Drawing on select examples of adoption policy, this article considers key assumptions in discourse about ‘the best interests of the child’. The central argument is that the life-long impact of adoption needs to be recognised so that the long-term interests of adoptees are met, and not only when they are children. Based on doctoral research into the experiences of adult Korean adoptees in the United States and Australia, this article argues that currently post-adoption services are geared to adoptive parents and the adoptee-as-child and do not adequately address the needs of adoptees beyond childhood. Accurate and accessible information is important for adoptees as they try to understand their past and make sense of their identities.

Under New Labour, policies designed to help families reconcile paid work and family life have increasingly become part of the UK's family-policy terrain. These policies are usually analysed from the perspective of mothers. In this paper, however, we examine how fathers have been situated within these developments. We argue that, while there is evidence of increased optimism on the part of New Labour about fathers' capacity as care-givers, the policies to have emerged since 1998 are only minimally facilitative of opportunities for fathers to reconfigure their paid work and care patterns. We suggest that the reason for this has much to do with the economistic rationale under which the reconciling work and family-life agenda has emerged.

Resilience and social exclusion are both slippery concepts. Attempting to explore the relationship between them – the challenge set for contributors to this themed section – might therefore be considered a rash undertaking. Nevertheless, there is much to be learned – theoretically, empirically and in terms of policy implications – from bringing together these two areas of investigation which have developed hitherto largely in isolation from each other.

Although contemporary sociological thought reports a diversification of family forms in society, ‘the family’ continues to influence national and international political agendas. Social workers, as ‘street level bureaucrats’, are social agents that both work with citizens and implement policies made by senior officials. Despite this, the extent to which conceptual and policy developments in family diversity manifest in family-based social work practice remains under explored. This article brings together the findings of two comparative studies, and explores the transfer of conceptual understandings of family, and policy, in England, through two examples: gendered caring expectations and culturally located familial norms. Significantly, we show that, when prompted, social workers recognise family complexity and diversity, but myriad constraints complicate the application of these understandings, and related policies. Bringing together literature from sociology, social policy and social work, this article, thereby, offers a unique lens and highlights a lag between conceptual developments, policy and implementation.

This study examines kinship care of orphans throughout China. It finds that in addition to children becoming orphaned if both parents die, some children are treated as orphans when their father dies and rural traditional kinship care obligations restrict the viability of widowed mothers continuing to care for their child. When mothers are forced for socioeconomic reasons to leave the paternal extended family, children effectively become orphans, dependent on ageing grandparents. Girls and disabled children are most at risk. Implementing financial and other support to orphans, widowed mothers and kinship carers could improve the sustainability of these family relationships.

With the Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (TWWC) Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990) intended to provide a comprehensive typology covering welfare regimes as well as their effects on the economy. However, the initial TWWC-framework fell short of its promises as it ignored welfare services and the industrial sector of the economy. In the last twenty-five years many studies have analysed these previously overlooked aspects. In this article we review this research. We find that most empirical studies on welfare services, as well as on the economy, confirm the validity of the TWWC typology. However, insufficient attention has been paid to exposing the interplay between the different areas. In the second part of the article we provide two alternative explanations for the linkage between welfare regime and capitalism typologies. There is evidence for a functionalist explanation as proposed by the Varieties-of-Capitalism (VoC) framework, as well as for a political explanation delivered by the power resources approach.

This paper aims to promote greater discussion and debate on the implications and legitimacy of the current UK government policy approach that seeks to nurture voluntary activity by encouraging participation in voluntary groups (formal volunteering) and neglects the cultivation of one-to-one help (informal volunteering). Analysing the 2001 Home Office Citizenship Survey data on the geographical variations in volunteering, this policy approach is argued to privilege the development of a volunteering culture characteristic of affluent areas and to fail to recognise and value the informal volunteering culture more characteristic of lower-income populations. Why this is the case and how it might be resolved is then considered.

This paper critically examines the development of recent policy and theoretical issues concerning the ‘extension of working lives’ for older people in the United Kingdom. It grounds its analysis in ideas from the ‘risk society’ thesis (Beck, 1992) to explore how the matrix of population ageing, job and pension changes impinge on the shifting emphasis on increasing the retirement age, coupled with individualising pensions from state provision to a focus on self-responsibility via private provision. This neo-liberal re-positioning of extending work and pension policy has implications for the management of risk for older people in the UK. The paper explores the impact of population ageing on government ideas associated with social policy relating to extending working lives. It concludes with an assessment on the lessons policy makers and social policy analysts can learn from such shifts and the impact on the social construction of age.

