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.

Definitions of frailty are much debated. The focus of this article is on the representation of frailty; who employs the terms ‘frail’ or ‘frailty’ in social care, about whom and with what meanings? We report secondary analysis of interview data from two waves of a longitudinal study starting in 2008. Study participants were 240 social care managers/practitioners working in four English localities. Social care managers and practitioners did not talk at length about frailty as characterising the increasing needs of care users. The minority who talked about frailty used the term in three ways: describing a physical state not including dementia; describing a stable state, as distinct from those dying; and as a combination of physical and mental disabilities (i.e. dementia). Differences among the participants in this study about the meaning of frailty could have implications for policy makers and for communication with other staff, health professionals, older people and their relatives.

Little research has been conducted exploring the relationship between public-sector accountability and the law. This is a significant oversight given the potential for this relationship to cause unintended consequences around issues of liability, especially in the context of a growing litigation culture. The purpose of the current research is to explore this relationship, using qualitative studies of public-sector professionals in England. The findings of the study suggest that increasing emphasis on accountability has led to a growing magnification of legal risk in the public sector, with consequences for the ways public-sector professionals perceive their relationships with the public.

This article examines whether people aged eighty-five-and-over, referred to throughout as ‘The Oldest Old’, are more likely to suffer from social exclusion than people aged sixty-five to eighty-four. Social Exclusion is defined according to the four dimensions identified in the 1999 Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey. Using data from Understanding Society, the analysis finds that the Oldest Old have a higher likelihood of experiencing social exclusion than people aged sixty-five to eighty-four. These findings illustrate the risks facing the Oldest Old, and highlight the policy challenges presented by ageing western populations.

Policy makers and researchers are alarmed by the pervasive substandard working conditions and mistreatment in domestic work worldwide. Using an original dataset from a sample of domestic workers in Portugal (n = 684), our study explores types of abuse and harassment and tries to unveil the potential factors affecting the likelihood of having been a victim. Empirical evidence pointed to three segments of domestic workers: victims of labour abuses related to contract and wages, victims of multiple abuses including mistreatment and also psychological and sexual harassment, and a segment with no occurrence of abuse. Informal workers are more often victims of labour abuses, while migrants, especially Brazilian women, are more likely to report all types of abuse and harassment. On the other hand, carers of the elderly often suffered multiple abuses. The results suggest that despite the prevalence of labour abuses in Portugal, the most severe abuses are uncommon.

This introductory article offers an analytical framework to understand the limits of approaches that stress the diffusion and transfers of international norms within the field of disability policy over the last three decades. It also aims to provide alternative ways to frame some of the important changes that have occurred through the concept of layering, in order to better account for the intricate processes of national translation but also for the contradictions, conflicts, and obstacles that the promotion of disability rights have faced in different countries. Finally, this article serves to introduce the contributions that make up the themed section in this issue of Social Policy and Society.

The United States has been a leader in the creation of disability rights law, providing a policy template for other nations. Yet the social model, the animating philosophy behind the disability rights movement, has had little effect on the wide range of welfare programs that serve people with disabilities. These programs, whose creation preceded the modern disability rights movement, reflect a medical model of disability that is at odds with the social model. Analysing the Americans with Disabilities Act (which embodies the social model) and Social Security Disability Insurance (the largest welfare program for people with disabilities), we explore how and why this layering of contradictory disability rights and welfare programs developed and how it has been maintained. We argue that the tension between these policies engendered a series of patches, or ‘kludges’, that allow the policies to coexist without meaningful synthesis. We contend that the United States is particularly prone to this layering of ‘tense policies’, but that it is likely characteristic of disability policy in many nations. Finally we argue that accurate benchmarking of disability rights regimes across nations requires analysts to dig through all the layers of disability policy.

In France, public policies in the field of disability was transformed by the law in 11 February 2005 on ‘Equal Rights and Opportunities, Participation, and Citizenship of People with Disabilities’. The law was framed as the introduction in France of the international ‘social model of disability’, in order to combat discrimination. Yet international references in parliamentary debates leading to the adoption of this law were all but absent. How do we explain this paradox? This article aims to answer this question by showing how the newly introduced measures reflected the needs of different stakeholders involved in this public policy to maintain their positions and reform their mutual agreements. This transfer was not characterised by a thorough rethinking of the public policy subsystem, but rather resulted in layering of new rights on top of old frameworks. How then did the organisations promoting these measures manage to implement public policies despite clear contradictions between old and new goals? This article suggests that the organisational regulation of political conflict (conflict avoidance and circumvention of obstacles) and the safeguarding of embedded interests (by limiting possibilities for compromise and administrative obstruction of legal disputes) played a decisive role in this process.

Applying a political economy lens, this article examines the impact of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), within a political context marked by crisis and austerity. Taking the case of Portugal, a country that faced a financial crisis and underwent an austerity plan, the article seeks to understand the impact of the CRPD at domestic level. What has changed, what has remained the same and what has deteriorated? And how has the disability movement responded and resisted to the crisis? This article addresses these questions and discusses the challenges of implementing disability rights in times of ‘enduring’ austerity.

There is growing concern surrounding the retraction of disability social provisioning measures across the western world, with state fiscal policy trends foregrounding austerity as a central principle of welfare provisioning. This is occurring within many of the nation-states that have ratified and legislated rights enshrined by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). This article undertakes a critical analysis of disability income retraction in Australia since the early 2000s and examines these changes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians living with disability by focusing on Article 20 of the CRPD, the right to personal mobility, a core right for people with disabilities and Indigenous peoples. Beyond economic inequality, the article illustrates that the various administrative processes attached to welfare retraction have implications for the realisation of mobility practices that are critical for individual cultural identity and wellbeing. Disability austerity has resulted in a new form of Indigenous containment, fixing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with disabilities in a cyclical motion of poverty management.

The literature on disability rights intersects with different disciplines such as law, sociology, social policy, political science, and of course disability studies. For this reason, it is highly diverse in its methods and approaches, and the dialogue between these various strands is not always easy.