Since the late twentieth century, health and welfare policy in Australia and the UK has focused on enhancing the freedom, life choices and participation of service users. Public policy, based on the construct of social inclusion, requires greater individualisation of services, active engagement with service users, and innovative partnerships between different providers. At the same time, however, the management of risk through a range of compliance procedures can discourage the exercise of discretion by workers, limit the participation of their clients and reduce incentives for innovative cooperation between services. Drawing on in-depth interviews with community care professionals and their managers engaged in high risk social care in Australia, this article gives particular attention to the relevance of risk to social inclusion and individualised service provision.

This article draws on the authors' experience in conducting a recent qualitative longitudinal study in the evaluation of the Pathways to Work Pilot for incapacity benefits recipients. Findings from the qualitative longitudinal research highlighted issues that might not otherwise have been apparent. This approach to policy-related research provides new perspectives and opportunities for substantive findings. It also presents a number of challenges. Issues arise about how to engage with policy makers when exploring changes over time. Policy makers are often keen to have ‘emerging findings’ from panel data, but an initial cross-sectional analysis to meet such requirements contains views and experiences of people who subsequently drop out of the panel. The full longitudinal perspective then comes from a smaller group, and there may be some surprises in comparison with the ‘emerging findings’. At the same time, the focus of policy interests may shift during the lifetime of the panel, especially during a pilot or trial in a rapidly developing policy area. Researchers may be asked to introduce new topics or abandon some lines of enquiry, and may face ethical issues in deciding how to make best use of the data.

Two recent studies of elder abuse in the UK are located in current policy contexts of adult safeguarding. After describing the studies, the discussion draws out their central messages and identifies the challenges that the studies present to recent policy debates and innovations. These relate to the need to properly integrate both wider older people's issues and issues of racism and ethnicity within developments in adult safeguarding policy as well as social care services as the personalisation agenda advances.

This article places the British material on religion and social policy in a comparative perspective. In order to do so, it introduces a recently completed project on welfare and religion in eight European societies, entitled ‘Welfare and Religion in a European Perspective’. Theoretically it draws on the work of two key thinkers: Gøsta Esping-Andersen and David Martin. The third section elaborates the argument: all West European societies are faced with the same dilemmas regarding the provision of welfare and all of them are considering alternatives to the state for the effective delivery of services. These alternatives include the churches.

In times of labour market insecurity and retrenchment of state support, low income families rely on friends and relatives as a safety net. This article explores the enhanced role of this ‘third source of welfare’ in light of these developments. It draws on qualitative longitudinal research to demonstrate how families’ situations fluctuate over two years and the importance of social support networks in hard times and periods of crisis. The research illustrates how social support is not necessarily a stable structure that families facing insecurity can fall back on, but rather a variable resource, and fluid over time, as those who provide such support experience changing capabilities and needs. A policy challenge is to help reinforce and not undermine the conditions that enable valuable social support to be offered and sustained, while ensuring sufficient reliable state support to avoid families having no choice but to depend on this potentially fragile resource as a safety net.

Recognised as a global concern by the UN, and increasingly acknowledged as a gendered crime and welfare issue in such diverse settings as the UK and China, domestic violence provides an important window on the development of policy and action in a global context. Focusing specifically on England and China, and mainly on the latter, the article highlights the need for gender to be an integral aspect of global social policy analysis, examines the impact of international organisations (governmental and non-governmental) on domestic violence policy development, and demonstrates the importance of country context in constructing and implementing global policy frameworks.

The involvement of service users in the research process is becomingly increasingly required by many funders of research and is being seen as an indicator of quality in its own right. This paper provides original data from a study of social policy researchers’ views of service user involvement in research. It shows a diversity of stances which have been categorised here as belonging to Advocates, Agnostics and Adversaries of user involvement. The views of Agnostics and Adversaries pose serious challenges that need to be addressed if service user involvement is to be more widely accepted and valued by some researchers and academics in social policy.

There is growing evidence that welfare recipients facing significant personal barriers are not being well served by either regular employment programmes or support services operating in other areas, such as mental health or drug and alcohol sectors. This paper argues that there is a lack of recognition of the desire and capacity of such individuals to engage in employment and the potential for employment to assist in their recovery, given appropriate support. Existing policy responses and gaps are discussed and effective programmes and models identified.

