This article argues that postmodernist theory is something which students of social policy should neither accept uncritically nor dismiss out of hand. Firstly, the article takes issue with the responses made to postmodernist theory by Ramesh Mishra and Peter Taylor-Gooby. Secondly, it argues that the ideas loosely known as ‘reflexive modernisation’ constitute a more measured and critical response, though such ideas are likely to be of little use to social policy research in the absence of any reference to a left-right spectrum. Thirdly, it argues that by combining reflexive modernisation with a left-right spectrum, a decentred conception of welfare emerges which could be of value to a radical left politics. Finally, it argues for a Citizen's Income as a reform proposal which has the potential to establish such a system of decentred welfare.

Non-application to the social fund can lead to a reduction in the resources available to some of the most vulnerable members of society. This article shows how traditional models of take-up are inadequate for examining why payments from the discretionary cash-limited social fund do not always reach the people for whom the benefit was designed. Nevertheless, it is crucial to examine why non-application to the social fund denies many people even a chance of meeting their needs. A new model of take-up is proposed that widens the debate beyond the level of claimant behaviour, allowing non-application to the social fund to be looked at as a variant of non-take-up. It provides a framework for examining the influence of structural and administrative factors on social fund application rates and highlights the extent to which policy makers and legislators play a part in non-application.

For the last ten years, the Australian system of services for frail elderly people has been undergoing significant reforms. Prior to that time, a series of government reviews and inquiries had repeatedly identified the same problems, including the dominance of institutional care, the inadequate supply of home and community based services, the lack of co-ordination, the inefficiency, and the unequal distribution of services by geographical area. Changes since the implementation of the Aged Care Reform Strategy in 1985 have been considerable, particularly with regard to the residential care sector. This article is concerned with the policy responses which emerged under the Strategy, and their impact on aged care service delivery in Australia.

Whilst studies of employment have fuelled arguments about post-Fordism and questions of flexibility, recent debates about welfare have considered social polarization and the growth of an anti-social, anti-work ‘underclass’. In both cases, relatively little attention has been given to the ways in which people in depressed local economies now survive through precarious, marginal and informal work.

This article explores how people deprived of jobs seek to re-create positive working lives for themselves through voluntary work. Drawing upon qualitative interviews with working-class men and women in Teesside, it explores the motivations and meanings of volunteering and the significance that voluntary action has for work and welfare in such communities. State intervention in the voluntary work sphere is assessed and a number of recommendations are made for policy and practice.

The aim of this article is to present a less negative and more rounded analysis of the potential contribution of postmodernism to social policy than that presented by Taylor-Gooby (1994) in this journal entitled ‘Postmodernism: A Great Leap Backwards?’. It covers four major themes. First, it examines Foucault's ideas on power/knowledge, the body, discipline and surveillance. Second, the article explores the connections between feminism, postmodernism and social policy. Third, it analyses theories of the poststructural state. Fourth, it considers a neglected topic in the subject of space and assesses the contribution of postmodern discourses of spatiality and their relevance to social policy. The article acknowledges the contradiction arising from post-modernism's critique of meta-theory and mainstream social policy's commitment to universalism, but concludes that the answer does not lie in the universal rejection of postmodernism but in the use of the ideas and insights to move the discipline in new directions.

Major policy developments in Northern Ireland concerned with socioeconomic differences between Protestants and Catholics have involved a concern with structural issues and the nature of the policy making process. These initiatives have raised considerable debate concerning the extent to which religion-specific policies are appropriate. In this article each of these initiatives is considered in detail. It is suggested that the debates in Northern Ireland could have significance in the light of proposals to develop race-specific policies in Britain.

This article reports on comparative research into the living standards of unemployed couples claiming Income Support, couples claiming in-work benefits and couples in receipt of a male median wage. The data reveal high levels of debt and credit dependence across the whole sample, which have a particularly damaging impact on the daily consumption patterns of the unemployed group. The problems this raises for comparative judgements about living standards are discussed, most notably the need for a longitudinal perspective in both the analysis of financial circumstances and the interpretation of data on current standards of living.

