The emphasis of this literature review is on conceptual issues rather than a review of empirical studies. The paper starts by addressing the question why the concept of resilience is particular and what value is added if such a perspective is adopted. Next, the historical context and evolvement of the research on resilience are briefly reviewed with a short overview of the range of research topics in the area. The third section discusses the definition of resilience and its main elements. Section four addresses the main criticisms of the resilience concept. Section five identifies areas for further research.

This article explores recent developments in the modernisation of adult social care through the lens of changes to English day services. Drawing on wider policy debates, it argues that Disabled Peoples' Movement and governmental ideas on self-directed support, although superficially similar, are growing increasingly apart. It is argued that in the absence of adequate funding and exposure to organisations of disabled people, day service recipients risk moving from a position of enforced collectivism to an enforced individualism characteristic of neo-liberal constructions of economic life.

A major problem for voluntary organisations service providers under contract has been their independence in regard to both the relatively narrow issue of the terms and conditions of service provision, and the broader issue about the part voluntary organisations might play in policy shaping and democratic renewal. I examine the way in which New Labour has developed its ‘partnership’ approach to the voluntary sector since 1998. I argue that better terms and conditions have been secured for voluntary organisations providing services, and that large and umbrella organisations now have more impact on the implementation of central government policy. However, the more equal partnership required for a policy-shaping role in the sense of agenda-setting is likely to remain elusive, while at the local level there are tensions between the idea of voluntary organisations as agents of ‘civil renewal’ and as service providers.

This article presents preliminary results from a multi-stage quantitative study of ‘multiple exclusion homelessness’ (MEH) in seven urban locations across the UK. It demonstrates a very high degree of overlap between a range of experiences associated with ‘deep social exclusion’ – namely, homelessness, substance misuse, institutional care and ‘street culture’ activities (such as begging and street drinking). It also provides evidence to support the contention that homelessness is a particularly prevalent form of exclusion, with its experience reported as widespread by those accessing low threshold support services targeted at other dimensions of deep exclusion, such as drug misuse. Further, the analysis presented indicates that the nature of MEH varies geographically, with the profile of the population affected looking quite different in Westminster (London) than in the other urban locations. The main explanation for this appears to be the exceptionally high proportion of migrants in the MEH population in Westminster, who tend to report lower overall levels of personal trauma and vulnerability than the indigenous MEH population.

Research demonstrates the important role of refugees and asylum seekers' social networks in providing both the practical and emotional support necessary to mitigate social exclusion and promote integration within receiving societies. Based on research conducted by the National Evaluation of the Children's Fund, we highlight the barriers to network building for refugee and asylum seeking children and families, and the ways in which Children's Fund strategies and practices are tackling these. Using the ‘Indicators of Integration Framework’ developed by Ager and Strang (2004), we describe the activity of Children's Fund services in relation to the concepts social bonds, social links and social bridges. Such attempts to reduce social exclusion are seen to have limited effectiveness when framed by a government policy context favouring the development of social bridges at the expense of social links and bonds.

Housing has been unjustifiably neglected in comparative welfare state research. The banking crisis of 2007–08, however, revealed how important housing, especially home ownership and the institutional structures of the mortgage market, has become to welfare state change. Securitisation of mortgages created a new circuit of global capital, while national mortgage markets became the conduit through which home owners were connected to this wave of globally sourced capital. In the UK, equity stored in owner-occupied property became much more fungible because of the very open/liberal mortgage market. As a result home owners began to ‘bank’ on their homes using it not only for consumption but increasingly as a financial safety net, a cushion against adversity and a means for securing access to privately supplied services and supporting their family's welfare needs across the life-course. This welfare state change – a move towards asset-based welfare – was historically and today remains underpinned by the emergence of the UK as a home-owning society.

This article explores the process of attrition, where domestic violence cases fail to make it through the criminal justice system and do not result in criminal conviction. The article draws on the hitherto most detailed study of such attrition in the UK. The research, carried out across the Northumbria Police Force area, explored the quantitative attrition of domestic violence cases, from reporting to the police to final court outcome, contextualising this via the experiences of individuals (mainly women) victimised by domestic violence as well as the perspectives and practices of the police, prosecutors, the courts and non-criminal justice agencies.

