This article examines how intensive family interventions in England since 1997, including the Coalition government's Troubled Families programme, are situated in a contemporary problem figuration of ‘anti-social’ or ‘troubled’ families that frames and justifies the utilisation of different models of intensive family intervention. The article explores how techniques of classification and estimation, combined with the controversial use of ‘research’ evidence in policy making, are situated within a ‘rational fiction’ that constructs ‘anti-social’ families in particular ways. The article illustrates how this problem figuration has evolved during the New Labour and Coalition administrations in England, identifying their similarities and differences. It then presents findings from a study of intensive family intervention strategies and mechanisms in a large English city to illustrate how this national level discourse and policy framework relates to developing localised practice, and the tensions and ambiguities that arise.

Gender inequalities are a key issue for most pension systems in Latin America. Contributory pension schemes that link benefit entitlements to work and earnings tend to reflect in the benefits they offer the gender gaps that prevail in the labour market. This deepened with the implementation of individual private accounts as part of structural pension reforms in a number of countries. This article evaluates how recent pension policies, including measures geared to coverage expansion and so-called pension ‘re-reforms’, have addressed gender gaps in pensions in four Latin American countries. It shows that the expansion of non-contributory pensions and a greater emphasis on redistribution are important for the protection of older women in a context of gendered labour markets and the unequal distribution of paid and unpaid work between women and men. Looking at the cases of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Chile, the article identifies progress but also the persistence of gender gaps in pensions and emphasises the need for further measures to promote adequate social protection for older women.

The reforms to children's services in the UK brought in by the Every Child Matters Green Paper and the subsequent Children Act 2004 represent the most significant change in this area of social policy since 1948. The policy approach has two distinguishing features – an ‘outcomes led’ approach rooted in the views of children and young people about what constitutes ‘wellbeing’ in their lives, and a partnership approach that recognises these outcomes can only be achieved through high levels of inter-agency and inter-professional working. This article suggests that the two features may be in tension, and that during the process of implementation there is a danger that user defined outcomes will be re-interpreted to fit in with other organisational and professional agendas. The analysis draws upon Rick Matland's framework for exploring the impact of conflict and ambiguity respectively upon the implementation process.

Drawing on a qualitative longitudinal study that examined experiences of welfare reform among a small group of recipients of out-of-work benefits, this paper considers how individuals’ social citizenship rights, responsibilities and status are all affected by processes of welfare reform. It discusses the ways in which welfare conditionality impacts upon targeted individuals’ citizenship status, noting a trend towards ‘conditioning’, where people seek to govern and manage their own behaviour(s) in order to meet the demands of contemporary citizenship. The paper considers the extent to which even a ‘modicum of economic welfare and security’ is now denied to so many Britons, concluding with a discussion of what if any emancipatory potential social citizenship still holds.

The increasing emphasis on community participation across the globe is well-documented. In the UK, it has been a central theme in neighbourhood renewal policy, where communities are expected to engage not only at neighbourhood level but also to take their place alongside public and private sector players in local strategic partnerships at city- or district-wide levels. Engaging communities beyond the neighbourhood poses particular challenges for the voluntary and community sector infrastructure. This article draws on an evaluation of the UK government's Community Participation Programmes to identify the challenges of scaling up to these levels and how these can be addressed.

This paper attempts to contribute to understandings of the role of resilience as a process enabling individuals to steer a positive course in their lives by drawing on longitudinal qualitative data collected from six case study individuals, drawn from a wider study of one hundred families over a seven-year period. It is shown how respondents construct their own life trajectories, specifically reflecting on the changes and challenges they face. Additionally, this work offers a policy perspective to the debate on resilience, examining the interplay between recent government initiatives and their potential role in fostering resilience.

In October 2008 in the UK Incapacity Benefit (IB) (the main income replacement benefit for sick and disabled claimants) was replaced by the Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) for new claimants. Drawing upon recent work on the retrenchment of welfare benefits and services this paper examines the context for the changes, the marketisation of the job placement services for ESA claimants and the extension of conditionality to sick and disabled benefit claimants. The paper argues that the introduction of ESA is a good example of the retrenchment of benefits for the majority of sick and disabled people. The paper concludes that ESA can be interpreted as creating a group of disadvantaged people through which the private sector can profit.

The purpose of this article is to contrast productivism with post-productivism and raise a question mark over the extent to which social democrats should support the former rather than the latter. It offers a definition of post-productivism, explaining this in terms of the ‘reproductive value’ of care and sustainability. The paper then sketches the limits to social democracy and indicates why post-productivist solutions might therefore be appropriate. It concludes by speculating on some implications for social policy.

This paper reports on a study of what active citizenship means from the perspective of citizens who are active within third sector organisations. It is based on an empirical study involving 1,610 respondents across 11 towns in six countries. The study explored how active citizenship is manifested, by gathering data on attitudes towards social changes and the forms and practices of active citizenship. There are two major, and apparently contradictory themes emerging in the data. The first theme provides a portrait of active engagement, proactively, and sometimes oppositionally working for a better world. On the other hand, citizens by and large avoid active oppositional engagement in the political process. They prefer to work collaboratively with government and to work at the local level. This second theme can be understood as social maintenance, support for existing structures that facilitates community cohesion, while providing relief for the disadvantaged, often with a conservative charity or welfare orientation. Following the work of Touraine, the study revealed how citizens act at the local rather than the national level, and focus on concrete issues and interpersonal relations rather than political action aimed at wider policy change. While this form of citizenship action can reflect a conservative form of maintenance, it is equally a creative new form of association and mutual support.

