We provide an overview of transnational non-state actors and their agency that shape today’s out-of-home childcare around the world, specifically institutional residential childcare. Based on existing studies and desktop research, we reveal a broad range of complexly inter-related for-profit and non-profit actors promoting diverse, often conflicting policies and practices – with ambiguous implications for children in care. We focus on secular and faith-based international non-governmental organisations, transnational companies, private regulators, and individuals. Many of them promote family- and community-based care, yet many others support orphanages and other forms of institutional care. The growing number of transnational actors in residential childcare, the emergence of private regulatory frameworks, the advance of market-based, for-profit players, and the involvement of well-resourced religious communities make the future of child institutionalisation uncertain. We discuss how this transnational agency compares with other policy fields and propose directions for future investigations of how transnationalism impacts children in care.

This paper compares social policy responses to the cost-of-living crisis in the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland. In seeking to protect citizens from an inflationary shock, a series of fundamental social policy questions arise. What would the aims of support packages be? To what extent should support be universal or targeted? If targeted, did existing policy architectures facilitate or frustrate the targeting of support? As the scale and persistence of the inflationary shock became evident, smaller and near-universal responses gave way to larger support packages with a greater reliance on targeting. Social security systems played an important role in policy responses, though often by passporting one-off payments rather than a strengthening of these core programmes. Passporting led both to improved distributional outcomes vis-à-vis the more universal elements but created new administrative challenges and led to rough justice in some circumstances. The reliance on one-off payments underlined the temporary nature of policy responses.

In constructing this edition in the role as ‘guest editors’ Alan Aldridge and I believe that the theme of consumerism to be both stimulating and timely for social policy. The implications of consumerism – as a political ideology, as a set of social movements, and as the values of a consumer society – are being felt in a wide range of policy areas. Within social policy analysis, consumerism, along with welfarism, clientism and privatism has been advanced as one of the four key elements in the provision of and public orientation towards welfare services. Within sociology, there has been a rapid growth of books and journal articles addressing consumption as a key concept in the analysis of contemporary culture. One manifestation of this is the recent launch of the international Journal of Consumer Culture.

South Korea is rapidly becoming an aged society and with changing family structures there is increasing concern about the care of older people. This paper considers the well being of family carers of older people who suffer from dementia or a stroke. One hundred and sixty eight family caregivers, who were caring for elderly relatives, were selected and the major factors affecting their psychological well-being and proposals to improve their quality of life are identified and discussed.

Public service pensions have been a fundamental component of the British pension system in the post-war period and recent reform initiatives have caused political controversy. This article assesses the impact of the Conservative/Liberal government's public sector pension reform plans of 2011 for different public sector workers. It simulates their projected pension outcomes, assuming people contribute to the new system throughout their working lives. In particular, we examine the government's claim that the move away from final to average salary schemes will make pensions fairer for women and lower paid workers. The article shows that the reforms are indeed fair, if measured by the government's standards: retirement is delayed for all, but the lowest skilled and women lose least and some even gain higher pensions without paying proportionately more. Despite austerity, recent British pension reforms reflect a greater awareness of social inequality than many would expect and they have been built on more cross-party agreement than apparent at first sight.

In 1996, the USA became the first major democracy to eliminate individual entitlement to the social safety net. The reforms introduced in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act are briefly outlined in this editorial article, which, drawing on the papers assembled in this themed section, considers the consequences of the legislation, both positive and negative, and seeks to explain why the new policy regime seems likely to prove resilient.

This article explores the impact of public sector employment on attitudes to retrenchment of social spending from a household perspective. The idea the employees of the public sector will stand together to preserve public spending exists throughout the literature on support for and persistence of the welfare states. The empirical evidence for this link, however, has been poor. In this article, I show that this link can be established when studying it from a household perspective. Using a nationally representative survey from Denmark I show that people living in a household where one or both are employed in the public sector are more willing to spend more on the public sector. This effect is, however, only for some policies – unemployment benefit, social assistance, education grant, and integration services – which were generally the least popular policies in the eyes of the public.

