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The independent sector domiciliary care market has always been an integral part of the social care system in England, but has become especially important in recent years. Its smooth running is crucial for the delivery of an effective community care policy. This paper argues that the motivations of these providers is an important aspect of this system's functioning, and derives a typology which captures the most important ingredients which theory and practice suggest should be taken into account in this regard. Four provider types are identified; they can be labelled satisfied team players; demoralised isolates; ambivalence-experiencing go-getters; and ambivalence-experiencing quiet lifers. The categories reflect both the balance of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, and these providers' situational contexts, including the nature of the relationships developed with local authority purchasers. The latter exert exceptional power and influence in social care markets in England.

The Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey of Britain made it possible first time to explore poverty using three different measures applied at the same time on the same sample. The measures were: lacking socially perceived necessities; being subjectively poor and having a relatively low income. These approaches are all commonly used to identify the poor and to measure poverty but rarely if ever in combination. In this article we have found that there is little overlap in the group of people defined as poor by these dimensions. There are reasons for this lack of overlap, connected to the reliability and validity of the different measures. However the people who are defined as living in poverty by different measures of poverty are different. This inevitably means that the policy response to poverty will be different depending on which measure is employed.

We have attempted to analyse overlap in two ways. First, by exploring the dimensions of poverty cumulatively, we have found that, the more dimensions people are poor on, the more they are unlike the non-poor and the poor on only one dimension, in their characteristics and in their social exclusion. Second, by treating particular dimensions as meriting more attention than others, we explored three permutations of this type and concluded that, while each permutation were more unlike the non-poor than those poor on a single dimension, they were not as unlike the non-poor as the cumulatively poor were. These results indicate that accumulation might be a better way of using overlapping measures of poverty than by giving priority to one dimension over another.

The implication of the paper is that it is not safe to rely on one measure of poverty – the results obtained are just not reliable enough. Surveys, such as the Family Resources Survey or the European Community Household Panel, which are used to monitor the prevalence of poverty, need to be adapted to enable results to be triangulated – to incorporate a wider range of poverty measures.

An important consideration when designing social policy is the expected response of individuals to new taxes and expenditures. Response is predictable when individuals are assumed to optimise instrumentally. However, the extent to which instrumental behaviour can be deemed ‘representative’ has been questioned. Behavioural experiments reveal that individuals rely more heavily on low-cost signals and heuristics than on an optimising calculus. When costs and benefits are not easy to discern the consequences of action are difficult to estimate and perceptions of the intrinsic value of action assume greater relevance. Such considerations are particularly apposite when social policy affects altruism. In this paper the proposition is that policy signals impact on motivation systematically. Policy can have a greater (or lesser) impact than anticipated by instrumental response to the sum of its parts. Two examples prove illustrative. The first considers institutional reform and the supply of ‘merit wants’. The second focuses on recent proposals to nurture the voluntary charitable sector. In both cases, policy expectations based only on instrumental response prove misleading; the impact of policy signals on perceptions of the intrinsic value of action cannot be ignored.

China has a long tradition of Confucianism, it has also been dominated by a communist ideology for a few decades. How did these different beliefs and principles influence its welfare system in the past? Towards which direction is the system shifting when the balance of power between the state (the dominant ideology) and society (with its own traditions) has been changed? This article analyses the case of ‘Foster Mother Villages’ and the Datong Social Welfare Institution. The case of Datong shows that, although the influence of official communist ideology was dominant in the overall system of child protection in China, traditional factors were also influential. The dominant role of official ideology has to be underpinned by financial support from the state. Where the government failed to provide the support, the traditional factor became dominant in the main institutional arrangements: that is the reason why institutional care failed to replace foster care in Datong city. In the past 50 years, spanning the eras of both planned economy and market reform in China, the Datong Social Welfare Institution has protected more than 6,500 orphaned, lost and abandoned children, and most of these children have finally achieved a normal family life.

It is a widespread assumption that the interface between social assistance and the labour market implies an incentive structure that hinders people to work. This incentive structure is known as the unemployment trap. In particular within economics it is seen as a matter of course influencing the debate on labour market and social welfare reform. In contrary to these dominant discourses, we take the unemployment trap-theorem as a hypothesis to be tested empirically. We focus on the case of German social assistance (Sozialhilfe) by analysing data from the Social Assistance Calendar from the German Socio Economic Panel (GSOEP), a longitudinal data set, recorded by the Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (DIW). The data are analysed by using approaches of the Event History Analysis, yielding results that clearly contradict the unemployment trap-theorem: Most people re-enter the labour market after a relatively short period of receiving Sozialhilfe. This is the starting point for asking for the recipients’ reasons for their labour market decisions by analysing 26 interviews with recipients of Sozialhilfe in Cologne and Leipzig.

The image of housing as the wobbly pillar under the welfare state has been widely used in recent years, and is clearly an attractive metaphor in the present period as residualisation deepens and privatisation continues. However, this paper is concerned with the early years of the postwar welfare state, when conditions for a securely founded housing service were, arguably, more conducive than they are today. Accordingly the paper focuses on policy work in the 1940s, drawing on new research on Public Record Office files, to reveal the amount of wartime planning within Whitehall for postwar housing policy, and the extent of continuity between the pre and post 1945 periods. It is shown that under the wartime coalition government there was considerably more planning for housing after the war than is acknowledged in the existing literature, and that this work shaped policy under the Labour government of 1945–51. Housing emerged as the wobbly pillar under the welfare state because of the amount of detailed wartime planning and Labour's acceptance of its analysis and prescriptions. Whereas most accounts concentrate on the size of the late 1940s building programme (and judge the government accordingly), the argument here is that to understand how housing emerged as the wobbly pillar it is necessary to look beyond quantity to the question of why a self-proclaimed socialist government failed to challenge the market dominance of housing provision.

Encouraging individuals' adaptability to more flexible patterns of work and learning, and promoting greater self-management of employment security, are central to UK policies aiming to improve employability and social inclusion. Little is known, however, about the responses to these issues of those deemed to have employability problems. This article presents the results of a qualitative phase of research with young people not in work, education or training to determine the extent to which these policy-espoused concepts of adaptability and self-management were reflected in their attitudes and jobsearch activity. The findings indicate generally negative attitudes and avoidance in jobsearch towards working outside a traditional ideal of standard, permanent employment and also towards improving prospects by updating skills. Reasons included a disincentive to enter training or temporary work due to short-term risks to benefit status, but more significant concerns reflected the increasing problem of the ‘churning’ of low-skilled youth between work and welfare. It is argued that inconsistencies between policy dictums about how the unemployed should behave in order to receive benefits and how they should behave in order to become more employable are not conducive to long-term employability and may actually contradict the aims of ‘active’ labour market policies.