In 2000, the European Union established three principles that should guide Member State pension systems and their reforms: the financial sustainability of pension systems; adequacy of pensions; and the modernisation of systems. The latter included the achievement of greater gender equality and sought to respond to the significant gender gaps in public pension systems. This article demonstrates how the reforms carried out over the period 2000–2017 have focused on strengthening the financial sustainability of systems but may also have contributed to even greater gender inequality in old age protection. To this end, we examine the major legislative amendments concerning eligibility criteria and entitlement conditions in six countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal and Spain), as representative of the social insurance scheme.

Individual Placement and Support (IPS) is a highly effective model of employment support for individuals with severe mental health conditions. Its potential modification for new settings and larger cohorts is of keen interest across advanced economies given shared health-related (un)employment challenges. Despite mushrooming policy interest and activity around modified IPS a significant barrier and risk at present is the absence of a well-considered analytical framework to enable structured critical reflection about the effective translation of IPS principles and fidelity into modified IPS services. This article fills this void through the presentation for the first time in the literature of such an analytical framework, unpacking as it does so a set of key original analytical distinctions that are unhelpfully homogenised in current literature and policy thinking and highlighting the wider potential of IPS principles and models to the nature of good employment support for other individuals with health conditions and disabilities.

Household food insecurity (HFI) impacts over 1.7 million households in Canada with adverse effects upon health. As a signatory to numerous international covenants asserting that access to food is a human right, Canadian governments are obliged to reduce HFI, yet Canadian governments have done remarkably little to assure that Canadians are food secure. In the absence of government action, HFI has spawned numerous non-governmental means of managing the problem such as food banks, feeding programs, and community gardens and kitchens. These efforts have depoliticized the problem of HFI, making its solution more difficult. Solving HFI is also complicated by the presence of five competing discourses of HFI in Canada: nutrition and dietetics, charitable food distribution, community development, social determinants of health, and political economy which offer differing causes and means of responding to HFI. We argue that the least considered discourse – the critical materialist political economy discourse – best accounts for the presence of HFI in a liberal welfare state such as Canada and provides the most effective means of responding to its presence.

Neoliberal metaphors of students often describe students as consumers, managers and even as commodities, but this analysis often disregards the discursive complexity of education. We argue that frame merging is essential to understand the hybrid modalities of neoliberal images of students in the Swedish context, where the image of the student is suspended between a social democratic welfare service model, academic capitalism, new public management and welfare nationalism. We demonstrate this through the case study of introducing student fees for non-EU students in Swedish higher education, and how the merging of universal tax financing with a more individualised fee paying solution creates variegated and complex metaphors of students and higher education. These metaphors are infused with social democratic social citizenship, neoliberal reform of welfare services, academic capitalism and nationalist welfare chauvinism. This implies that, in practice, it is nigh on impossible to disentangle the neoliberal consumer metaphor from that of social citizenship; instead they merge to generate multiple contextually relevant metaphors to fit the local debates in higher education.

There is growing interest in research that informs more effective practices in employment services across Europe, Australia and the USA. However, despite the ever-expanding amount of research on the implementation and efficacy of various policy programmes in practice, the knowledge on how to bring unemployed individuals closer to the labour market remains ambiguous and inconclusive. This is especially so in the context of the more vulnerable unemployed, who face physical, mental and social challenges in addition to unemployment. In this article, we examine the existing literature in terms of its potential to inform (the development of) effective employment policies. On this basis, we outline an alternative approach based on the concept of relational causality, and discuss the implications of such an approach for applied policy research.

Punitive welfare conditionality, combining tough sanctions with minimal self-directed support, is a defining feature of contemporary UK working age social security provision. This approach has been justified by policy makers on the basis that it will increase the numbers in paid employment, and thereby offer savings for the public purse that are also beneficial for individuals who are expected to be healthier and better off financially as a result. In this article, we aggregate two qualitative longitudinal studies (Welfare Conditionality, 2014–17; and Lived Experience, 2011–16) that document lived experiences of claiming benefits and using back-to-work support services. In both studies and over time, we find, contrary to policy expectations, that coercion, including sanctions, was usually experienced as unnecessary and harmful and that poverty was prevalent, both in and out of work, tended to worsen and pushed many close to destitution. Conditionality governed encounters with employment services and, perversely, appeared to impede, rather than support, transitions into employment for participants in both studies. These constitute ‘shared typical’ aspects of lived experiences of welfare conditionality. We propose Combined Study Qualitative Longitudinal Research as a new methodological approach to extend inference beyond the usual study-specific confines of qualitative generalisation.

When looking at clients with a long history of unemployment and substantial health and/or social problems, stories of success (in terms of moving from being on cash benefits to getting a job) are limited. Thus, when a client does manage to gain employment or enter education, it represents an unusual1 story of success seen from a political, organisational and individual perspective. In this article, we investigate empirically what can be learnt about current active labour market policies from these client cases. Methodologically this is explored through interviews with former clients who have managed to find a job despite dealing with complex health or social issues, and interviews with their former caseworkers. Thus, the article aims to provide insights into the crucial elements in making the move from vulnerable unemployed to being ready for a job, as well as finding it and keeping it.

A key question concerning the marketisation of employment services is the interaction between performance management systems and frontline client-selection practices. While the internal sorting of clients for employability by agencies has received much attention, less is known about how performance management shapes official categorisation practices at the point of programme referral. Drawing on case studies of four Australian agencies, this study examines the ways in which frontline staff contest how jobseekers are officially classified by the benefit administration agency. With this assessment pivotal in determining payment levels and activity requirements, we find that reassessing jobseekers so they are moved to a more disadvantaged category, suspended, or removed from the system entirely have become major elements of casework. These category manoeuvres help to protect providers from adverse performance rankings. Yet, an additional consequence is that jobseekers are rendered fully or partially inactive, within the context of a system designed to activate.

Policymakers in the UK have promised to deliver personalised employability services for vulnerable jobseekers. However, unemployed people often describe their engagement with state-funded services as defined by: the offer of low cost, standardised job search services; and pressure to accept any job, irrespective of quality or appropriateness. This article argues that more progressive, co-produced alternatives are possible. We draw on an evaluation of local, third sector-led services targeting lone parents (LPs) in five local government areas in Scotland. Our research involved more than 100 in-depth interviews with both service providers and LPs. We find that partnership-oriented co-governance mechanisms facilitated collaborative approaches to the management of services and processes of co-production. LPs expressed positive views of the personalised services that were co-produced. We conclude that a commitment to collaboration and co-production may be more effective in promoting personalised services that are responsive to the needs of vulnerable groups.