for older people and the barriers to effective implementation. It investigates the experiment-based marketisation policy process, the power hierarchy and the lines of accountability of the state in the care field. Multi-layered barriers are identified in the market-oriented policy process. These include (1) inherent bureaucratic obstacles at practice level: reluctance to exercise discretionary power, administrative inefficiency, incoherence of care schemes and poor inter-department communication; and (2) complexities and failures at policy-making level: the infeasibility of policies, underestimation of operational capacity and inadequate involvement of practice knowledge. These findings have implications for balancing the efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability of care policies in an era of public service austerity.

This article examines the special role of the private rented sector in the provision of housing in London. The proportion of households who rent privately continues to be much higher in the capital than in the rest of the country. The reasons for this are analysed, together with the type of households that are found in the sector in London, and the sort of accommodation they obtain. The conclusion is reached that while the operation of the sector in London does differ in some important ways from the rest of the country, the major difference is simply its greater size in London. A forecast is then made of future trends. Finally, the likely effects of different policy options on those already in, and those seeking to enter the sector, are assessed.

The standard of living of children depends on (i) family income; (ii) production within the family; (iii) economies of scale within the family; and (iv) distributions within the family. We use 1976 and 1986 Family Expenditure Survey information on (i), models of housework time based on time-budget surveys to estimate (ii), and equivalence scales to take account of (iii).

The Department of Education defines an immigrant child as one either born abroad or born in U.K. to a parent or parents whose origin was abroad, and who came to Britain less than ten years ago. This definition does not therefore include children born to immigrant parents of long-standing, or to black parents born here. Mrs Thatcher has proposed a new definition of ‘immigrant child’ from January 1972, which will take into account grand-parents’ country or origin. It should thus be possible to estimate the total population of ‘black’ children in British schools with more accuracy after this date.

The history of the development of social work as a professional discipline from its early beginnings in the 1900s to the present time has exhibited two contradictory trends. Sometimes social work has seemed to be the conscience of society. During other periods it seems to have been an apologist for the status quo, devoting its efforts to adjusting clients to the existing social institutions. These trends can be identified by the activity of social work during changing historical periods in the United States as well as by the professional leaders associated with these eras.