In the context of increased marketisation in welfare provision, formal information and advice (I&A) is widely assumed to enable users, as consumers, to make informed choices about services, support and care. There is emerging evidence that telephone I&A services represent important ways of providing such services. This article proposes a framework that identifies key areas of focus delineating the efficacy of I&A, which is then used in a comprehensive literature review to critique existing research on outcomes and/or impact of telephone I&A. Existing, predominately quantitative, research has critical weaknesses. There is a lack of adequate contextual focus, understanding agency, and how I&A is used in different contexts to influence causal processes. The article contends that the efficacy of I&A is not adequately reported and provides much needed theoretical clarity in key areas, including the desirability of further realist evaluation approaches.

Studies have indicated government transfers greatly alleviate poverty among older Americans. Yet recent social policy changes were suggested to increase older Americans’ fiscal insecurity. New evidence is needed to expand the evaluation of government transfers. Longitudinal Health and Retirement Study data from 2002 to 2014 were used. We computed individuals’ poverty status both when household income included and did not include government transfers. Results indicated the poverty rate dropped dramatically when household income included government transfers. The poverty alleviation effect was significantly greater among people who were female, older, members of a minority group, having fewer years of education, residing in the South, and living in a bigger household. Evidence from this study solidified the overall poverty alleviation effect of government transfers in old age. Differential effects among various demographic groups could be attributed to their initial status and divergent political beliefs about who should receive government transfers.

In the UK and many other European countries, there continue to be concerns about a range of social issues including the position of immigrants, the educational attainment of marginalised groups and the persistence of the gender pay gap. Increasingly, governments and NGOs assert that the promotion of equality and human rights policies are central to addressing these issues, with a view to creating societies which are both more equitable and more efficient. Over the past decade and a half, a period of economic growth followed recently by a major recession, the equality and human rights agenda enjoyed a high political profile. However, as we discuss in this review article, the social and economic optimism of the late nineties and early to mid noughties has been followed by economic retrenchment, a commitment to the shrinking of the state and the public sphere across Europe and a general move to the political right. In this article, we first review the political context which led to the rise of the equality and human rights agenda. Subsequently, we examine competing conceptualisations of equality and their operationalisation within British social policy. Finally, we assess the progress which has been made towards achieving a more equal society in the UK over recent years drawing on data gathered and analysed by the National Equality Panel (NEP, 2010).

In the RAE 2001, widely differing proportions of staff were judged internationally excellent in different academic subjects. This has important financial and other implications, and in 2008 a hierarchical structure will aim to increase consistency. We look at those subjects that will be part of a super-unit with social policy in 2008, and consider what objective rationale may explain the wide differences in ratings in 2001. A quantitative analysis found no such rationale, indeed some variations appear perverse. This highlights the need for greater consistency of judgements, perhaps steered by a ‘super-panel’.

This article uses Taiwan as an example to examine how families manage work and care when the government and workplace provide limited support. Many Taiwanese households employ live-in migrant care workers to negotiate care responsibilities and adults’ paid jobs. Based on interviews with employers of live-in migrant care workers and workers, the findings demonstrate that daughters-in-law and occasionally daughters and sons become employers of live-in migrant care workers because of the limitation of public care services and lack of support they receive in seeking to combine paid work and family care responsibility. Even after employing migrant workers, women retain greater care responsibility in daily practices than their husbands. Hiring live-in migrant care workers also imposes risks to all parties involved in the processes of organising, coordinating, and providing care due to the uncertainty of care quality and the nature of care work.

Our recent paper on state-mandated private pension schemes in Western Europe has been criticised by Ginn because it did not look specifically at the impact of private provision on women. This was not our intent, but she raises important issues that are largely ignored in economics-driven pension privatisation policy discourses. She has addressed this omission by demonstrating that private pension provision may result in significant levels of economic disadvantage among women retirees. We do not disagree with the broad thrust of her analysis and its conclusions. However, because she has failed to appreciate the crucial difference between voluntary and state-mandated private pension provision, her thoughtful analysis does not invalidate our proposition that the state-mandated provision of private pensions in Western Europe is consistent, to varying degrees, with the notion of collective responsibility for needs satisfaction.

