Although policy priority has always been on economic management in East Asian countries, those countries also developed some notable social policies. However, explanations for the development of social policies in those countries have been relatively underdeveloped compared to those of their economic management policies. This study adds to our understanding of the social policy development in East Asia by examining two cases of social policy adoption in South Korea – the Medical Insurance Law and the Minimum Wage Law. This Korean case study shows a pattern of policy development primarily driven by particular ‘interests’ (state elites' perceived political survival needs and their reputation in international society), with ‘environmental’ factors and ‘policy legacies’ playing a supplementary role. In particular, these policies are interpreted as anticipatory concessions to moderate members of Korean society by the state elites who aimed to stabilise their regimes by separating radicals from moderates. In addition, the medical insurance scheme is understood as a by-product of the competition between the South and North Korean regimes. This study also draws our attention to such issues as the similarities and differences between the East Asian welfare regimes and the change and continuity in the development of social policies in East Asia.

In the past two decades ‘decarceration’ and ‘deinstitutionalisation’ have been key themes of youth justice in the West. Restrictions have been imposed on the courts, limiting their ability to hand out residential and custodial training sentences to young offenders. As an alternative, resources have been redirected into the development and expansion of community-based rehabilitation programmes. However, in Hong Kong large numbers of young offenders continue to be placed in residential and custodial institutions after very brief criminal careers, and for crimes which do not pose a serious risk to the community. This article makes use of a recently published research study to discuss the experiences of young male offenders in the Hong Kong youth justice system, and to consider why community-based rehabilitative programmes as direct alternatives to residential training and custody have been slow to develop. It then goes on to explore how from a cultural perspective the use of community-based programmes might be justified and how they could be developed around existing sentencing guidelines.

In contrast to the majority of research on the relationship between women and the state which bases its findings on nationally aggregated data and concentrates its analysis on the forces which shape national policy concerning gender, this article adopts a micro-social approach to this question. Based on the findings from an in-depth qualitative cross-national study of the child care strategies of 112 mothers working in secretarial or clerical occupations in two countries with very different configurations of ‘political motherhood’, namely, France and Britain, the article assesses the impact of these varying policy environments on the construction of mothering in the everyday lives of employed women. It finds that different configurations of political motherhood have a significant impact on the practical aspects of these women's child care strategies but less impact on their fundamental conceptions of the duties and responsibilities of mothering. It concludes by considering the significance of these findings for current debates concerning the role of the state in perpetuating or combating unequal gender relations.

We are delighted to have been appointed to take responsibility for editing this journal for the next five years. We have taken over a long-established journal that has been well managed by Miriam David and Dulcie Groves since 1994. Our first months as editors are made easier by the fact that we have inherited a substantial backlog of accepted articles. However, we consider it very important that the time lag between acceptance of an article and publication should not be too long, particularly in a journal which contains assessments of and reactions to contemporary policies. Our publishers, Cambridge University Press, share our concern and have agreed that the size of the journal can be increased. However, more than that is required. This editorial has been written to inform readers of the other steps we are taking.

The focus of this article is upon the recent revival of interest in human agency within both sociological and social policy debates. There is a striking resonance between the increasing attention paid to individual behaviour within normative debates about welfare and the concern of some sociologists with the moral and ethical dilemmas that confront the individual in contemporary society. These two sets of arguments are not compatible. Indeed the analyses they present are contradictory. Moralists such as Etzioni, Field and Mead share a belief in the need to restructure welfare in ways that encourage and reward responsible behaviour. In contrast, sociologists such as Bauman, Beck and Giddens suggest that such endeavours could prove to be both futile and dangerous.

Attempts to address issues of agency face formidable obstacles and arouse genuine fears that they will serve to endorse a punitive and atavistic individualism. It is these fears, however, which have constrained and confined the debate about welfare in the post-war years. The revival of agency creates opportunities for a social science which is more sensitive to the activities of poor people whilst reflecting more fully the difference and diversity which characterises contemporary British society.

This article uses data from the Survey of English Housing (SEH) 1993/4 in order to investigate patterns of residential mobility in relation to social housing in England. Such an analysis provides an insight into the contemporary dynamics of residualisation. Hitherto, much of the analysis of residualisation has, quite properly, concentrated on the operation of the Right to Buy legislation in the process of social exclusion. However, this article argues that the process of residualisation has not been due just to changes in the tenure of dwellings, it has also been due to the intensification of processes of residential movement by people which can be traced back to at least the mid-1970s. As the number of dwellings sold through the RTB declines, the movement of people is again becoming the primary mechanism through which residualisation operates. The article also examines patterns of movement within the social rented sector. It concludes that as the sector has become smaller, the rate of mobility within it has increased. This increased rate of mobility is due to a number of factors, but is primarily a function of the demographic profile of tenants in the social rented sector. The factors which predispose certain types of household to be mobile within the sector are examined.