Since coming to office, New Labour has made much of a ‘public philosophy’ that stresses the importance of equal access to opportunities. This article does not so much criticise this fairly modest understanding of social justice as ask whether the kind of social policies that New Labour has devised are capable of delivering ‘opportunity for all’. The suggestion is that, because ‘targeted’ policies – Labour's local regeneration initiatives are the example taken here – face intrinsic difficulties as vehicles for social inclusion and thus greater equality of access to opportunity, they need to be supported by a wider commitment to distributive justice.

This article outlines the reasons for the recruitment of migrant workers by the adult care sector in England, as revealed by participants in a multi-method study. The background to the study is the changing socio-demographic profile of the social care workforce, notably the employment of non-UK citizens in large numbers from outside traditional recruitment sources within the British Commonwealth. The article reports on 136 individual interviews with different stakeholders from the English social care sector undertaken in 2008–2009. Drawing on a theoretical framework developed during the first phase of the study, the analysis revealed a two-fold explanation of the demand for migrant workers in the English care sector. First, to fill specific staff vacancies, either through direct recruitment of workers from outside the UK or among those already in the UK; and, second, a more strategic, but less common, decision to recruit migrants with specific characteristics. The implications for social policy are set in the context of political concerns about migration and concurrent political aspirations to improve social care through resolving recruitment difficulties.

This discussion offers a thematic introduction and contextual framework across the welfare domains of homelessness and employment. The Labour Government (1997−2010) introduced a range of policies, which drew connections between homelessness and employment strategies. Such approaches were indicative of efforts to responsibilise and empower marginalised groups by way of conditional responses, which intended to steer clients towards independent and ‘active’ citizenship. In this context, work-related activities were regarded as transformative and meaningful. In broad terms, this approach can be understood as part of a wider set of therapeutic interventions that aimed to support clients with multiple support needs, albeit through somewhat coercive and regulatory overtones (Harrison and Sanders, 2006). A review of social policies developed under the Labour Government is useful for a critical understanding of welfare approaches and practices during that period, and it also enables us to evaluate how far there is continuity or change in approaches in successive political administrations. Labour introduced a set of policy principles that represented distinctive responses to disadvantaged groups, and this review highlights some of the key rationales and techniques of governance from that era. The conclusion will discuss the potential legacy for welfare policy, with specific reference to the Coalition Government.

The pressing issue of homelessness in Australia is largely caused by a shortage of affordable accommodation. Unexpected results from a study into the experiences of homeless families, however, revealed that many people held the perception that asylum seekers, refugees and migrants are given greater priority by welfare agencies for housing assistance. Analysis of the interview data is used to illustrate how public and political discourses circulating at the time of the interviews may have contributed to these views. The article also discusses the extent to which xenophobia in the Australian community has links with feelings of economic insecurity.

The application of formal conditionality to address ‘dependence’ on social security has been an important trend since the 1990s. Reforms between 2010 and 2015 saw a renewed interest in this approach. This article will focus on conditionality in disability benefits in that period. It will present findings from a qualitative study of twenty-three disabled people living in the central-belt of Scotland, exploring the operation of surveillance as a form of ‘hidden conditionality’. It will find that this had a significant impact on participants’ daily lives, affecting who they interacted with, and what activities they felt they could take part in. The implications of this for disabled people's ability to realise equal citizenship will be examined.

The policy rhetoric of the UK Coalition government's ‘Troubled Families’ initiative, and that of New Labour's earlier Respect Agenda, share an emphasis on families’ responsibilities, or rather their irresponsibility, and their financial costs to society. Giving children a chance of a better life coincides, in this framing, with reducing costs for the taxpayer. The research reported here was based on a national study of Family Intervention Projects (FIPs), funded by the UK government between 2009 and 2012, beginning under New Labour, continuing over a period when the FIP programme was discontinued, and ending after the Troubled Families programme had begun. The research involved over 100 in-depth interviews with stakeholders, including service managers, family key workers, and caregivers and children in twenty families, to consider critical questions about the kinds of trouble that families experience in their lives, and how they are recognised in the policy and practice of intensive family intervention.

