Domestic abuse policy increasingly uses language which indicates that abuse is patterned according to structural factors. However, practicing according to these structural accounts of abuse is problematic because of the policy and organisational contexts that practitioners work within and, we argue, because the implications of the structured nature of victims’ experiences is not fully understood by all practitioners.

We ask whether women's differential use and experiences of services with a remit to address abuse can be illuminated using two theoretical perspectives – ‘candidacy’ and intersectionality. We report the findings of a literature synthesis that investigates how these improve our understanding of women's help-seeking and service utilisation and of the responses that they receive. Both concepts were highly congruent with the literature and we conclude that, together, candidacy and intersectionality offer a means of enhancing knowledge of how the political becomes enacted in the personal. Embedding such knowledge within practice repertoires offers the potential to develop more nuanced structural understandings of women's experiences and constraints.

In considering the impact of austerity, much attention has been focused on the immediate effects of public spending cuts and on documenting the resulting increase in hardship and unmet needs. However, in calculating the consequences of austerity for the welfare state, it is its enduring legacy that is equally important. This article examines the proposition that the indirect effects of austerity on social, economic and political relations are as significant for the welfare of future generations as the ‘decade of austerity’ has been for contemporary welfare. The analysis draws on the approach adopted by Paul Wilding (1992) reflecting on the 1980s as the ‘decade of Thatcherism’. Wilding’s ten legacies are recategorised across four dimensions: normalising a non-commitment to welfare, societal scarring, refuelling the race to the bottom and diminishing the political capacity for change. The conclusions suggest that austerity will abide in the social and political relations of welfare long after austerity measures have ceased.

For a long time, the discussion about the impact of economic globalisation on the full employment/generous welfare state policies pursued by social democratic governments was characterised by doom and gloom. Glib neo-liberal arguments about the impossibility of maintaining social democratic policies, that were presumably hindering competitiveness through excessive wages and taxes in the new international environment were difficult to counter, because social democrats could not resort to an equally elaborate and internally consistent economic doctrine that could substitute for evidence, and the evidence was not yet in to counter these arguments on empirical grounds. Recently, careful and comprehensive comparative studies have provided evidence that, despite undeniable problems posed by economic internationalisation, social democratic welfare states and employment regimes have proven to be highly resilient (Scharpf and Schmidt, 2000; Huber and Stephens, 2001). Indeed, some kinds of traditional social democratic policy, such as an emphasis on labour mobilisation through active labour market policy and social services that make it possible to combine labour force participation with raising children, and an emphasis on human capital formation have facilitated adaptation to the new economic conditions. Moreover, newly available data on skill distribution (OECD/HRDC, 2000) and income distribution (LIS) suggest that the egalitarian thrust characteristic of social democratic policy has made an important contribution to raising literacy skills at the bottom, which in turn facilitates the integration of the entire labour force into productive activities that are competitive in high-quality markets.

This article examines the policy process in Wales prior to the introduction of a National Assembly for Wales and uses this as a framework for assessing the potential impact of devolution. Health and social services form the largest part of the budget of the National Assembly for Wales and the article focuses on health policy as a key area of interest for Assembly Members. The period 1992 to 1997 demonstrates an emphasis on managing both demand and finances thereby promoting the continued dominance, in terms of both resource allocation and prioritisation, of the acute hospital sector. The article then explores how far this has changed and what potential there is for changing this assumptive reality in a New Labour and devolved NHS.

In the space of a mere five years, basic income has become something of a global policy phenomenon. The proposal to grant all permanent residents of a political territory a regular cash transfer on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement (Van Parijs and Vanderborght, 2017) is actively discussed at the highest levels of policy-making across the world, including by international institutions such as OECD, IMF or the World Bank. At the same time, several country surveys indicate the basic income idea is gaining considerable traction amongst the general public, with support for basic income in the latest wave of the European Social Survey (ESS) averaging slightly above 50 per cent (Lee, 2018). This suggests basic income has now firmly moved away from a mere ‘philosophical pipe dream’ to being considered as a serious alternative to conditional income assistance (Van Parijs, 2013; Haagh, 2017).