The 1990 National Health Service and Community Care Act introduced sweeping changes to health and social welfare services. The reforms to community care were dominated by the introduction of markets for social care. We argue that the new markets cannot be guaranteed to deliver the range of services required to meet community care objectives. When they began to assume their new responsibilities, few key purchasers had a basic understanding of the functioning and imperfections of markets. Consequently, they were poorly equipped to anticipate or ameliorate the sources of market failure that we identify. Like any other relatively ill-informed purchaser, local authorities risk being unable to buy what they want on behalf of their residents and at an appropriate volume, cost and quality. We discuss where and how market imperfections are likely to occur. In this context, we offer an economic framework to help in the shaping and managing of social care markets.

This article explores some of the main reasons why feminist mobilisation around the issue of child daycare in Britain has been so limited and its impact so modest. It describes this mobilisation, comparing it with experience in other countries and with mobilisation on other issues. It suggests that the modest achievement to date is largely attributable to factors other than the lack of feminist pressure. Indeed feminist reservations were partly a realistic response to these external constraints. But they were also a consequence of the particular character of second wave feminism in Britain and of the questions posed by the issue of childcare for feminists. These questions included the nature and proper role of the state, motherhood, the value of paid employment for women, social class and the tension between short and long-term strategies for social change.

The post-Fordist welfare state thesis is premised upon the economic and technological changes seen in Britain and elsewhere over the last twenty-five years. Its regulationist variant though goes further and locates welfare shifts within a broader account of the transformed accumulation regime. This amounts to a useful intellectual framework within which to consider social policy developments.

This article however, argues that the post-Fordist case is ultimately misleading as it works with an overly restrictive picture of welfare and pays insufficient attention to non-class social divisions. It overemphasises historical disjunctures in the development of welfare and in doing so misses important areas of continuity. This is compounded by a linked tendency to assume rather than demonstrate the actual transformation of the various services. The evidence from education provides only limited support for the predictive aspects of the model. It also confirms the need for sensitive causal accounts of welfare change.

The term ‘postmodernism’ has recently entered the study of social policy, prompting debate over its usefulness for social policy analysis. Peter Taylor-Gooby's (1994) appraisal of literatures often described as ‘postmodern’ leads him to reject them as having little to offer the discipline of social policy. This article argues that such a view derives from a confusion about the field of ‘postmodernism’; in particular, from a conflation of several different theoretical positions and schools of thought. This article provides a clarification of these literatures in order to argue that the issues they raise have important implications for the way in which we might understand the prospects for policy formulation and implementation. The article distinguishes between the political economy strand of the ‘post’ literatures – postindustrialism and postfordism – and the cultural studies strand – poststructuralism and postmodernism – showing that the different issues they highlight, and the ways in which they conceptualise power and control will lead to different theoretical connections between social policy and political action.

The article develops a case study of the family and work history of an interviewee which is used to illustrate the context in which family arrangements for work, care and support develop. The study uses Finch and Mason's (1993) focus on human agency to develop a ‘family responsibilities account’, and then goes on to explore three aspects of the social structural context in which the life has been lived. These are developed from Connell's analysis (1987) of gender relations: constraints associated with the division of labour, with issues of power and with emotional and personal life (cathexis).

A detailed account of the life in question is given, and this is reanalysed using the four approaches indicated. The result is an overall account which emphasises the complexity of social life and of human decision-making, even at the apparently mundane level of choices about family life, paid employment, domestic work and the care and support of kin. The extent to which constraining factors interweave with individual agency is demonstrated, and the significance of the analysis for policymakers is noted: each change in arrangements for work and care in a life affects others, and policy must be made in an awareness of the complexity of its unintended effects as well as of its objectives.

