In the past many of the leading figures in social policy writing had interests in history – for example Richard Tawney, T.H. Marshall, and Richard Titmuss. However, social policy has lost its ‘historical imagination’, with many students – Thatcher's children, and in a few years Major's children – not being exposed to social policy history, and with many publishers believing that anything before 1997 or even 2001 belongs to ‘history’ rather than ‘social policy’. The papers in this section were originally delivered to the ESPAnet conference in Copenhagen in September 2003. As will be evident, contributors take rather different views of how the historic past can help in understanding or informing policy formation and implementation, although what unites them is that historical understanding is important in social policy analysis.

Social justice is a policy aim of the UK Labour government. This paper considers the applicability of the concept to disability, seeking to establish principles for conceptualising social justice and disability and considering the nature of the challenges for public policy and society posed by this conceptualisation. The paper considers how disability is implicated in two types of claims about the source of social injustice: those concerned with socially constructed differences between people; and those arising from material inequalities. Appropriate values underpinning alternative conceptions of social justice are discussed and tensions in policymaking considered.

Social policy and the social sciences more generally, have tended to emphasise links, activities and processes occurring ‘within’ nation states to the neglect of those cutting across them. This ‘methodological nationalism’ is increasingly being questioned as transnational processes, be they ‘from above’ or ‘from below’, institutionalised or non-institutionalised, formal or informal, have become more significant over the last half century. The spread of activities, links and ties beyond national borders has become more extensive and the interactions themselves have become more intensive. In the light of these changes, the aim of this themed section is to draw attention to the transnational dimensions of social policy and advance the study of transnationalism in relation to social policy and welfare.

This themed section arose partly as a response to the debate, which has been taking place within the academic social policy community recently, about the nature and future of social policy as an area of study. It includes contributions from those working within Politics departments, both in Britain and abroad, as well as from those working within more specific Social Policy contexts. There are many reasons why the Political Economy approach to social policy is particularly appropriate today. Three important reasons are the increasing importance of processes of ‘globalisation’, the ever more explicit linking of economic and social policies by governments, and the entry of new actors such as for-profit corporations into the domain of social policy.

Age discrimination has become a topical issue in Britain, and legislation is promised by the year 2006. It is often viewed as a recent problem, caused by the decline in older men's economic activity rates since the 1970s, by concerns over ageing populations in the future and by the need to extend working lives. Yet it has a long history, going back at least to the 1930s, with much research into older workers being conducted in 1950s Britain. Examination of this history helps us understand some of the difficulties inherent in the concepts of ageism and age discrimination.

Social policy has treated welfare states as nation states. Contemporary processes seem to have unsettled the spatial, scalar and social coherence of nation-states. This article examines the challenge of rethinking the relationships of nation, state and welfare. It argues for a transnational conception of both the current remakings of nation, state and welfare, and of their past formations. Such a view casts doubt on the value of the container model of the nation-state, and makes visible the constitutive or nation-constructing role of welfare states.

This article discusses the nature of, and links between, the academic disciplines of Social Policy and Political Economy. Two core concerns of mainstream Social Policy are identified: firstly, a focus upon the development and operation of the welfare state and, secondly, a concern with concepts such as equity. Political Economy is identified as a discipline based upon the understanding that the production and distribution of wealth can only effectively be studied alongside the operation of power. It is argued that the core concerns of Social Policy are best approached from a Political Economy perspective. Three contemporary trends make this a particularly opportune time to apply the Political Economy approach to the concerns of Social Policy. These are, firstly, the growing importance of processes of ‘globalisation’, secondly, the increasingly explicit linking of economic and social policies by governments and, thirdly, the emergence of new actors in the social welfare field, particularly for-profit corporations.

Mainstreaming equality involves integrating equality considerations from the outset into how an organization operates, its policies and practices. Whether this works to the advantage of disabled people depends critically on the quality of understanding of equality issues for different groups. This paper begins by clarifying goals for social justice, social inclusion and equality and then considers the salience of disabled people as a social category. It briefly reviews different equality strategies, before focusing on mainstreaming and its potential to promote cultural change and socially just distribution. An analytical framework to support mainstreaming is outlined. The paper concludes by stressing the importance of disabled people's involvement with mainstreaming equality if outcomes are to promote social justice.

Neoliberal reforms in social welfare policy have been common across the developed capitalist democracies in the latter decades of the twentieth century. A central question for political economists has been whether or not economic globalisation has played a significant role in fostering these reforms in public social welfare provision. In the present paper, I review the best recent work on globalisation and the democratic capitalist welfare state. I also provide a synopsis of recent arguments about the domestic political sources of contemporary trajectories of the welfare state. After brief surveys of welfare state retrenchment and recent scholarship, I utilise newly available data to offer an analysis of the impacts of globalisation and key features of domestic politics on 1981–2000 variations in social welfare entitlements and decommodification.