This paper illustrates the social and health consequences of the politics and policies of Gypsy sites in the UK. Recent research concerning health status shows that Gypsies and Travellers have significantly poorer health than other UK resident English speaking ethnic minorities and economically disadvantaged white UK residents. Interview data from the qualitative study of Gypsy and Traveller experience of health and access to health care illustrate the impact of inequality and the association of accommodation factors with health outcomes health. This paper explores how policy on Gypsy sites impacts on the availability of suitable accommodation for Gypsies and Travellers and examines the practical implications for their status in society and the wider health consequences.

The feminisation of international migration for care labour has gained prominence in the last three decades. It has been theorised mainly in the context of the changing care regime in the Global North; the changes in other parts of the world have been largely neglected. This article explores the dynamics between changing care regimes, labour markets and international migration in the East Asian context through the case of Korean Chinese migrants to South Korea. Korean Chinese came to South Korea through various legal channels beginning in the late 1980s and occupy the largest share of both male and female migrants in South Korea. Korean Chinese women have engaged in service sector jobs, including domestic work and caregiving, since their influx, yet such work was only legalised during the 2000s in response to demographic changes and the care deficit. This article sheds light on the female Korean Chinese migrants’ engagement in care work in the ambiguous legal space of migration and the care labour market, and their changing roles in the process of development of the care labour market. Based on interviews with Korean Chinese migrants in South Korea, immigration statistics, and the Foreign Employment Survey in 2013, this study explores how the care regime intersects with migration in the process of the care regimes development.

Based on research in Australia, this article offers explanatory concepts about how welfare workers deal with contradictions between the rationalising ‘informationalisation’ of welfare system governance and the demands of people-centred welfare practice, or ‘technologies of care’. While the situation in Australia with respect to the relationship between government, funders and welfare workers may not be mirrored in other places, the concepts are relevant for the development of local research, insights and practice.

Suggestions are also made for further action to bridge the gap between information systems design and welfare practice through the adoption of a dialogic and representational system for more effective interoperable design that reflects the needs of the major parties involved, including funders, designers and particularly welfare workers.

In the context of the discussion about the governance capacity of small states in the world market raised by Katzenstein, the case of East Asian newly industrialised countries is an interesting one. This article takes the development of social policy in Taiwan as a case study through which to explore the role of social policy in the process of rapid industrialisation in small states. It is argued that in the initial phase of industrialisation the productive component of social policy was highlighted by the developmental state to serve the goal of economic development. Social policy functioned at this stage as an effective instrument to dampen the cost of labour and thus contributed to the low-cost strategy of developmental state. Since the 1980s, however, social policy has been profoundly transformed as a consequence of economic globalisation on the one hand and domestic democratisation on the other. It is argued that social policy making since the 1990s in Taiwan has shifted in emphasis from the productive to the consumptive component. Finally, it is suggested that three factors will be decisive in determining Taiwan's social policy in the future: limited governmental revenues, fiscal strain due the public debt problem and the steering capacity of minority governments.

This article reviews critical literature on sex trafficking policy through a cultural studies lens. It argues that the conflation of ‘trafficking’ and prostitution that pervades anti-trafficking policy makes trafficking victims out of sex workers. On another register, anti-trafficking policy creates ‘victims’ through curtailments on mobility and work eligibility that make workers more dependent on third party managers and less able to secure assistance when these parties abuse the power that the state has effectively granted them. The article calls upon policy makers to undertake the policy making process with sex workers’ continued experiences of the state as a primary source of violence and exploitation in view.

The papers in the themed section emerge from the work of the ESRC Research Group on Care, Values and the Future of Welfare (CAVA), based at the University of Leeds. CAVA was funded from 1999 to undertake a five-year programme of research into changes in parenting and partnering in Britain and their implications for future social policies. At the heart of CAVA's research is an investigation into the values that people attach to their parenting and partnering activities. We are interested in ‘what matters’ to people in their family lives and personal relationships, especially as they undergo change. This question lay at the centre of our core empirical projects, all of which were based on in-depth qualitative research. (An account of our methodology may be found in the Appendix to this Introduction). The projects focused on different aspects of change: motherhood, care and employment; kin relationships after divorce; care and commitments in transnational families; practices of care and intimacy amongst those who live without a co-resident partner; and collective values of care and support in self-help groups, voluntary organisations and trade unions. Each of these projects is represented in the following collection.