As means-tested benefits have come to occupy a more central place in the UK system of income transfers, so the goal of an individualised system seems to have receded. However, there is also a developing policy interest in the situation and status of the individual in the social welfare system. Individual assessment of labour market circumstances is central to the New Deal programmes, and the ‘partners’ of those receiving social security benefits have become a target group for policy in their own right. This article outlines the policy issues, describes the measures that have been introduced so far, compares these with the Australian moves towards ‘partial individualisation’, and discusses some key issues in the reform agenda.

Rod Rhodes (1997) Understanding Governance: Policy Networks, Governance, Reflexivity and Accountability, Open University Press 1997.

Gerry Stoker (1998) ‘Governance as theory: five propositions’, International Journal of Social Sciences 50, 1, 17–28.

Helen Sullivan and Chris Skelcher (2002) Working across Boundaries: Collaboration in Public Services, Palgrave.

Janet Newman, Marion Barnes, Helen Sullivan, and A. Knops (2004) ‘Public participation and collaborative governance’, Journal of Social Policy 33, 203–223.

From a term used largely within political science in the mid-1990s, ‘governance’ has become a key conceptual and analytical convention adopted by social policy, largely because of its usefulness in examining questions that are key to the discipline: citizenship; welfare rights and responsibilities; accountability; legitimacy and partnership working. Clarence and Painter (1998) have constructed a useful characterisation of public policy, identifying a shift in emphasis from hierarchies, to markets and now to collaboration. Networks, ‘joined up’ governance and partnership working are now central in both policy practice and analysis. These processes are not new, but New Labour have clearly expanded and accelerated them. For New Labour, collaborative working is now perceived as central in their response to key policy challenges: improving public services, tackling social exclusion and revitalising local democracy. These processes are now evident at all levels of policy making from supranational organisations such as the European Union down to neighbourhood-based initiatives. It appears that we are moving from the closed, unitary system of government of the Westminster model to a more open, decentralised system of governance. Our conceptions of citizenship have accordingly shifted, from one based on representation to one based on active participation, particularly within local communities. Governance is an issue which concerns all levels of government and citizen participation, from international-level World Bank concerns about commitment to efficiency and accountable government, to highly devolved localised urban regeneration partnerships.

Throughout the years, social policy scholars have advanced a multi-level perspective of non-take-up, viewing it as is a complex process shaped by a broad range of interacting barriers and actors. However, a comparatively small amount of that scholarship has addressed the key role of take-up agents: professionals or semi-professionals who actively help clients realise their welfare rights. Moreover, most of this scant literature has tended to focus on the agents’ impact rather than on their role and practices. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Israeli take-up agents from the public, business, and non-profit sectors, this study seeks to understand better the work of take-up agents in realising their clients’ welfare rights. Our findings show that in order to pass their clients through the gateways of welfare, agents use four keys: knowledge, networking, emotions, and power. The meaning of these keys and related practices is discussed.

Choice is central to developments in many areas of welfare. Making choices, for example about health, social care, employment and housing, can be very emotional. This article draws on theories from experimental psychology and behavioural economics to analyse empirical evidence from a longitudinal, qualitative study of support-related choices. It argues that if people are expected to make emotion-laden choices, and to minimise negative aspects associated with the process of making a choice, they need to be supported in doing so. It contributes to the limited evidence and debate to date about the process costs to individuals of choice.

This paper argues for a transformation of arrangements for accessing and allocating public resources for long-term care in the UK. Currently these arrangements are fragmented, inequitable and not always well targeted. While not necessarily advocating a social insurance approach, the experience of Germany nevertheless shows how simplicity, transparency and equity of access can be combined with strong cost control levers and political sustainability. An opportunity to transform ways of accessing and distributing public resources for long-term care arises with the piloting of ‘individual budgets’ in 13 English local authorities from 2006. The paper argues that the principles underpinning individual budgets should be extended, with the UK government taking a strong national lead.

This paper reviews the development and nature of one of the two components of the UK's equality regime – equality law. The origins of equality law lie in the postwar consensus on non-discrimination. The paper reviews the limitations of non-discrimination or negative equality duties. It documents the expansion of equality law at the turn of the twentieth/twenty-first century, when seven UK Acts and two European Directives introduced additional negative equality duties, provided for a new enforcement authority and introduced positive equality duties in respect of some social statuses. Many of these duties were introduced as part of devolution arrangements. UK equality law leads the field in European terms. The nature of positive equality duties and New Labour's approach to equality in general are also critiqued.