Social care policy is actively promoting integrated and personalised care. Local organisations are starting to re-engineer their business processes, review front line practice, develop new operational tools and revise their information systems to support and deliver these new approaches. This article draws on a study undertaken in one local organisation as it began to implement its response to these expectations. It uses structuration theory to explore how the macro agendas described by policy and legislation are translated into local perspectives and then further refracted through the lens of operational practice, shaping the business tools which deliver the change. The evidence suggests that there needs to be a better understanding of how the expectations of policy are interpreted – and potentially distorted – through their translation into local practice, and of the role that information and information services play in enabling, or disabling the delivery of those expectations at the front line.

This review explores debates concerning the costs of long-term care for older people, and aims to give an overview of the recent and current research agenda in this area, referring primarily to work published 2000–2006. The focus of much work is on the identification of costs, their distribution and the contexts of policy and delivery of services in which these operate. Live debates concern future costs, their control and related issues of social justice and equity.

With the ‘gig economy’ moving to the forefront of research on service labour, interest has heightened in the techniques of labour control that reproduce it. Taking tipping as just such a technique, this article explores critically the policy research around ‘tipped’ employment in the United States. In the United States, tipping is a legally recognised form of labour remuneration that informalises the wage relation, incentivises the worker in precarity, and internalises social relations of subordination. Understanding tipped work, its legal status, its operative logic, and the contradictions that arise within its framework, is a priority for relevant social policy analysis. The aims here are: 1) to set out the ‘topography’ of the policy landscape on tipping in the United States; and 2) to problematise the current scope of this policy literature in societal terms. This research will focus on the restaurant industry, but will establish its broader societal significance.

To what extent does Malta's social policy support gender equality, in the use of time? How much do state policies assume that men and women both need time to care, as well as for paid work? Does Malta's full-time paid work structure allow time for the equal sharing of unpaid care responsibilities between women and men, that in turn enhances gender equity in the workplace and domestic sphere? Themes that emerge in the study rest largely on women's voices. The study finds that women need to shift their full-time economic activity to shorter and flexible working hours when they become mothers, with negative consequences of loss in income and career regression. Labour market exit and financial dependence on men is also a frequent occurrence. The findings of the study suggest that strong pressure to assume traditional roles is embedded not only in Maltese culture and social norms, but also in the state's own social policy.

This article investigates the delay in implementation and inadequacy of specific policy actions in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in nursing homes. The analysis focuses on Lombardy and Madrid, the two wealthiest regions in Italy and Spain. These were the most severely affected by the onset of the pandemic, both country-wise and at the European level. We compare the chronology of policy decisions that affected nursing homes against the broader policy responses related to the health crisis. We look at structural factors that reveal policy legacy effects. Our analysis shows that key emergency interventions arrived late, especially when compared to similar actions taken by the national health services. Weak institutional embedding of nursing homes within the welfare state in terms of ownership, allocation of resources, regulation and coordination hindered a swift response to the onset of the crisis.

European welfare states have a tradition of compensating for social risks. But across Europe, remarkable transformations may be observed that shift the focus from a needs/rights based compensatory approach towards a more individualistic ‘social risk management’ approach to welfare (see Schmid, 2006; Abrahamson, 2010). The basic idea of social risk management is that citizens have their own responsibility for preventing social risks. The ‘new’ welfare state mirrors this approach by adopting the role of equipping individual citizens for this task. The concept of the ‘new welfare state’ has been discussed under different labels, including ‘positive welfare’ (Giddens, 1998), ‘enabling welfare’ (Gilbert, 2002), ‘new welfare’ (Taylor-Gooby, 2008) and ‘social investment state’ (Engelen et al., 2007).

Japan's implementation of the Long Term Care Insurance Act in 2000 provides a good example with which to examine the restructuring process of care services for older people, as these have come to be commodified by the welfare state. By focusing on Welfare Non-Profit Organisations provision, this article explores the significance of gender in the restructuring process. It reveals that care services are stratified with institutional care placed at the top of hierarchy of care services costs, and domestic task services at the bottom. There is an unequal distribution of gender and organisational type for each type of care work.

Recent discussion in the UK has focused on proportionate dispute resolution to deal with people's problems with public services. Complaints procedures, which are seen to be user-friendly and informal, have been held up as good examples of proportionate dispute resolution mechanisms. Most complaints procedures include an informal first stage where, it is argued, most complaints should be resolved but there is little research evidence about what happens at this stage. This article looks at the informal stage of complaints procedures from the perspective of social care service users and considers some of the issues raised by informality.

Parents and carers often have interrupted workforce histories, causing gaps in their pension contributions and hence significantly lower retirement incomes. In some countries, to ameliorate these inequalities, carer credits have been introduced to maintain public pension contributions during periods of workforce absence. But improvements to credits in public schemes have taken place alongside a shift to private pensions that widens inequalities for carers. Introducing carer credits to private pensions is one method of addressing these inequalities. A search for examples of credits to private schemes in OECD countries revealed that, at present, they are rare and limited. This article sets out the design features and principles that should underpin carer credits to private pensions.

This article examines the relationship between food insecurity and the uncertainty and inadequate financial resources associated with low quality work among lone mother households in the United States. Food insecurity has increased since the start of the Great Recession and is particularly high among lone mother households. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, I find that mothers who have been employed part-time involuntarily and experienced job loss have an increased likelihood of experiencing food insecurity. This relationship holds even after controlling for multiple measures of household income, suggesting the relationship between low quality work and food insecurity is not solely determined by low financial resources. Results suggest that, to reduce food insecurity among lone mother families, policymakers must address both the low wages and uncertainty associated with low quality employment.