The paper addresses two dimensions of the debate on social capital – the analytical concept of Robert Putnam and the way it may become interrelated with political concerns debated in public. It is argued that in Putnams' concept two dimensions of social capital – social bonds and civic commitment – are interrelated in a way that suggests that social capital is something like the basis for good policy making. Against this, the open interrelationship between the two is stressed: one does not only need ‘social capital to make democracy work’ (Putnam) but often more democratic politics in order to make social capital work.

This article calls for a more nuanced understanding of the links between the motivations, trajectories and policy environments of community asset organisations and the geographies of their social impact. While potential for the ownership of physical assets by place-based community organisations can be found in new localism powers in all four jurisdictions of the UK, there may be differences in policy articulation and implementation that enable or limit the social benefits community asset organisations are thought to deliver. Furthermore, community assets are premised on their intrinsic tie and value to place, with social cohesion, communal mobilisation and identification of mutual interest thought to be at their heart. This article reviews research in this field set in relation to recent policy developments, and identifies an important need to better understand how the personal and social geographies of impact are delivered in, and influenced by, different spatial contexts and political frameworks.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, a set of measures and interventions has been progressively implemented in France under the heading of ‘parenting support’ (soutien à la parentalité). This article describes this policy process in order to understand the drivers, instruments and actors at work, and also to highlight the controversies and ideological roots of the policy and its framing. It is argued that parenting support policy is the result of a complex process engaging a potent combination of old and new ideas, objectives and instruments which involve political and ideological contestation. The current turn to parenting in France is mainly a recalibration of previous experiences that were themselves also the site of important contradictions and controversies.

The last decade has witnessed a growing interest in the promotion and use of innovation as a means of improving public services. Rafts of central government initiatives exist to promote, support and learn from innovative activity. This paper examines the adoption of a new, innovative service in a social work setting in the UK, namely family group conferencing. It explores the rate and pattern of the adoption of this service innovation by Councils with Social Service Responsibilities (CSSRs). It examines the implementation process and identifies: resources, professional resistance, risk, the role of central government and champions amongst the factors that facilitated and inhibited its use in three case study sites.

This paper examines conflicts in polices in England and Wales pertaining to the demand for alternative, non-medical crisis support for those experiencing ‘psychosis’. We examine the limitations of current treatment, policy and legislative frameworks in supporting these demands. In particular, we focus on the limitations of prevailing conceptualisations of ‘human rights’, ‘social inclusion’ and ‘recovery’. These concepts, we argue, are embedded within a broader treatment framework which renders medication as mandatory and all other treatment modalities as inherently subsidiary, and a broader policy framework which is complicit with bio-medical orthodoxies of ‘mental illness’ and prioritises treatment compliance and compulsion. Therefore, in order to advance a ‘human rights’ approach to mental health policy, we argue that reigning orthodoxies inherent within policy and practice must be explicitly challenged to open up spaces for the availability of alternatives.

Drawing on the results of a qualitative longitudinal analysis of the experiences of homeless people using an employment related programme in the UK, this article explores the experiences of homeless women. Research focused on women’s trajectories through homelessness remains unusual and this comparatively large study provided an opportunity to look at a group of homeless women over time. The results from 136 in-depth interviews with forty-seven homeless women are reported. The interviews explored their lives prior to becoming homeless, their routes into homelessness and their trajectories through and out of homelessness. The article does not compare experiences across gender, focusing solely on women, because the existing evidence base focuses largely on the experiences of lone homeless men. The goals of the article are twofold, first to add to the existing evidence on women’s experiences of homelessness and second to add to emergent debates on whether gender is associated with differentiated trajectories through homelessness.

In this article, we highlight some critical matters in the way that an issue is framed as a problem in policymaking and the consequent means of taming that problem, in focussing on the use and implications of neuroscientific discourse of brain claims in early intervention policy and practice. We draw on three sets of analyses: of the contradictory set of motifs framing the state of ‘evidence’ of what works in intervention in the early years; of the (mis)use of neuroscientific discourse to frame deficient parenting as causing inequalities and support particular policy directions; and of the way that early years practitioners adopt brain claims to tame the problem of deficient parenting. We argue that using expedient brain claims as a framing and taming justification is entrenching gendered and classed understandings and inequalities.

The article will examine the latest development of China's urban social assistance reform. Under the impact of the dual processes of globalisation and the deepening market transition, China's social security reform is increasingly taking a new safety net approach to assist the urban poor, instead of relying mainly on social insurance provision. The minimum living security project for urban residents is one of the approaches supplementing social insurance in social protection. In 2002, about one-third of social security beneficiaries were supported by the newly developed social assistance project. The changing approach does not mean that the government is withdrawing from its responsibility for social insurance to the urban workers, but reflects the changing goals and means of social policies. This indicates that China's social welfare system is shifting towards a new residual welfare model.

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.

This article critically reviews the foundational studies carried out by Felitti in the US and Bellis in the UK and their colleagues examining the relationship between Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and adult health and morbidity. These studies have paved the way for much research on childhood adversity and its impact on child development and brain functioning at a family level. ACEs have gained traction in the UK in terms of policy targeting dysfunctional families through early intervention to stop the intergenerational effects of adverse childhood experiences. This article questions the foundational research that argues for family-level, parent-based intervention, especially in light of substantial evidence about the biological embedding of poverty and the direct links between disadvantage and child development. It also hopes to raise awareness about the contested nature of ACEs and their growing influence on family policy.