This paper argues that the study of social policy can be enriched by a greater focus on the dynamics of the policy process itself. Such a focus needs to transcend the usual descriptive accounts of institutions and implementation methods. The paper draws on a range of theoretical approaches that illuminate the shaping and delivery of policy, from classic theories of power and the state to analyses of the micro-dynamics of the policy–action relationship. The paper explores the contribution of recent developments in governance theory, and assesses contemporary debates about the ‘modernisation’ of the policy process and the focus on evaluating ‘what works’ in social policy.

To date, practical and scholarly work on the interaction between formal and informal social protection has focused on crowding in and crowding out of informal social protection by formal social protection. However, little is known about the relationship between both forms of social protection in conditions where one form of social protection is more effective than the other, or both forms of social protection are effective and ineffective. This article empirically examines how both forms of social protection interact and conceptualises this relation under these conditions by drawing on ninety semi-structured interviews with households across fourteen cities in Pakistan. The study theorises the interaction of formal and informal social protection in five different ways. Based on this, the article argues for further research to explore the relationship between formal and informal social protection in different contexts for building scholarship and policy interventions to improve the lives of the vulnerable.

Two recent studies of elder abuse in the UK are located in current policy contexts of adult safeguarding. After describing the studies, the discussion draws out their central messages and identifies the challenges that the studies present to recent policy debates and innovations. These relate to the need to properly integrate both wider older people's issues and issues of racism and ethnicity within developments in adult safeguarding policy as well as social care services as the personalisation agenda advances.

Since the late twentieth century, health and welfare policy in Australia and the UK has focused on enhancing the freedom, life choices and participation of service users. Public policy, based on the construct of social inclusion, requires greater individualisation of services, active engagement with service users, and innovative partnerships between different providers. At the same time, however, the management of risk through a range of compliance procedures can discourage the exercise of discretion by workers, limit the participation of their clients and reduce incentives for innovative cooperation between services. Drawing on in-depth interviews with community care professionals and their managers engaged in high risk social care in Australia, this article gives particular attention to the relevance of risk to social inclusion and individualised service provision.

Social policy represents a critical dimension of the governmental response to COVID-19. This article analyses the Australian response, which was radical in that it signalled an unprecedented policy turnaround towards welfare generosity and the almost total relaxation of conditionality. It was also surprising because it was introduced by a conservative, anti-welfarist government. The principal argument is that, though the generosity was temporary, it should be understood simultaneously by reference to institutional change and institutional tradition. The ‘change’ element was shaped by the urgency and scale of the crisis, which indicated an institutional ‘critical juncture’. This provided a ‘window of opportunity’ for reform, which would otherwise be closed. ‘Tradition’ was reflected in the nation’s federalist conventions, which partially steered the response. The central implication for other countries is that, amid the uncertainty of a crisis, governments need to consider change within the bounds of their traditional institutions when introducing welfare reform.

Increasingly, parents in separated families equally share care of their children post-separation. In this article we extend a well-known family policy model to generate hypotheses about the level of child support to be paid by separated parents when children live primarily with their mother (‘sole custody’) in contrast to when children spend equal time with both parents (‘shared care’). We test these hypotheses with data collected from thirteen countries. In sole custody cases, countries with an earner-carer policy model do have lower child support expectations than countries with a traditional family policy model or a market-oriented model, as predicted. Countries with a traditional family policy model do have the highest orders in the shared case, as predicted. However, there is as much variation within models as there is between, suggesting new analytic frameworks for considering child support in family policy need to be developed.

There is growing evidence that welfare recipients facing significant personal barriers are not being well served by either regular employment programmes or support services operating in other areas, such as mental health or drug and alcohol sectors. This paper argues that there is a lack of recognition of the desire and capacity of such individuals to engage in employment and the potential for employment to assist in their recovery, given appropriate support. Existing policy responses and gaps are discussed and effective programmes and models identified.

This article places the British material on religion and social policy in a comparative perspective. In order to do so, it introduces a recently completed project on welfare and religion in eight European societies, entitled ‘Welfare and Religion in a European Perspective’. Theoretically it draws on the work of two key thinkers: Gøsta Esping-Andersen and David Martin. The third section elaborates the argument: all West European societies are faced with the same dilemmas regarding the provision of welfare and all of them are considering alternatives to the state for the effective delivery of services. These alternatives include the churches.