The number of mature-age Australians registered with employment services is growing, with mature-age jobseekers spending longer unemployed and on income support than younger jobseekers. However, the role of employment services in extending working lives has so far received little attention in policy discourses on ageing and employment. This article examines the effectiveness of Australia's employment services system in supporting mature-age jobseekers, drawing upon interviews conducted as part of wider research on unemployment and underemployment in mature-age. We find that the overriding experience among mature-age jobseekers’ is of a system that exudes ‘carelessness’. We situate mature-age jobseekers’ experiences of systemic carelessness within the context of wider welfare reforms that have contributed to the de-professionalisation and routinisation of employment services’ delivery.

This article maps important trends that mark a new stage in neoliberal capitalism since 2008, with a focus on class struggle and resistance in the advanced industrial democracies. New forms of collective action have arisen in response to austerity which has been imposed, in different forms, across most of the advanced industrial democracies, in a context in which established solidaristic institutions – trade unions, social democratic parties, welfare states – have already been eroded as a result of the preceding twenty five years of neoliberal reform. The article presents an overview of these trends, highlighting austerity policies and anti-austerity responses. The article accounts for the rise of new forms of resistance and collective action as they have emerged differently in different national contexts, focusing on developments in the UK, US, Spain, Japan and Germany.

The judgements and valuations made on Internet review sites are part of contemporary consumer culture. This article considers what such sites do in the market for commercial sex. It contributes to policy discussions in two ways. Firstly, it considers how the infrastructure and mechanisms of the web enables organising, searching and reporting of consumer experience, and hence how web reviews mediate commercial markets. It thereby draws links between social policies that concern the Internet and those that relate to sex work. Secondly, it explores how sex review sites mediate the field of commercial sex and discusses some of the potential insights for policy audiences. Policies directed at the regulation of this market will benefit from clear recognition of what customers understand their actions to be and how they participate in the construction of norms about commercial sex.

This article examines the relationship between the characterisation of and response to anti-social behaviour issues in areas of high ethnic diversity and emerging ‘post-multicultural’ policies of integration, cohesion and citizenship. It draws on a small study of the views and perceptions of members of local community safety and anti-social behaviour teams in three areas of England with very ethnically diverse populations. The analysis distinguishes between responses to ASB issues within ‘settled’ minority communities, among young people from those communities and within the ‘new’ immigrant communities. While these responses vary, the article argues that each can be seen as supporting national policy goals of community cohesion and responsible citizenship based on the assertion of ‘shared values’.

This article is the result of a joint project conducted by University of Roehampton and the Scottish Human Rights Commission, undertaken between March 2010 and April 2011. The article describes the methodological challenges encountered in the data collection phase of the project and addresses the conceptual relationship between social science and human rights research. It argues that social policy and social sciences research has an important contribution to make in the promotion and protection of human rights and demonstrates the use of the Research in Scotland's National Action Plan for Human Rights, being prepared by the Commission during 2012–13.

The ways that social spending policies are run by fiscal welfare through the tax system remain relatively neglected, while the costs and impact of public expenditure are constantly under scrutiny. Mostly means-enhancing in contrast to much means-tested public spending, the costs of social tax reliefs are little examined, their distributional impact even less so. This article considers what is needed to provide a better basis for the development of robust and flexible policies for establishing, managing and evaluating fiscal welfare that can contribute to building a more open and equal society. Particular attention is given to increasing accountability and assessing tax and public spending activities together when they benefit the same target group; and to reducing inconsistencies of treatment in comparable tax and public schemes.

This paper introduces and illustrates the value of a classification trees approach in the study of resilience. The inherently interactive nature of the resilience construct makes this approach useful. Classification trees are a person-centred approach to data analysis, which successively split the sample into pairs of increasingly homogeneous groups of individuals. We outline the approach and then illustrate using adult educational outcomes for children in the British Cohort Study of 1970 who had experienced foster care. The insights gained from the classification tree approach are contrasted with those obtained from standard regression approaches.

Processes of privatisation and liberalisation around the world would lead us to expect a growth in the private provision of health and social care services, which in turn we would expect to lead to a growth in the international trading of such services. However, the available data are not adequate to allow us to develop a clear and comprehensive picture of the scope and nature of this emerging world market. What data do exist may take a variety of forms and be pitched at different levels of analysis. Such data may be focused at the level of firms providing such services, at the national level; at the level of regional organisations and agreements; or at the level of international organisations and agreements. This article discusses the methodological problems and challenges of attempting to integrate such diverse forms of data and levels of analysis. It is concluded that a comprehensive analysis must not only include all of these levels, but take account of the ways in which processes at different levels may interact to reinforce the tendency towards trade in healthcare services.

Drawing on the neo-republican theory of non-domination and a qualitative case study conducted in three Dutch municipalities, this article explores the extent to which external rules are able to prevent arbitrary power in relationships between welfare officers and work supervisors, on the one hand, and welfare recipients participating in mandatory work programmes, on the other hand. It concludes that external rules were insufficiently implemented in the three municipalities in question. In addition, it found that rules cease to be capable of constraining arbitrary power where institutional contexts themselves are unpredictable and insecure. Under these conditions, welfare recipients may seek to avoid risks and act in accordance with the preferences (or their expectation of the preferences) of the welfare officer or work supervisor by playing the role of the ‘good recipient’ instead of relying on available rules of a protective nature or rules that enable them to have a say in their participation in mandatory work programmes.