This article reports on a study exploring the accommodation experiences of older Gypsies and Travellers and how specialist Supporting People services can enhance their wellbeing and social inclusion. The findings suggest that through development of pro-active, culturally appropriate services, flexible, tailored support and joint working, these services have contributed to their users’ wellbeing. Cuts to Supporting People funding pose a serious threat, especially in the context of loss of other services and changes to accommodation policy under the banner of localism. Targeted funding to sustain these specialist services could be important to redress risks of further marginalisation of Gypsy/Traveller communities.

In the last two decades, the Chinese government has made serious attempts to enhance social provision by contracting out social services. Empirical evidence suggests that openness and flexibility of resource allocation gradually decrease from Guangzhou in southern China to Beijing in northern China, amongst China’s three first-tier cities. This study further reveals that state–non-governmental organisation (NGO) relations vary not only across geographical locations but also amongst service sectors governed by government departments and mass organisations. The varied state–NGO relations across geographical locations and service sectors manifest the complexity of the state–NGO collaboration under China’s fragmented authoritarian governance system. Different local circumstances and diverse considerations of local officials involving vertical and horizontal lines of authority accounted for the variations and complexity from the eyes of NGO practitioners.

1 Key texts A basic introduction to political philosophy, covering social justice and related issues well is: Kymlicka, W. (2002), Contemporary political philosophy: an introduction, 2nd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Extensive research in a number of disciplines, including economics, social policy, sociology, geography and management have been undertaken relating to migrant participation in the labour market. Given the highly topical nature of migrant employment in Western Europe and the US, the aim of this brief review is to draw together some of the more recent attempts to theorise on the presence of migrants in the labour market, discuss some of the recurrent themes that have emerged from empirical research in this area, consider some of the main implications for policy-making in what now seems likely to be known as the post-Brexit era and outline areas for future research. In doing so, the intention is to contribute to further inter-disciplinary theory-building and to a more nuanced understanding of the complexity of this highly politicised area and the implications of migrant employment for policy and future research.

As they were just coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, Southern European nations were confronted with a new shock to their economies – this time in the form of a steep rise in prices. This article describes and typifies the social policy responses and measures adopted in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain in response to rising inflation. We find that Southern European (SE) governments have put forward a substantive fiscal response – which compares well with that of its neighbours, and even with the previous crisis. The thrust of the response was targeted at limiting the pass-through of international energy prices to consumers. This was complemented, albeit to a lesser degree, with direct support to families. Nevertheless, we do find important differences concerning the weight given to (traditional) welfare transfers, and the role given to indexation mechanisms and wage increases. We also find important continuities with the model of crisis-response adopted during the pandemic.

Responses to hate crimes, hate incidents and hate speech are characterised by an exceptional fragmentation in terminology and lack of coordination among governmental and non-governmental organisations. This article proposes a new conceptual framework to map the diversity of responses to hate crime, hate incidents and hate speech, with the aim of assessing gaps and needs in this important policy area. Using Australia as a case study, we create and analyse a database of 222 organisations running activities focusing on tackling hate against different target groups. The results highlight an uneven distribution of efforts across different geographical areas, types of activities and target groups. The majority of anti-hate efforts, especially by government organisations, focus on awareness raising and education rather than victim support and data collection. Racial and religious hate are the main foci of anti-hate efforts, compared to other forms of hate, such as anti-LGBTIQ+ and disablist hate.

This article aims to identify how the economies that do not necessarily prioritise social rights in their social policy arrangements fare in achieving various healthcare objectives. The big five of East Asian countries – China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore plus Hong Kong – are considered as such cases. It first highlights a wide range of variations in their healthcare offerings. It then shows that, contrary to the common belief, they constitute a surprisingly high level of redistributive elements in them. Deviating from their overall welfare regime characteristics, each healthcare system presents a unique combination of policy objectives in social, medical, economic and political terms, raising a question of the utility of social rights as a central conceptual lens to understand the world of welfare capitalism.