In December 2017, the House of Commons Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee put out a call for submissions to an Inquiry that would consider the evidence-base for early intervention policies, with a particular focus on ‘Adverse Childhood Experiences’ or ACEs. This article analyses those submissions and the transcripts of the Inquiry’s oral sessions in the belief that they constitute a useful window through which to explore the types of claims being made in ACEs discourse. Our aim is to assess whether the ACEs phenomenon represents a continuity with what has been termed the ‘first three years movement’ (Thornton, 2011a, 2011b) – social policy and philanthropic activism which focuses on the earliest years of life in the name of preventing social problems ‘down the line’. In particular, we consider constructions of parents as determinate of these social problems through their influence on their children and the ways in which these are gendered in new ways.

With the Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (TWWC) Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990) intended to provide a comprehensive typology covering welfare regimes as well as their effects on the economy. However, the initial TWWC-framework fell short of its promises as it ignored welfare services and the industrial sector of the economy. In the last twenty-five years many studies have analysed these previously overlooked aspects. In this article we review this research. We find that most empirical studies on welfare services, as well as on the economy, confirm the validity of the TWWC typology. However, insufficient attention has been paid to exposing the interplay between the different areas. In the second part of the article we provide two alternative explanations for the linkage between welfare regime and capitalism typologies. There is evidence for a functionalist explanation as proposed by the Varieties-of-Capitalism (VoC) framework, as well as for a political explanation delivered by the power resources approach.

This themed section focuses on parenting support as a social policy phenomenon within and across five European countries. The provisions involved include: information to parents about parenting and child-rearing (through helplines and websites as well as face-to-face services), organised parenting classes or programmes, one-to-one counselling and intensive work around parenting behaviours in ‘troubled families’, professional and non-professional networks and service provision oriented to reduce social isolation and increase social integration (especially among ‘minority’ sections of the population). Why are these developments interesting and why do they merit a themed section? There are numerous answers to this question. In the first instance, these measures are an interesting instance of social policy's increasing interest in what happens between parents and their children. Secondly, studying parenting support helps to reveal fundamental contestations between state and society with regard to the management of personal life and the governance of family. Thirdly, analysing developments helps to explore emerging specialist areas of social policy and how these tie in with public and political constructions of ‘social problems’.

Globalisation, and its possible impacts, has been widely discussed and debated in Taiwan. The economic technocracies argue for globalisation, as a triumph of the free market and minimum state intervention, through measures of tax cuts, privatisation, deregulation, and so forth, as required to secure Taiwan's economic development in the future. However, rising unemployment accompanied by the new poverty requires more state provisions of social welfare. A strange policy orientation mixing tax cuts with welfare increases is proposed that precisely demonstrates the dilemma of the state between global competition and social reform. This is now a great challenge for Taiwan to balance economic and social requirements.

As many commentators have pointed out, the pressures facing modern welfare states are formidable. One response by government is to place greater emphasis on a policy-making paradigm that rests on an individual rational actor account of agency. This finds its intellectual home in the leading tradition of neo-classical economics, its ideological home in a politics of active citizenry and equality of opportunity and its institutional home in the mechanisms by which the Treasury currently directs social policy.

The resulting policies have strengths in delivering productivity improvements and responsiveness to consumer demand, but weaknesses in accommodating the value positions of an increasingly diverse society, in sustaining the social cohesion necessary to the continuance of state welfare and in confronting the structural basis of some social interests. These issues have traditionally been recognised in the sociology of values, the psychology of trust and the political science of power.

One strength of academic social policy is that it is a field of study in which a number of disciplines are deployed. The ascendancy of one paradigm may obscure the contribution of others. It is hard for social policy academics to gain recognition when they speak a different language from that of policy making at the highest level.