The availability of childcare is an important factor in enabling motherhood to be combined with paid employment. This article uses evidence from the fifth sweep of the National Child Development Study to analyse the use of childcare by a cohort of employed women who were aged 33 in 1991. There is a heavy reliance on informal care by women in partnerships and also by lone mothers. Formal care is most heavily used by women whose youngest child is under five, especially if the woman works full-time. Reported costs of childcare represent nearly a quarter of net weekly earnings for mothers with a child under five. Formal childcare is shown to play an important role in facilitating women's full-time employment. Full-time employment is the route by which women achieve financial independence from their partner. It also increases the likelihood of contributing to an occupational pension which, in turn, has implications for financial independence in later life. However, the majority of women in this cohort do not take the full-time route. For these women, low earnings potential and part-time working make paid childcare uneconomic and reinforces both their role as minor financial contributors within the family and their lack of pension provision in later life.

The prolonged and pervasive recession in the UK property market has produced significant numbees of households with unsecured housing debt – negative equity. These homeowners are typically recent, first-time buyers and are concentrated in the southern core regions of Britain. Various aggregate estimates exist of the numbers of households with unsecured debt and the amounts of money involved; little is known, however, about individual experiences of negative equity. Here, in-depth interview data are drawn on to explore the different strategies adopted by households in varying social and financial circumstances. Findings are related to more general changes in housing market behaviour and to broader theoretical debates about the growth of home ownership.

Over the years during which Israel has occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian economy has become heavily dependent on wages earned in Israel. Yet Israel has done relatively little to modernise these territories' social security arrangements, or to enable Palestinian frontier workers to benefit from its own social security system. This article compares the occupational welfare, public assistance and health insurance programmes in the three entities, and suggests how they could be better organised to protect Palestinian workers and their families against daily contingencies which can decimate their economic security.

A new chief executive of the Benefits Agency, and a new chairperson of the Social Security Advisory Committee, have been appointed. In its response to the Social Security Committee's recent report on social security expenditure, the government revealed that by 1992/3, 30 per cent of individuals were living in households receiving at least one means-tested benefit. In November 1994, there were 5.7 million income support claimants, with just under 1 million partners and 3.2 million other dependants; almost 1.7 million claimants had one or more deductions from their weekly income support (25:1/97, 1.7; 24:3/95, 1.3). In May 1994, more than 3 million people had been claiming income support for more than two years (24:2/94, 1.1). An Institute of Economic Affairs (EEA) report claimed that recent governments' tax and benefit policies have played a central role in increasing welfare dependency.

Political consensus on the scope and structure of the welfare state in post-war Britain has been much overstated. The Labour governments (1945–51), committed to universalism and a planned economy, gave state welfare a central role in guaranteeing ‘fair shares for all’ and used it to help secure union co-operation over wage restraint. The Conservative governments (1951–64), committed to the restoration of ‘sound finance’, abandoned these objectives and attacked components of the welfare state designed to control prices and mediate demands for higher wages. The author concludes that, for comparative social policy studies to be effective, differing frameworks of state welfare have to be more exactly defined.

A number of circumstances have combined in the reform era in China to put women at a more disadvantageous position now than at any other time since 1949. Some of them reflect age-old prejudices, others are the result of the economic reforms, but the two join in a synthesis to threaten women's improved status. Health factors that have particularly impinged on women include: the one-child policy and the skewed birth ratio in favour of boys that this has led to; very clear problems in the area of mental health, including a suicide rate which is much higher for women than for men; kidnapping; and life-threatening exploitation in the new special economic zones. The government's desire to control women's fertility, however, has led to a marked improvement and increase in maternity and childcare health services in the last ten years. The central government has lost power to the provinces and is no longer able to take decisive action to protect women from the effects of discrimination.

In November, the Secretary of State for Social Security announced that most benefits would go up in line with inflation (or, for means-tested benefits, the Rossi price index) in April (24:3/95, 1.1). He also announced other plans, including: cuts in housing benefit for single people under 25 renting privately; a freeze in one parent benefit and lone parent premium; and an increase in the childcare disregard for family credit (24:1/93, 1.3). There will be changes to national insurance contributions for the self-employed. The Labour Party was reported to be reviewing its policies on social security.