Recognised as a global concern by the UN, and increasingly acknowledged as a gendered crime and welfare issue in such diverse settings as the UK and China, domestic violence provides an important window on the development of policy and action in a global context. Focusing specifically on England and China, and mainly on the latter, the article highlights the need for gender to be an integral aspect of global social policy analysis, examines the impact of international organisations (governmental and non-governmental) on domestic violence policy development, and demonstrates the importance of country context in constructing and implementing global policy frameworks.

Policymakers in the UK have promised to deliver personalised employability services for vulnerable jobseekers. However, unemployed people often describe their engagement with state-funded services as defined by: the offer of low cost, standardised job search services; and pressure to accept any job, irrespective of quality or appropriateness. This article argues that more progressive, co-produced alternatives are possible. We draw on an evaluation of local, third sector-led services targeting lone parents (LPs) in five local government areas in Scotland. Our research involved more than 100 in-depth interviews with both service providers and LPs. We find that partnership-oriented co-governance mechanisms facilitated collaborative approaches to the management of services and processes of co-production. LPs expressed positive views of the personalised services that were co-produced. We conclude that a commitment to collaboration and co-production may be more effective in promoting personalised services that are responsive to the needs of vulnerable groups.

In December 2017, the House of Commons Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee put out a call for submissions to an Inquiry that would consider the evidence-base for early intervention policies, with a particular focus on ‘Adverse Childhood Experiences’ or ACEs. This article analyses those submissions and the transcripts of the Inquiry’s oral sessions in the belief that they constitute a useful window through which to explore the types of claims being made in ACEs discourse. Our aim is to assess whether the ACEs phenomenon represents a continuity with what has been termed the ‘first three years movement’ (Thornton, 2011a, 2011b) – social policy and philanthropic activism which focuses on the earliest years of life in the name of preventing social problems ‘down the line’. In particular, we consider constructions of parents as determinate of these social problems through their influence on their children and the ways in which these are gendered in new ways.

The involvement of service users in the research process is becomingly increasingly required by many funders of research and is being seen as an indicator of quality in its own right. This paper provides original data from a study of social policy researchers’ views of service user involvement in research. It shows a diversity of stances which have been categorised here as belonging to Advocates, Agnostics and Adversaries of user involvement. The views of Agnostics and Adversaries pose serious challenges that need to be addressed if service user involvement is to be more widely accepted and valued by some researchers and academics in social policy.

Globalisation, and its possible impacts, has been widely discussed and debated in Taiwan. The economic technocracies argue for globalisation, as a triumph of the free market and minimum state intervention, through measures of tax cuts, privatisation, deregulation, and so forth, as required to secure Taiwan's economic development in the future. However, rising unemployment accompanied by the new poverty requires more state provisions of social welfare. A strange policy orientation mixing tax cuts with welfare increases is proposed that precisely demonstrates the dilemma of the state between global competition and social reform. This is now a great challenge for Taiwan to balance economic and social requirements.

This article considers changing perceptions of adult ageing and their interpretation in social policy. Once wider international trends are outlined, Australian policy is used as a case example. It is argued that a mismatch between policy initiatives and personal change is a new social risk associated with demographic and socio-cultural development, having implications for the way in which social ageism and age discrimination should be considered. The article concludes with a consideration of new directions that a critical, life course sensitised approach to social policy might take.

As many commentators have pointed out, the pressures facing modern welfare states are formidable. One response by government is to place greater emphasis on a policy-making paradigm that rests on an individual rational actor account of agency. This finds its intellectual home in the leading tradition of neo-classical economics, its ideological home in a politics of active citizenry and equality of opportunity and its institutional home in the mechanisms by which the Treasury currently directs social policy.

The resulting policies have strengths in delivering productivity improvements and responsiveness to consumer demand, but weaknesses in accommodating the value positions of an increasingly diverse society, in sustaining the social cohesion necessary to the continuance of state welfare and in confronting the structural basis of some social interests. These issues have traditionally been recognised in the sociology of values, the psychology of trust and the political science of power.

One strength of academic social policy is that it is a field of study in which a number of disciplines are deployed. The ascendancy of one paradigm may obscure the contribution of others. It is hard for social policy academics to gain recognition when they speak a different language from that of policy making at the highest level.