This article examines changing patterns of money management in the UK and elsewhere and argues that couples are becoming more individualised in their finances. It draws on quantitative and qualitative data and considers some of the implications of individualisation, in particular in terms of paying for children and childcare. The conclusion is that independent management of money may give both partners a sense of autonomy and personal freedom – so long as their incomes are broadly equivalent. However, if the woman's income drops, for example when children are born, while her outgoings increase, because she is expected to pay the costs of children, the situation may change. Individualisation in money management can then be a route to inequality, so long as women's earnings are lower than men's and women are responsible for paying for children and childcare.

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 the 2008 crisis, there has been a sharp rise in demand for food aid across high-income countries, spurring increased academic interest in the issue of food insecurity. Despite this heightened interest, there remains a paucity of quantitative evidence on trends in the prevalence of food insecurity in rich countries. In this context, the following article presents ‘direct’ evidence on recent patterns of food insecurity across countries and welfare regimes using secondary analysis of the European Quality of Life Survey. It uses an item which has been a longstanding component of deprivation scales, ‘could your household afford a meal with meat, chicken or fish every second day if you wanted it?’, to investigate two hypotheses. First, we explore whether food insecurity has risen since the 2008 crisis as the rise in food aid suggests. Second, we examine if this rise has varied across welfare regimes, if it has occurred at all. The article finds evidence to support both contentions: food insecurity has risen across many European countries and has varied by welfare regime. It also finds that contrary to expectations, the sharpest rise was in the Anglo-Saxon countries of Ireland and the UK, rather than Southern or Eastern European countries.

This paper explores bias in the use of evidence in policy. It argues that existing models of the evidence–policy relationship neglect the tendency for attention to be paid only to that evidence helpful to the interests of powerful social groups. An evolutionary analogy is used to explain how this bias arises, without the need for irrationality or conspiracy on the part of policy makers. Examples are given in the fields of drug, asylum and other policies, and the possible responses by researchers to the biased use of research evidence are discussed.

This article reflects on the insights afforded by the regular measurement and monitoring of household food insecurity in Canada juxtaposed against information on food bank usage in the population. We show that the number and characteristics of people using food banks suggest that this population is a non-representative subset of the food insecure population. We also highlight how the number of people using food banks is insensitive to the level of household food insecurity in the population. Who goes to food banks is a function of the nature of food bank operations and the severity of food insecurity. Representative data on household food insecurity should be regularly collected and utilised to make policy recommendations for interventions to address the problem of insecure food access.

Social innovation (SI) is an increasingly prominent but contested issue in discussions of social policy reform. Although not yet a familiar concept, nor widely understood (least of all by policy makers), it has entered mainstream policy discourses. However whether SI marks a significant departure in either theory or in practice, or merely in rhetoric, remains to be determined. This Review Article, and the Themed Section as a whole, aims to set out some of the questions social policy analysts should ask about SI, and to help clarify whether or not it is a significant development which merits attention. The Review begins by considering some of the reasons for the recent interest shown in SI before clarifying the meaning of the concept and outlining some of the different forms SI has taken. This discussion is followed by a consideration of some of the practical and theoretical questions which SI raises for social policy analysis. The Review concludes that social policy analysts cannot afford to ignore SI, but that the most effective contribution the discipline can make is to apply a critical empirical perspective to test the significance, value and impact of SI.

This paper explores the concepts of adversity, risk, vulnerability and resilience in the context of child protection systems with the aim of contributing to the debate about the ways in which risk of ‘harm’ and ‘abuse’ are conceptualised at different stages of the lifespan and in relation to different groups of people. The recent developments in the policy and legislative framework for state intervention on behalf of children in the UK are described and linked with an exploration of the underlying assumptions about abuse and neglect. Concepts of adversity, risk, vulnerability and resilience and the ways in which the complexity of the routes and pathways to ‘harm’ pose a challenge to the current UK state protective system are discussed.