The United States has been a leader in the creation of disability rights law, providing a policy template for other nations. Yet the social model, the animating philosophy behind the disability rights movement, has had little effect on the wide range of welfare programs that serve people with disabilities. These programs, whose creation preceded the modern disability rights movement, reflect a medical model of disability that is at odds with the social model. Analysing the Americans with Disabilities Act (which embodies the social model) and Social Security Disability Insurance (the largest welfare program for people with disabilities), we explore how and why this layering of contradictory disability rights and welfare programs developed and how it has been maintained. We argue that the tension between these policies engendered a series of patches, or ‘kludges’, that allow the policies to coexist without meaningful synthesis. We contend that the United States is particularly prone to this layering of ‘tense policies’, but that it is likely characteristic of disability policy in many nations. Finally we argue that accurate benchmarking of disability rights regimes across nations requires analysts to dig through all the layers of disability policy.

This article considers changing perceptions of adult ageing and their interpretation in social policy. Once wider international trends are outlined, Australian policy is used as a case example. It is argued that a mismatch between policy initiatives and personal change is a new social risk associated with demographic and socio-cultural development, having implications for the way in which social ageism and age discrimination should be considered. The article concludes with a consideration of new directions that a critical, life course sensitised approach to social policy might take.

One of the central lessons taken from the work of Michael Lipsky on street level bureaucracies is that street level bureaucrats make policy. Two resulting broad public policy concerns are the impact of street level decision making on public policy and the impact on citizens’ access to public services. This article reports on a study of the views of Ontario Works’ case managers on the nature of bureaucratic discretion in the setting of a highly rule bound provincial income assistance programme in Canada. The focus of this article is on case managers’ interaction with contradictory and complex policy directives. An argument is developed that in such a restrictive policy setting, meeting the goals of unswerving policy implementation and citizen access to public services may work at cross purposes.

Peter Townsend argued that poverty could be scientifically measured as a ‘breakpoint’ within the income distribution below which participation collapses. This paper stands on Townsend's shoulders in measuring the level of poverty and participation by: (1) broadening his original measurement of participation; (2) using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) in conjunction with a new dataset including 40,000 households (Understanding Society, 2011; 2013); and (3) taking into account the multi-cultural/ethnic nature of British society. We find that participation – defined as lack of deprivation, social participation and trust – reduces as income falls but stops doing so among the poorest 30 per cent of individuals. This may be indicating a minimum level of participation, a floor rather than a ‘breakpoint’ as suggested by Townsend, which has to be sustained irrespective of how low income is. Respondents with an ethnic minority background manifest lower levels of participation than white respondents but the relationship has a less linear pattern. Moreover, the floor detected for the overall population is also replicated when combining all respondents from ethnic groups.

The aim of this paper is to study the Hong Kong government's attempt to promote residualism and market principles in medical services through changing its fee and charge policy, strengthening the principle of selectivity at the expense of the universalist principle and proposing compulsory saving measures. It is argued that these reform measures are related to the government's mixed attitude towards medical services – that is, whilst providing medical services in response to political demands and the requirements of capitalism, the government wants to reduce the challenges these services pose to capitalism and its financial policy.

This article examines the saving behaviour of ethnic minorities in the UK. Within the context of pension planning, we investigate saving for retirement patterns in relation to ethnicity, gender and age. We use data from the Family Resources Survey (FRS) to analyse employment status, income, saving types and levels. Although we find profound heterogeneity, ethnic minorities show higher levels of unemployment, lower income and consistently lower levels of saving for retirement compared to our white control group. Disadvantages of ethnic minorities during their working life persist, especially for women, although to a lesser extent than in the past, and continue to affect private savings and prospective retirement income. Indian and Chinese men have experienced the greatest improvements in terms of employment status and income and this is reflected in higher levels of saving for retirement since the mid 1990s.

The case selection issue has long been neglected in cross-national welfare regime studies, despite its importance in securing validity and reliability. This article reviews thirty-three studies that produced their own welfare regime typology, and analyses their case selection practices. They can be divided into five groups in terms of their case sizes: from Esping-Andersen's (1990) original eighteen nations to ‘all’ nations. Three peculiar patterns can be observed in the approaches. First, more than two-thirds of studies still focus on the old set of eighteen nations, arguably ignoring emerging welfare states. Second, theoretical tension exists between ‘isolationists’ and ‘expansionists’ on the exportability of the welfare regime concept to wider cases. Lastly only a few studies have clarified and justified their case selections. It is concluded that the welfare modelling business needs to rectify the common practice of ignoring case selection issues.