Social science researchers in the UK now accept that religion has returned to public life (Spalek and Imtoual, 2008; Dinham and Lowndes, 2009), after what has been described by Gorski (2005) as a considerable period of ‘intellectual and political repression’ that began in the post-World War II era. This lasted until around the beginning of the 1980s when political events such as the 1979 Iranian revolution, the rise of the ‘moral majority’ in North America and the spread of religious political mobilisation across the world, forced social scientists to recalculate their predictions about the effective demise of religion which had been considered to be a direct consequence of processes of modernisation (Casanova, 1994; Gorski, 2005; Habermas, 2006).

This article reviews the consultation process during the development of a local dementia strategy. The processes of involvement by the range of stakeholders involved and how their different views shaped the strategy are considered. Particular attention is paid to the involvement of people with dementia as they are the recipients of the services to be shaped by the strategy and also form the group most difficult to reach. This article demonstrates the value of including a wide range of stakeholders in the development of local policy and the importance of involving people with dementia in policy development.

Using the China Household Income Project 2007 data and imputing health and education benefits through microsimulation, this article provides evidence on how the inclusion of health and education benefits might change the estimated size, structure and redistributive effects of the Chinese social welfare system. We find that the inequalities in social welfare systems across the urban–rural–migrant populations persisted, reinforcing the multidimensional inequalities in health and education well documented in the literature. Imputed health benefits were larger and played a greater redistributive role in urban areas than for their rural and migrant peers. Imputed education benefits, on the other hand, played a more equalising role in rural and migrant populations as compared to the urban population. These results highlight the importance for China to use health and education benefits effectively to mitigate such multidimensional inequalities and enhance the life opportunities of disadvantaged citizens, especially children.

Governments across the world have been slow in reacting to meeting the needs of disabled people during the pandemic. This has exposed existing inequalities in social policies, as well as new support barriers. Debates over social care have focused on Covid-19's impact on those living in residential care. Little is known about the experiences of disabled people who rely on daily support in their homes.

This article reports on a year-long study examining the experiences of disabled people during the pandemic in England and Scotland. It focuses on the crisis in social care and offers evidence of how lives have been disrupted. For many, this resulted in a sudden loss of services, delayed assessments and break down of routines and communities. Findings underline the weakness of social care in its wider relationship with the NHS and show how the social care crisis has challenged the goal of independent living.

Retirement scholars (and policy makers) have traditionally assumed spouses share their retirement savings, even when they are financially heterogamous and their individual saving capacities diverge. Recent research, however, has challenged this assumption, emphasising that wealth is unequally distributed within couples. In this study, we contribute to this debate by exploring how often financially heterogamous spouses describe their management of retirement savings as joint and redistributive. Data collected in Québec (Canada) in 2015 show that 28 per cent of couples with an income differential report to balance retirement savings across partners. Building on exchange and institutional theories of conjugal behaviour, we also stress that the prevalence of this practice varies with several factors, including union duration and matrimonial status. These findings suggest policy makers underestimate the size of the population at risk of old age financial vulnerability when assuming lower-income individuals are well prepared for retirement if partnered with a better-off spouse who saves.

Parenting support in the Nordic countries builds upon a century-long tradition of controls and services run by municipalities and county councils (Hagelund, 2008; Danielsen and Mühleisen, 2009; Lundqvist, 2015). However, with the introduction of structured parental guidance programmes from the 1990s onward (mainly based on research insights and experiences from the US and UK), new elements have been added to the former policy legacy (Lundqvist, 2015).

Parent education surfaced as a political question in Sweden in the 1960s and support for parents has since remained on the political agenda. Despite different views on the ideal relationship between the welfare state, the family and children, support for parents has been advocated by parties from all over the political spectrum. By tracing the political debate, this article addresses the question of how the notion of support for parents was adapted to different political ideas, ideologies and ways of defining the relationship between state, family and children from the 1960s until the 2000s in Sweden. We analyse the arguments that different political parties offered and the varying meanings attributed to terms like ‘parent education’ (föräldrautbildning) and ‘parenting support’ (föräldrastöd) during three different phases in the transformation of the Swedish welfare state: the final period of its expansion in the 1960s and 1970s; the economic crisis and retrenchments of welfare services in the 1990s; and the era of individual responsibility in the 2000s. Support for parents has been actualised as a solution to different social and political problems and the notions of parent education and parenting support have proven the capacity to accommodate different political ideas, ideologies and visions.