Since it came to power in 1997 the Labour Government has conceived of low levels labour market participation by disabled people as not just an economic concern but also an indicator of social exclusion or social injustice. This article presents some evidence about inequalities between disabled and non-disabled people in the labour market; reviews the evidence on discrimination in employment and discusses the potential of anti-discrimination legislation as a tool to reduce social injustice; discusses sources of social justice in the benefits system; and considers whether people in receipt of Incapacity Benefits should be expected to seek work. It concludes that rights and responsibilities are unjustly distributed between government and disabled people.

This paper argues that agrarianism was a central force in shaping outcomes in Irish social insurance in the post-war period, as Irish policy makers sought to balance the needs of urban and rural Ireland, and the interests of diverse groups in the agricultural sector. Using the Beveridge Report as a policy template, Irish policy makers struggled to apply this model to very different Irish conditions, where the agricultural sector had a profound economic and ideological weight. The paper points to the need for political theories of the welfare state to encompass variation in the way in which agrarian interests are structured.

This article analyses the theoretical utility of policy transfer in developing perspectives on international and comparative social policy. It argues that existing work on policy transfer provides us with a theoretical tool to connect perspectives on international policy change, by focussing on the knowledge base of policy and the motivations of actors throughout the policy process from the global level to the context of practice. In doing so, it explores the role of epistemic communities in policy-oriented learning, particularly in education. The article concludes by suggesting four areas for future work on transfer which would serve to advance international policy analysis.

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.

The future of the welfare state in advanced liberal democracies is increasingly judged in economic terms. For, in an era of economic globalisation and heightened competition between economies, it is invariably suggested that the welfare state must prove its value in an exhaustive competitive audit if it is not to reveal itself an indulgent luxury and an unsustainable burden on competitiveness. Given the influence of such assumptions among policy-makers, it is unremarkable that social policy goals are increasingly subordinated to perceived economic imperatives. The critical dissection of the prevailing orthodox on the competitive-corrosive qualities of the welfare state in an era of (supposed) globalisation and welfare retrenchment is, then, a most urgent task for social policy analysts. In this paper I provide a review of the most recent comparative political economy of globalisation and regionalisation. This challenges, quite fundamentally, the view that globalisation is the proximate cause of welfare retrenchment in OECD countries and that high levels of welfare expenditure are incompatible with an open and competitive economy.

Direct payments have been heralded by the disability movement as an important means to achieving independent living and hence greater social justice for disabled people through enhanced recognition as well as financial redistribution. Drawing on data from the ESRC funded project Disabled People and Direct Payments: A UK Comparative Perspective, this paper presents an analysis of policy and official statistics on use of direct payments across the UK. It is argued that the potential of direct payments has only partly been realised as a result of very low and uneven uptake within and between different parts of the UK. This is accounted for in part by resistance from some Labour-controlled local authorities, which regard direct payments as a threat to public sector jobs. In addition, access to direct payments has been uneven across impairment groups. However, from a very low base there has been a rapid expansion in the use of direct payments over the past three years. The extent to which direct payments are able to facilitate the ultimate goal of independent living for disabled people requires careful monitoring.

In this counterfactual article, the social consequences of a further period of Labour government from 1951 to 1964 are explored. It is contended that Labour would have retreated from a broad ranging ‘socialist’ strategy. However, its firm commitment to the welfare state would, in the absence of severe economic turbulence, have helped to embed a more deep-rooted ‘welfare’ culture in British society.

This article considers the character of EU social policy and in particular the linkages between the EU's economic and social strategies. Arguably, the most recent enlargement of the EU represents a turning point for the future of EU social policy, though there is disagreement about its future if not so much about the causes of this crisis. The article concludes that the future political economy of EU social policy and indeed of the EU itself may be subject to fundamental changes.

Genetic developments are viewed with distrust by the disability rights community. But the argument that genetic screening promotes social injustice is not straightforward. Disabled people are affected by both the problems of impairment and the problems of disability. Preventing impairment should be a priority as well as preventing disability. Questions of social justice arise if biomedical approaches are prioritized at the cost of structural changes in society. They also arise when disabled people do not have access to genetic medicine. On a global scale, the priorities for impairment prevention are basic healthcare, not high technology medicine.

This paper does four things. It reviews recent contributions to the literature concerning ‘global social policy’ – understood here as global social redistribution, global social regulation and global social rights. It traces recent developments and initiatives in one of these aspect of global social policy namely mechanisms of global redistribution. It discusses developments in the governance of global social policy arguing that this is increasingly the province of global networks, partnerships and tasks forces somewhat removed from public scrutiny. Finally, it reflects upon the need for and prospects of a global social reformist project and the contribution that both research and political alliances might play in this.

This article provides a historical analysis of particular policy initiatives undertaken in the US and the UK in the 1960s and 1970s and asks to what extent the lessons from these policy initiatives can be transferred to current policy development in the UK today. The focus of the discussion is local community-based interventions, aimed at combating poverty and exclusion. These are now generally referred to in the UK as Area Based Initiatives (ABIs).