This article focuses on the contracting-out of Public Employments Services. Quasi-markets promise to deliver more efficient, effective and de-bureaucratised employment services. By comparing experiences from Holland, Australia and Denmark we investigate whether quasi-markets deliver on promises. Quasi-market models have difficulties in living up to the preconditions for a well-functioning market and political expectations. Efficiency gains and cost-savings are still largely unknown. Instead it is clear that quasi-markets create a new type of employment policy, and new conditions for governing the labour market and employment policy. Clouded in the ‘technical’ language of improved efficiency and effectiveness, such changes are often neglected and depoliticised.

This article provides insights into how the concept of vulnerability operates in welfare and disciplinary processes for young people who are considered ‘vulnerable’. It reports from empirical qualitative research conducted in a large city in England which included interviews with vulnerable young people and with professionals working with this group. Findings highlight that despite differences of opinion about what constitutes ‘vulnerability’, it is a popular and powerful conceptual mechanism which underpins the delivery of service interventions for certain young people. A relationship between vulnerability and ‘transgression’ is revealed, calling into question dichotomous representations of young people as either ‘vulnerable victims’ or ‘dangerous wrong-doers’. It is argued that whilst it can be utilised in the pursuit of more ‘caring’ interventions with those who are seen to be ‘in need’, vulnerability is also a concept relevant to debates concerning selective welfare systems and behavioural regulation.

This paper sets out an argument for the re-imagining of care in social policy on three interrelated grounds: epistemological–theoretical, substantive socio-historical, and normative political–philosophical. It takes up the epistemological challenge offered by queer theory to propose a different gaze be cast on care which recognizes the practices of care which take place outside normative heterosexual couples and families. Following on from this, it suggests that the care that has been the object of study in social policy has failed to keep up with transformations in the realm of sociability which characterize the contemporary world. It outlines findings of research which show the increasing importance of friendship to those at the cutting edge of processes of individualization. Finally, it points to the new and valuable lens that the study of caring practices of friends might cast on the ethics of care, and it ends with some pointers to what it might mean for social policy to take friendship seriously.

In the United Kingdom many households are seeing their food security suffer through rising food and fuel prices, economic recession and welfare reform. Household budgeting priorities by necessity tend to be towards expenditures whose default consequences are severe; food budgets are where people can and do make economies. People manage variously on minimal diets, food gifts and charitable support, but the consequences in terms of social wellbeing and nutritional health, while potentially severe, are hidden and individually embodied rather than monitored and addressed by society. This article discusses the potential consequences of these shifts in household food provisioning under conditions of increasing austerity. The challenges posed for social policy are explored, particularly in relation to changes in welfare provision, the increasingly prominent role of the voluntary and community sector and potential devolution of responsibilities to local levels.

Universal Credit is a major change in the UK's social security system which will affect around eight million households by replacing six existing means-tested benefits and tax credits with a single benefit, based on income, assets and circumstances, and paid monthly. Much commentary about Universal Credit has supported the principle but raised concerns about delivery. This consensus about the principles and the focus on delivery have resulted in less attention being paid to key policy choices informing the design. This article examines two aspects of the design of Universal Credit: the aim to make Universal Credit as much ‘like work’ as possible, and the architecture of the means test. The focus here is the gap between the assumptions underlying the design of Universal Credit, on the one hand, and the research evidence about life on a low income, and in low-waged and often insecure employment, on the other. Finally, we discuss the most significant contradiction between the ‘transformational’ aim for Universal Credit, to help people achieve greater ‘independence’ from the state, and the realities of deepening and widening control of claimants’ lives.

The four earlier articles in this themed section are based on presentations at a workshop convened to explore challenges in using qualitative longitudinal methods for policy-related research, with particular focus on data analysis and interpretation. Together, they provide useful pointers to the scope of qualitative longitudinal approaches, and extensive discussion of management and analysis of the particular and complex data produced. Readers who are interested in pursuing themselves a qualitative longitudinal approach to policy-related social research will want also to look to a wider literature to enhance their understanding of issues to be taken into consideration, and to explore the range of methods and options. The aim of this review article is to provide some ideas about the kind of literature likely to prove helpful. The bibliographic references for this review article are supplemented by the guide to sources which completes this themed section.