This article proposes a novel way of measuring cross-national changes over time in the outputs of social security systems. Traditional approaches to the comparative analysis of social security systems use expenditure levels, regime types or poverty and inequality rates to rank countries and map change over time. All these approaches encounter the problem of determining how much of the observed change is due to internal developments within the social security system, and how much due to exogenous social and economic factors. Taking the example of public pensions in five European countries since 1950, this article demonstrates how formal social security rules can be used in a simulation model to evaluate changes in public pension payments for a variety of hypothetical individuals characterised by different levels of lifetime income. This procedure produces direct measures of the impact of changes in social security systems which are entirely independent of exogenous developments in social and economic structures. This new method reveals the ‘pure’ effect of internal social security system development over time.

Contemporary theoretical debates point to a transformation of societies and social organisations away from universal forms of mass production and consumption, organised through mass institutions, towards smaller, diversified, entrepreneurial units linked together by new forms of market and network co-ordination. This greater diversity is also held to be a feature of service users who require individually fashioned solutions to non-standard problems and tailored products for their different tastes.

Applications of these accounts of social and economic transformation to the public sector propose similar patterns to those evident in private industry and in regional communities. The large, standardised bureaucracy is seen to give way to de-coupled, multiple agency models of service delivery within a new type of welfare state.

The study uses interviews and surveys (n = 365) with service delivery staff in the Australian employment assistance sector where transformations of this type have recently been sponsored by government. These data indicate that many of the key propositions of the post-Fordist account are valid. Smaller, non-unionised units dominate the new order and services are devolved to the local level. However a number of the expected patterns of flexible specialisation, diversity and networking are not found, suggesting marked differences and possible tensions between public and private sector forms of organisational development in the new order.

The Netherlands and Britain have treated lone mother families in similar ways in the post-war period. Until very recently they have been alone among countries of the EU in allowing lone mothers to draw benefits without making themselves available for work so long as they have dependent children. At the beginning of the 1990s, both countries attempted (unsuccessfully) to enforce the obligation of ‘absent fathers’ to maintain. In 1996, the Dutch government took decisive steps towards treating lone mothers as workers rather than mothers. In Britain, the last Conservative government began to move in the same direction, something that has been confirmed by the new Labour government. This article reviews the structure and characteristics of lone motherhood in the two countries and the nature of the recent policy changes. It then reports the findings of an exploratory qualitative study of divorced mothers in both countries. The evidence from the interviews reveals the strength of the primary commitment that women in both countries make to care. It also shows the difficulties divorced women face in combining paid and unpaid work, which, we suggest make the pendulum swing from treating lone mothers as mothers, to treating them as workers unrealistic.

In the last two decades there have been a number of social, medical and legal initiatives in the UK and elsewhere to provide assistance to women who suffer violence from their partner. The most recent innovations focus on responding to the men who perpetrate this violence. In this article we present the initial results of the first British study of programmes for violent men. The three-year study used a longitudinal method to compare the effects of two court mandated programmes with other, more orthodox, forms of criminal justice intervention (fines, admonishment, traditional probation, prison). Here we describe the men's programmes, locate the current study in the context of existing evaluations of similar programmes operating in North America, outline the methods employed, present the results of the post-hoc matching used to assess the probable effects of selection bias and using subsequent prosecutions and the accounts of women, compare the impact of different criminal justice interventions. The results indicate that twelve months after the criminal justice intervention a significant proportion of the Programme men had not subsequently been violent to their partner. This was in contrast to men sanctioned in other ways (the Other CJ group) who were much less likely to have changed their violent behaviour.

This article examines the secular trends in the overall association of parental divorce (or separation) and children's educational attainment at school-leaving age during the period spanning a quarter of a century since the second world war in Britain. The study presents a reanalysis of data from the three British birth cohorts which studied children born in 1946, 1958 and 1970. Equivalent educational attainment at the different time points is defined relative to the population distribution at the time, using the median level. The relative risks (with 95 per cent confidence intervals) of lower than median educational attainment associated with parental divorce (or separation) are 1.3 (1.2 to 1.5), 1.4 (1.3 to 1.5) and 1.4 (1.3 to 1.5) for the three cohorts respectively. These results refute the commonly held opinion that the effects of divorce on children have attenuated with the increasing prevalence of divorce.

High levels of long-term unemployment have undermined some of the assumptions of the post-war welfare state. In response most OECD governments are now replacing what have been characterised as passive income support payments with active benefit systems. Many have introduced new time limits to unconditional benefit entitlement in the form of job and training guarantees for those without work. This article describes how the 1993–6 Australian Labor government modernised its commitment to full employment by combining labour market programmes and social security reforms to create a Job Compact for the long-term unemployed. It analyses the achievements of the strategy and what went wrong, and it draws out lessons of relevance to the British Labour government which has committed itself to using job guarantees to build new bridges between welfare and work.

