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.

The European political landscape in the 1990s was characterised by centre-left parties returning to power in several countries after long periods in opposition. Following intensive internal debates over policy direction and policy revision, once back in power some centre-left governments in some countries have used terms such as the ‘third way’ and ‘new social democracy’, or the ‘Neue Mitte’ as an indication that contemporary policies should be seen as distinct from those pursued by both previous social democratic administrations and neo-liberal governments in the interim (e.g. Gamble and Wright, 1999; White, 2001). What, if anything, exactly constitutes the ‘third way’ has been a matter of considerable debate, as has been the question of how far traditional social democratic values and aspirations, such as solidarity and equality, are still relevant within ‘third way’ policies. More than previously, modern social democratic policy is geared towards reducing non-wage labour costs, fostering private forms of social protection, such as funded pensions, intensifying labour market integration and subsidising low-skilled jobs, but also incorporating new social risks and new social needs (Vandenbrouke, 2001).

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.

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.

In order to assess people's preferences regarding potential reforms of the Irish state pension system, we surveyed a sample of the Irish adult population about their opinion on a selection of measures and issues related to the redistributive principles and parameters of the pension scheme. Even though very few people are well informed about the pension system, we observe a kind of homogeneity regarding perceptions about the way public pension benefits should be provided. As far as we know, this article represents the first attempt to elicit people's preferences for reforming the state Irish pension system using stated preferences techniques.

Older workers have moved up the policy agenda within the industrialised nations. In the 1980s and first half of the 1990s, policy-making in much of the European Union emphasised the virtues of early retirement, partly as a response to high levels of unemployment. Since the late 1990s, there has been an increasing emphasis on overcoming age barriers in the labour market and on extending working life. This has been driven by concerns over ageing and shrinking labour forces, the sustainability of public pension systems, evidence of age discrimination in the labour market and the potential influence of the ‘grey’ voter. By contrast in the USA, the pronounced trend towards ‘early exit’ which has characterised Europe never existed. This is even more the case in Japan.

This paper summarises the way equality has featured in the disciplines of social policy and political theory leading up to the presentation of a new egalitarianian framework for thinking about and acting for equality. The paper presents a broadly chronological, integrated review of the place of equality within the subjects concerned. The longstanding problems of universalism and targeting are themes which recur throughout, and in New Labour's approach to equality and social justice.

Consideration of welfare regimes in Hong Kong has generally neglected gender and care work issues, focusing instead on welfare ideologies relating to production and the market orientation of social policies. In addition, traditional Chinese values place a high priority on motherhood. Drawing on qualitative interviews with lone mothers and social workers, this article considers welfare reform in Hong Kong from the late 1990s and the shift to welfare to work, examining these from the perspectives of gender. It suggests that as a result of the reforms there is a danger that lone mothers become double failures, as carers and workers.

This article assesses, using a framework derived from lesson-drawing, policy transfer and crisis research, the lessons offered by the media from abroad and from the past in the UK COVID-19 pandemic. The lesson-drawing literature focuses on a series of steps and questions associated with the ‘fungibility’ of lessons, and the crisis literature, with its constituent elements of threat, uncertainty and between ‘routine’ and ‘non-routine’ or ‘less routine’ crises. The article utilises the LexisNexis Database1 in order to provide a content analysis of newspaper coverage of lessons offered, giving analysis in ‘real time’ of the source of potential lessons (e.g. past pandemics or other nations), and the type of lessons (e.g. copying or instruments). Its analysis highlights the complexity of lesson-drawing in ‘real time’ in a period of considerable uncertainty, where knowledge is contested, and is subject to change over time.

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.

A central assumption in social policy research and practice is that a strong working alliance between caseworkers and clients produces the best outcomes. There is, however, limited empirical evidence to support this assumption. This is especially the case within Active Labour Market Policies, where existing research focuses on programme effects rather than relationship effects.

In this article, we examine whether strong working alliances produce higher employment and education outcomes for disadvantaged jobseekers. The case is a Danish municipality that invested in reducing the caseloads of caseworkers working with disadvantaged social assistance recipients. The data combine survey data on social assistance recipients with outcome data from national administrative registers. Based on linear regressions, the analysis indicates that strong working alliances are positively related to subsequent employment and education outcomes. We discuss the implications, limitations and generalisability of this finding and the conditions for providing stronger working alliances in employment services.