The arrival of large numbers of asylum seekers in the UK, many of whom subsequently become refugees, has been an important contributor to the emergence of new migration. Integration policy and initiatives have placed a great deal of focus on securing housing for refugees and enhancing their employability. While academics stress that integration should be a two-way process, and highlight the need for institutions to adapt to meet migrant need, the vast majority of policy attention has focused on supporting refugees to adapt to life in the UK. Few initiatives and even less research attention has been paid to encouraging or exploring institutional adaptation. This article looks at the experiences of UK housing providers involved in the HACT Reach In initiative. The project was unusual in that it sought to encourage housing providers to adapt their approaches to service provision by embedding refugees into their everyday work. Using data collected via qualitative longitudinal methods, the article examines the ways in which institutions changed their cultures and approaches to service delivery. It finds that initiatives that enable hosts and migrants to access new social fields create the opportunity for embedded integration that moves beyond the individual to impact upon institutions, and argues that shifting our attention to institutions has much to offer in conceptual, empirical and policy terms.

Singapore's Central Provident Fund (CPF) has served well in the old economy as a macroeconomic stabilisation policy. It finessed the developmental state and created socio-political stability with home ownership extended to health, education and asset enhancement schemes. However, structural changes with globalisation, information communication technology (ICT) and the new knowledge-based economy (KBE), plus a series of crises and downturns since the Asian crisis have undermined full employment as the lynchpin of the triangulation and CPF model. Announcements made in August 2003 are germane to this paper's discussion of the reinvention of the CPF model. Profound and creative reinvention to balance between neo-liberal market-based solutions without losing the socio-political control enjoyed by the ruling regime, however, remains a political choice as in delinking the CPF–fiscal process, CPF serves members or state.

This paper examines the experiences of immigrants in Toronto as they pass through, and leave, Ontario Works (OW), a ‘Work First’ approach to social assistance that prioritizes rapid labour force attachment. We examine the Ontario Works activities of immigrants, compared to native born Canadians, and their respective post-OW job characteristics. We find that immigrants experience a significant relative wage disadvantage after participation, and substantially less wage growth when moving to the second post-welfare job. We conclude that Ontario Works, like most ‘work first’ employment programs, is ill-suited to addressing earnings disadvantage among immigrants. We suggest that programs ‘beyond work first’, though not targeted specifically towards immigrants, might nevertheless offer more assistance. The recurring wage disadvantage, however, would remain unaddressed and might require more direct intervention.

This article looks at the promise of the ‘New Middle Class’ (NMC) inherent in the neoliberal ideological ideal of individualising societal responsibility for well-being and success. The article points to how this promise enables a discourse and practice of welfare reform and a disciplining of life styles particularly targeting the very poor in society. Women and some ethnic minorities are particularly prone to poverty and then therefore also discipline. The article then provides a case study of the Troubled Families Programme (TFP) and shows how the programme and the way it is constructed and managed partly undermines the provision of the material needs to alleviate people from poverty and re-produces discourses of poor lifestyle and parenting choices as sources of poverty, thereby undermining the ‘middle-class’ promise.

In Finland, parenting-related anxiety increased in the 1990s during a deep economic recession and subsequent widespread cutbacks to family services. Despite these cutbacks, resources allocated to services underlining the role of parents – namely, parenting support – increased, manifesting in the establishment of family support projects in the 2000s. Employing positioning theory and pragmatic modalities, I explore how key attributes of good parenting – responsibility and competence – are discussed within family support projects (n = 310). Given discussions regarding the relationship between parenting-related anxiety and the increasing number of parenting-related experts, this article explores parents’ positions within such discussions and overall parenting support in Finland. The analysis of projects clarifies the role of the parenting-related experts, but also provides a nuanced view of the position of parents. In some projects, for instance, parents are positioned as experts whose parenting responsibilities and competence are strengthened within peer-parent relationships and shared within the surrounding community.

On the surface, the wheelchair appears a simple machine: its function seemingly apparent and its workings relatively uncomplicated. Yet, despite this apparent simplicity, the wheelchair is a complex artefact imbued with a myriad of social as well as technical relations that act simultaneously to exclude and include, confine and liberate, shape and be shaped. The wheelchair's inextricable links to injury and illness have certainly shaped its definition as a medical device. Such a definition has labelled the occupier as passive or ill and shaped a wider understanding of the machine as a prison. Wheelchair users, however, perceive the machine as a means to independence: it enables rather than disables. We present evidence here to suggest that this is not a recent phenomenon as we show how wheelchair access has been on the political agenda for disabled people for most of the twentieth century. The paper also examines the role of the wheelchair in the development of this movement, and we suggest that, as the design of the wheelchair improved, so the demand for better access increased. The final section of the paper looks at how poorly the state and its agents understood the issue of access.

