The Troubled Families Programme (TFP) was launched by the UK Coalition Government in December 2011. Following the riots that took place in towns and cities across England during that summer, the then Prime Minister David Cameron promised to put ‘rocket boosters’ under plans to ‘turn around’ the lives of the country's ‘most troubled families’ by the end of the Coalition's term of office in May 2015. In his ‘fightback’ speech, delivered just a week after the riots had ended, Cameron (2011a) stated that the riots were not about poverty or race or government cuts. Instead, he argued that that the riots were ‘about behaviour: people showing indifference to right and wrong; people with a twisted moral code; people with a complete absence of self-restraint’.

A key question concerning the marketisation of employment services is the interaction between performance management systems and frontline client-selection practices. While the internal sorting of clients for employability by agencies has received much attention, less is known about how performance management shapes official categorisation practices at the point of programme referral. Drawing on case studies of four Australian agencies, this study examines the ways in which frontline staff contest how jobseekers are officially classified by the benefit administration agency. With this assessment pivotal in determining payment levels and activity requirements, we find that reassessing jobseekers so they are moved to a more disadvantaged category, suspended, or removed from the system entirely have become major elements of casework. These category manoeuvres help to protect providers from adverse performance rankings. Yet, an additional consequence is that jobseekers are rendered fully or partially inactive, within the context of a system designed to activate.

This paper examines the experiences of immigrants in Toronto as they pass through, and leave, Ontario Works (OW), a ‘Work First’ approach to social assistance that prioritizes rapid labour force attachment. We examine the Ontario Works activities of immigrants, compared to native born Canadians, and their respective post-OW job characteristics. We find that immigrants experience a significant relative wage disadvantage after participation, and substantially less wage growth when moving to the second post-welfare job. We conclude that Ontario Works, like most ‘work first’ employment programs, is ill-suited to addressing earnings disadvantage among immigrants. We suggest that programs ‘beyond work first’, though not targeted specifically towards immigrants, might nevertheless offer more assistance. The recurring wage disadvantage, however, would remain unaddressed and might require more direct intervention.

Singapore's Central Provident Fund (CPF) has served well in the old economy as a macroeconomic stabilisation policy. It finessed the developmental state and created socio-political stability with home ownership extended to health, education and asset enhancement schemes. However, structural changes with globalisation, information communication technology (ICT) and the new knowledge-based economy (KBE), plus a series of crises and downturns since the Asian crisis have undermined full employment as the lynchpin of the triangulation and CPF model. Announcements made in August 2003 are germane to this paper's discussion of the reinvention of the CPF model. Profound and creative reinvention to balance between neo-liberal market-based solutions without losing the socio-political control enjoyed by the ruling regime, however, remains a political choice as in delinking the CPF–fiscal process, CPF serves members or state.

The cluster of reforms to English social care associated with personalisation mark a break with recent thinking about what spaces are considered relevant and appropriate for people with an assessed social care need. The promise of personalisation from a spatial perspective appears to be twofold: expanding the physical spaces that are available to people, while at the same time contracting interpersonal spaces between people and those who support them to emphasise attentiveness and particularism. However, there is a danger that personalisation is much more variable in its impacts. The physical spaces for some are expanding while for others they contract, and these opportunities are likely to be unequally distributed in ways that overlay other forms of inequality. The attentiveness and particularism promised by personalisation is again patchily distributed, with wide variation in the quality of support planning and person-centred care. For the formal care workforce, the two concepts of space (physical environment and interpersonal closeness) intersect as physical spaces shape the capacity to deliver attentive, responsive care. The article brings these concepts together through a discussion of ‘caring labour’ at the intersection of the physical and emotional aspects of space.