This themed section discusses the conceptual development and related empirical applications of social innovation (SI), a concept acquiring a prominent position in both academia and the world of policy. When SI started being used in the early 1990s relatively few social scientists were familiar with it, mainly those interested in urban policy. Less than two decades later, not only is SI at the heart of the largest public research funding programme in Europe (Horizon 2020), it is also constantly referred to in the discourses of senior level policy makers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Land ownership and the rights in property are central to the American character, having originated as part of the colonial dialogue that led to the American revolution. Yet there has also been substantial social conflict over who has claims to property, and in whose interest. This article presents an interpretive history of citizenship claims to land and property from the colonial period to the present. It argues that a theme in this history is an ever expanding realm of citizenship claims against the individual owner, most markedly since the beginning of the twentieth century. The emergence of the modern environmental movement and a counter so-called private property rights movement in the 1970s forward has accentuated this social conflict. The future likely holds increased conflict in an era of social and political polarisation. The outcome is uncertain, and will depend on democratic dialogue among those with strongly opposing perspectives.

Despite serving as the Philippines’ main social protection strategy, debate continues surrounding the ability of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) to meet its long-term goal of breaking cycles of intergenerational poverty. To engage with this debate, this study brings together the constructs of entitlement and agency to analyse how different actors associated with 4Ps understand and experience the program. Drawing on forty-three semi-structured interviews with 4Ps beneficiaries, non-beneficiaries, and implementers, we provide a provisional explanation as to why a disconnect exists between the long-term goals of 4Ps and the experiences with the program among these different actors. In addition, this study highlights how challenges associated with the design and implementation of 4Ps, including limited transparency and communication of the program’s eligibility requirements, rigid monitoring of beneficiary compliance, and delays in receiving cash transfers, may constrain the transformational potential of this social protection strategy.

This article explores how staff in French public hospitals are indirectly involved in the governing of migration through healthcare. It unpacks the construction of differentiated values of life assigned to specific categories of vulnerable (authorised and unauthorised) migrants according to their perceived un/deservingness in context of budgetary restrictions. This context emphasises tensions between medical and administrative staff in the decision-making process regarding access to healthcare. The analysis rests upon empirical data (participant observations and semi-directed interviews) gathered in ‘healthcare access units’ located in public hospitals. Perceptions of un/deservingness lead to both healthcare rationing and healthcare denial and are built upon entangled criteria related to both migration status and budgetary concerns. These mechanisms reveal the administrative and budgetary dimensions that underlie the perceptions of health-related un/deservingness, which is linked to the costs of healthcare: the higher the costs, the less likely patients are to be designated to be deserving of healthcare.

Discomfort about the notion of adoption as facilitating a market in children has been one of the major motivations for regulation and control, not only for intercountry adoption but throughout the history of in country adoption as well. This paper explores the nature of the market in Australia, beginning in the decades before legalisation but looking also for continuities in the ways in which in country and later intercountry adoptions have been debated. Drawing on an analysis of advertisements from major metropolitan and regional newspapers it argues that benevolence always exists in an uneasy alliance with assumptions about the right to a child, creating a ‘shopping list’ of desired characteristics which the market has rarely been able to satisfy.

This article examines public attitudes towards two reform options for the defined-contribution (DC) Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF) scheme in Hong Kong: (i) increasing MPF contributions; or (ii) introducing a universal pension partly funded by switching MPF contributions to the universal pension. Drawing on a phone survey conducted with 975 active contributors to the MPF, we examine whether agreement with these MPF reform options can be explained by respondents’ self-interest, attachment to different welfare ideologies, their level of confusion with the MPF, uncertainty about future MPF income, and trust in the Hong Kong government to deal with MPF issues. This research identifies that it is uncertainty with future MPF income and low trust in the Hong Kong government to deal with MPF issues that have the most significant effect on respondents’ MPF reform preferences. Mainstream accounts of the effect of liberalist, universalist, conservative, and familistic welfare ideologies are only partially confirmed.

This article considers the significance of the UK departure for EU social policy from the perspective of the economic orientation of policy, institutional configuration and associated political agency. The analysis first focuses on the role the UK has played since it joined in 1973, highlighting the UK's strong support for the EU as a market project with a secondary role for social policy. It can as a consequence claim some success in imprinting its (neo)liberal orientation on EU policy while at the same time securing favourable terms for its own selective engagement with EU policy. The signals regarding EU social policy's future after the UK departs are very mixed. While there are some signs of a more social impulse in policy, the strong ties to a market approach, lack of consensus around the need for a different type of EU social policy engagement and institutional and political hierarchies constrain change.