The cluster of reforms to English social care associated with personalisation mark a break with recent thinking about what spaces are considered relevant and appropriate for people with an assessed social care need. The promise of personalisation from a spatial perspective appears to be twofold: expanding the physical spaces that are available to people, while at the same time contracting interpersonal spaces between people and those who support them to emphasise attentiveness and particularism. However, there is a danger that personalisation is much more variable in its impacts. The physical spaces for some are expanding while for others they contract, and these opportunities are likely to be unequally distributed in ways that overlay other forms of inequality. The attentiveness and particularism promised by personalisation is again patchily distributed, with wide variation in the quality of support planning and person-centred care. For the formal care workforce, the two concepts of space (physical environment and interpersonal closeness) intersect as physical spaces shape the capacity to deliver attentive, responsive care. The article brings these concepts together through a discussion of ‘caring labour’ at the intersection of the physical and emotional aspects of space.

The Troubled Families Programme (TFP) was launched by the UK Coalition Government in December 2011. Following the riots that took place in towns and cities across England during that summer, the then Prime Minister David Cameron promised to put ‘rocket boosters’ under plans to ‘turn around’ the lives of the country's ‘most troubled families’ by the end of the Coalition's term of office in May 2015. In his ‘fightback’ speech, delivered just a week after the riots had ended, Cameron (2011a) stated that the riots were not about poverty or race or government cuts. Instead, he argued that that the riots were ‘about behaviour: people showing indifference to right and wrong; people with a twisted moral code; people with a complete absence of self-restraint’.

A decade of austerity has amplified concern about who gets what from public services. The article considers the socio-economic and gendered impacts of cuts to local environmental services which have increased the need for citizens to report service needs and effectively ‘co-produce’ services. Via a case study of a UK council’s decade of administrative data on citizen requests and service responses, the article provides one of the first detailed analyses of the unfolding impact of austerity cuts over time on public service provision. It demonstrates the impact of austerity across the social gradient, but disproportionately on the least affluent, especially women. The article argues for the importance of detailed empirical examination of administrative data for making visible, and potentially tackling, long standing inequalities in public service provision.

The policy drive to support carers is a longstanding national and international priority. Research about the design and delivery of support for carers is critical to the underpinning evidence base. Through a timely exploration of a third sector perspective, the UK-based study discussed in this article provides insights into approaches to, and the commissioning of, support for older carers and carers of people with dementia. The study highlights the importance of: embedding carers’ perspectives in service developments; the provision of both generic and targeted support which adopts a nuanced and tailored approach; titrating the delivery of information and advice at a pace to match carers’ needs; capturing quantitative and qualitative dimensions in service evaluation; and increased quantity and longevity of funding. Such insights not only complement existing research but are also generalisable to other countries at a similar stage in the development of carer support.

This article aims to bring labour market activation policy into the orbit of eco-social policy, which we can understand as sustainable welfare without growth. Activation is extensively addressed from economic and social policy perspectives; however, environmental sustainability concerns are absent. Typically, each domain, activation and sustainability, is seen as mutually exclusive. Growing debate about sustainable welfare without growth features much discussion about the effects of productivism and about re-orienting and re-valuing work and how we use our time; however, such discussion tends to leave activation and unemployment untouched. One could ask whether there is any role for activation in eco-social policy: why focus on employment and employability, or even push people into work, if postgrowth requires a downsizing of paid employment and working time in everyone’s lives? The purpose of this article is to explore this question and to consider how activation could be re-valued and re-thought as a policy tool for eco-social policy.

The Care Act 2014 gave local authorities in England broad duties around wellbeing, and responsibility to ensure the availability of good quality, personalised social care and support services for people who need them. These responsibilities are for all people needing support, whether that is publicly or privately funded. In exercising their duties, councils have a responsibility for ‘market-shaping’: that is, understanding the supply and demand for care, and the types of services and support needed now and in the future, and steering the market accordingly. Changes to the implementation of the Care Act removed some of the levers that might have brought self-funders into the mainstream of local authority responsibilities. This article draws on sixty-four qualitative interviews undertaken as part of a larger study on market-shaping and personalisation of care, and reflects on the experience of self-funders and the approach to them adopted by local authorities and provider organisations. The findings indicate that self-funders are still largely bystanders to local authority market shaping strategies, despite being both impacted by those strategies and significantly influencing the markets in which they operate.