In Finland, parenting-related anxiety increased in the 1990s during a deep economic recession and subsequent widespread cutbacks to family services. Despite these cutbacks, resources allocated to services underlining the role of parents – namely, parenting support – increased, manifesting in the establishment of family support projects in the 2000s. Employing positioning theory and pragmatic modalities, I explore how key attributes of good parenting – responsibility and competence – are discussed within family support projects (n = 310). Given discussions regarding the relationship between parenting-related anxiety and the increasing number of parenting-related experts, this article explores parents’ positions within such discussions and overall parenting support in Finland. The analysis of projects clarifies the role of the parenting-related experts, but also provides a nuanced view of the position of parents. In some projects, for instance, parents are positioned as experts whose parenting responsibilities and competence are strengthened within peer-parent relationships and shared within the surrounding community.

The Care Act 2014 provides for ‘parity of esteem’ between people with social care needs and carers. This is achieved by extending the principles of prevention and wellbeing to carers; reinforcing carers’ right to an assessment; and setting national eligibility criteria for access to carer support services. This article reports on research that examined the impact of these changes on older co-resident carers of older people in four English local authorities. Findings are described in relation to four key themes: organisational arrangements and rationale; the aims of carer support and preventative services; design and delivery of carer assessment; and barriers to assessment and support. The findings of the research suggest that, despite the new statutory requirements, underlying contradictions and tensions in local authorities’ relationship with carers, and efforts to support them, remain unresolved.

A decade of austerity has amplified concern about who gets what from public services. The article considers the socio-economic and gendered impacts of cuts to local environmental services which have increased the need for citizens to report service needs and effectively ‘co-produce’ services. Via a case study of a UK council’s decade of administrative data on citizen requests and service responses, the article provides one of the first detailed analyses of the unfolding impact of austerity cuts over time on public service provision. It demonstrates the impact of austerity across the social gradient, but disproportionately on the least affluent, especially women. The article argues for the importance of detailed empirical examination of administrative data for making visible, and potentially tackling, long standing inequalities in public service provision.

This article looks at the promise of the ‘New Middle Class’ (NMC) inherent in the neoliberal ideological ideal of individualising societal responsibility for well-being and success. The article points to how this promise enables a discourse and practice of welfare reform and a disciplining of life styles particularly targeting the very poor in society. Women and some ethnic minorities are particularly prone to poverty and then therefore also discipline. The article then provides a case study of the Troubled Families Programme (TFP) and shows how the programme and the way it is constructed and managed partly undermines the provision of the material needs to alleviate people from poverty and re-produces discourses of poor lifestyle and parenting choices as sources of poverty, thereby undermining the ‘middle-class’ promise.

This article aims to bring labour market activation policy into the orbit of eco-social policy, which we can understand as sustainable welfare without growth. Activation is extensively addressed from economic and social policy perspectives; however, environmental sustainability concerns are absent. Typically, each domain, activation and sustainability, is seen as mutually exclusive. Growing debate about sustainable welfare without growth features much discussion about the effects of productivism and about re-orienting and re-valuing work and how we use our time; however, such discussion tends to leave activation and unemployment untouched. One could ask whether there is any role for activation in eco-social policy: why focus on employment and employability, or even push people into work, if postgrowth requires a downsizing of paid employment and working time in everyone’s lives? The purpose of this article is to explore this question and to consider how activation could be re-valued and re-thought as a policy tool for eco-social policy.

In the last ten years, EU migrants have come to play an important role in the UK labour force. They have become increasingly present in low-skilled occupations, where the largest proportional increase has been migration from Eastern and Central European countries. Drawing on research carried out between November 2015 and July 2016 on the employment of EU migrants in the sectors of hospitality, food and drink and construction, we find that EU migrants have met employers’ needs for a flexible labour force but that the use of mobile workers in these sectors is long-standing. The prospect of a reduced supply of EU migrants following the UK's vote to leave the EU and the government's target of reducing net migration poses a challenge for employers. We explore the tension between political pressure and economic need through posing a range of options for new immigration policy post-Brexit.