The use of private welfare services in the UK has risen. But relatively little is known about the patterns of use of private welfare services. This article investigates whether there is a private welfare class, and how attitudes to welfare state spending are linked to use of private services. It finds that there is considerable use of the private sector, but the size of the group consistently using a range of private welfare services is small. Changes in attitudes to public financing of welfare spending do not appear to be directly linked to use of private services.

Individual hospitals within the NHS are having to cope with a number of competing priorities and policies in the context of difficult financial circumstances. One such policy is Equal Opportunities (EO). It is within the devolved system of individual trusts that the implementation of (EO) policy takes place. This ‘localisation’ of EO issues also applies to the tackling of racial inequalities in the field of job recruitment, training and promotion. The present study is an examination of EO policies and their implementation at a single National Health Service (NHS) hospital in relation to the recruitment, career development, training and promotion of female ethnic minority employees. Interviews were conducted with fifty ethnic minority females drawn from administrative, domestic and nursing grades; and a further twenty-two with hospital managers with responsibility for recruitment, training and promotion. A number of important deficiencies in the hospital's EO policies were identified by the female ethnic minority interviewees, particularly in respect of the recruitment process, experiences of career development and perceptions of discrimination and harassment. The article details the managers' attitudes towards and knowledge of EO policies in general and their responses to these deficiencies in particular.

A Regulation Approach framework has been adopted to analyse the very rapid period of change in social security policy since the late 1980s. It is argued that the changes can be explained in terms of a number of regulatory dilemmas which emerged or were intensified under neo-liberal capital accumulation. Some of the regulatory dilemmas – high levels of economic inactivity, inflationary pressures consequent to higher employment and low levels of wages – it was thought could be managed through the social security system using what we call ‘market workfare’; by which we mean in-work means-tested social security benefits which have some measure of compulsion to work attached, such that it counts as workfare. The aim of in-work benefits is to reduce wages further so that the market can respond by creating more low-wage employment. By this stratagem it is the market which responds to labour demand, rather than the government creating work opportunities. The parliamentary neo-liberal right's approach to ‘market workfare’ is discussed, and then it is suggested that the marked similarities between New Labour and the previous parliamentary neo-liberal right can be explained because both administrations were attempting to manage the same regulatory dilemmas.

This article investigates whether equity is achieved in health service utilisation by children and young people aged 0–19 years. Data from the British General Household Survey 1991–4 is used to examine the influence of ethnicity, along with social class, housing tenure, family structure and employment of parents on the use of general practitioner, outpatient and inpatient services. Health status is the most powerful predictor of use for each health service and there is no evidence of socioeconomic inequalities. However, a clear ‘ethnic paradox’ persists after controlling for socioeconomic and demographic factors. South Asian children have a higher utilisation of GP services than any other ethnic group, but the use of hospital services is lower for children in all minority ethnic groups relative to the white population. Possible explanations for this paradox are examined in relation to indirect indicators of service quality. There is no evidence to suggest that South Asian children visit the doctor more frequently for a given illness episode than white children, but having a non-UK- born mother is associated with increased consultation and reduced use of outpatient services relative to UK-born South Asian parents.

Any predictions that solicitors acting for divorcing parents might become redundant, as increasing use is made of mediation services, are unsubstantiated by the research on which this article is based. This study shows how solicitors, far from retreating from issues of arrangements over the future of children of divorcing parents, are busy adapting themselves to the new working environment. For some this process involves themselves qualifying as mediators. For these and others, it entails acquiring and presenting to their clients an understanding of ‘child psychology’ which enables them to advise their clients on how to sort out their differences in ways that will safeguard their children's welfare. By constructing children's welfare within a legal discourse of justice and protection of their clients' lawful interests, solicitors are able to convince themselves that justice, in cases involving children's welfare, is achieved by persuading their clients to ‘be sensible’ and sort out their differences, and that those parents who are openly hostile and/or pursue their own (selfish) interests have lost sight of justice and need to be brought back into line. The article demonstrates how solicitors claim to achieve these ends and raises questions about their practical and theoretical implications.

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.

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.

At the same time as the number of lone mother families has been increasing, education policy has demanded more involvement in children's schooling from ‘parents’ (i.e., mothers). Social policy in this area is inherently contradictory, encouraging lone mothers into paid employment on the one hand, whilst imploring mothers to ‘help’ in (and out of) the classroom on the other. Whilst lone mothers become scapegoats for all societal ills, parental involvement schemes are seen to solve society's ‘problems’. Drawing on data from a research project, this article begins to examine the contradictions within and between these policies for low income lone mothers.