Family policy now has greater prominence in UK politics than ever before. These policies are developing in the context of major constitutional change across the UK, which has the potential for significant policy divergence. Devolution has generated greater interest in Scottish family policy, and how its policy processes have been reconfigured. New Scottish legal and policy initiatives with a family focus have emerged from both Westminster and Holyrood. This paper reviews the present context for family policy in Scotland, some recent family policy developments at both UK and Scottish levels of government, and identifies key issues these raise.

This article explores the findings of a research project carried out into the political awareness and attitudes of first year social science undergraduates. The results initially suggested that students generally lacked understanding of, and interest in, political structures and concepts and possessed poor news awareness and information-gathering skills. However, a more complex picture emerged that indicates a degree of engagement through responses to personal, moral and social questions, suggesting some degree of politicisation, yet such issues seem dislocated from their studies. This mixed picture poses serious challenges for social policy teachers seeking to enhance political awareness among their students.

Rights problems such as debt, employment, welfare benefits and family problems are widespread. They are problems of everyday life, affecting many people and many aspects of people's lives and are now well documented. In contrast, there has been little research on the role of family and friends when experiencing a problem and seeking advice. Drawing on comprehensive qualitative research, this article explores how people seeking advice for their rights problems rely on family and friends for help in the advice-seeking process. The research shows that help lies on a continuum from encouraging people to seek advice to assistance with the tasks necessary for problem resolution. The implications of this for service design are considered.

In this article, I discuss why steps towards basic income (BI) ‘from within’ the state are institutionally plausible in Denmark, yet this ‘inside-out’ transition is contested in Danish society. I argue that implementation since the 1990s of the flexicurity regime – labour flexibility with social transfers and training – has stretched the developmental tradition that historically has fed the case for broadly inclusive reforms. An ‘Equality Paradox’ is shaped by two relationships, between high social equality and feasibility of basic income, on the one hand, and high social equality and developmentalism, on the other. The upshot is basic income rests on developmentalism indirectly, as state-promotion of economic equality, cooperative public finance, and human development-oriented governing of core institutions all contribute to the feasibility of a BI reform. The ‘Equality Paradox’ explains why rising inequality and precarity in Denmark make a case for basic income within the public sector but the source of this inequality – neo-liberalism – also puts it at risk.

This article argues that it is possible to develop key indicators to assess the broad agenda of ‘fairness’, even in the context of competing frameworks (e.g. equality, capabilities), multiple equality strands (gender, race/ethnicity, disability, age, religion/belief, sexual orientation, gender identity and social class) and several domains (e.g. health, education). Indicators are required to summarise complex statistical information to make it accessible to a wide audience. Methods for selecting indicators are discussed: identifying overlaps in frameworks, finding commonalities and applying quality criteria. Synthesising in this way enables identification of ‘key indicators’ of equality, including: intimate partner violence, risk of poverty and pay gaps.

Contracting of social services has been adopted in China as an innovation in welfare provision. This article reviews the emerging literature on contracting of services to social organisations in China in order to identify lines of further enquiry. It reviews research published in the English and Chinese languages up to 2018. We identify three distinct narratives: public sector reform, improvement of welfare service quality and capacity, and transformation of state-society relations. We contrast the identified narratives with the empirical evidence produced for the Chinese case. We demonstrate that, despite contradictory empirical evidence, the premise that contracting improves public sector efficiency and quality of services predominates. The narrative that contracting transforms state-society relations is contested. This article contributes to the understanding of how contracting of services is justified in theory and practice, and proposes an agenda for future social policy research on contracting of services to social organisations in China.

This critical and empirical article explores contemporary reproduction, experience, and responses to stigma in welfare delivery in Ireland. Combining qualitative data about lone parents (n22) gathered through two different research projects in 2017 and 2018 allows us to interrogate stigma in a multi-dimensional way and as an overarching experience as an ongoing project of neo liberalism. We analyse our findings using Baumberg’s (2016) typology of stigma which differentiates claim making stigma from personal and societal stigma, applying the framework to empirical data concerning lone parents’ recent experiences of Irish labour activation and homeless support services. We find that while behavioural conditionality necessarily frames this experience and constrains claimants, it is not totalising. We conclude by using Tyler’s concept of stigmacraft to situate the context of stigma as part of the political economy of welfare.