The Care Act 2014 gave local authorities in England broad duties around wellbeing, and responsibility to ensure the availability of good quality, personalised social care and support services for people who need them. These responsibilities are for all people needing support, whether that is publicly or privately funded. In exercising their duties, councils have a responsibility for ‘market-shaping’: that is, understanding the supply and demand for care, and the types of services and support needed now and in the future, and steering the market accordingly. Changes to the implementation of the Care Act removed some of the levers that might have brought self-funders into the mainstream of local authority responsibilities. This article draws on sixty-four qualitative interviews undertaken as part of a larger study on market-shaping and personalisation of care, and reflects on the experience of self-funders and the approach to them adopted by local authorities and provider organisations. The findings indicate that self-funders are still largely bystanders to local authority market shaping strategies, despite being both impacted by those strategies and significantly influencing the markets in which they operate.

Using Work Training in Norway as a case, this article provides insight into motivation and structural factors that impact employer engagement with active labour market policies (ALMP) targeting young people. Drawing on mixed-methods data, we find a substantial proportion of Norwegian employers engage in Work Training. Both social responsibility and the economic interests of the company influence employers’ motivation for committing to Work Training. The findings reveal that the structural factors of business size and sector are crucial determinants of employer behaviour when it comes to hiring Work Training candidates. Although improved outreach activities by local job centres may be important, the article argues that efforts towards opening up sectors closed by sector-specific regulations on hiring, and increased awareness of structural constraints, are similarly important.

While recent research shows a gradual increase of young Māori in Higher Education it remains the case that inequality amongst the Indigenous population remains entrenched and institutionalised. This article explains how national governments in Aotearoa New Zealand have failed to address the colonial disparities and inequalities in the Higher Education system. In this process we will show, through the lens of historical privilege and institutional racism, how these processes continue to shape and frame both opportunities and experiences for Māori youth. The article will also highlight what strategies are needed if a more inclusive Higher Education system is to be developed that addresses the disparities that young Māori encounter.

This article analyses two cases of populist mobilisation – namely, one against a primary school entry-age reform and another against WHO sexuality education and the concept of gender – that took place in Poland between 2008 and 2019. Both campaigns had a populist character and were oriented towards restoring social justice taken away from ‘the people’ by a morally corrupted ‘elite’. There are differences between the cases that can be analytically delineated by assessing whether a religious mobilisation has an overt or a covert character. While the series of protests against the school-age reform represents a case of mobilisation with covert religious symbolism, the campaigns against sexuality education and the use of the concept of gender are characterised by overt religious populism. To characterise the dynamics of the two campaigns, the study uses the concept of a moral panic, emphasising the importance of moral entrepreneurs waging ideological war against the government and/or liberal experts conceived of as ‘folk devils’.

Over the last decade there has been a clear focus on tackling disadvantage and transforming lives. A plethora of programmes such as Family Intervention Projects, Think Families Pathfinders and Intensive Intervention Projects have focussed on families meeting centrally determined quantifiable outcomes and have used this as a factor to judge the success or otherwise of intervention programmes. However, little attention, or indeed value, has been given to the learning that young people experience throughout the intervention period. The article argues that learning is a crucial component of intervention projects. Qualitative evidence from a longitudinal study is used to explore young people's engagement with an Intensive Intervention Programme. Using individual experiences, evidence suggests that continuous learning during engagement with Intensive Intervention Projects can lead to soft outcomes which enable future positive change in the lives of individuals.

This paper explicates the welfare reforms executed in Korea after the abrupt financial meltdown in November 1997, and asks whether the same line of reforms will continue further into the twenty-first century Korea. The DJ government's post-crisis policy choice was to persue an expansion and consolidation of the social welfare system based upon the principle of solidarity. Consequently, the size of social welfare expenditure grew fast between 1996 and 1999. Korean experience of post-crisis years demonstrates the case in which the global integration of economy brought about the fast expansion of social welfare programs. The ultimate question is will this growth continue in the sea of neo-liberal challenges, with the new government's ‘Participatory Welfare’ whose complete design is not made public yet.

The policy drive to support carers is a longstanding national and international priority. Research about the design and delivery of support for carers is critical to the underpinning evidence base. Through a timely exploration of a third sector perspective, the UK-based study discussed in this article provides insights into approaches to, and the commissioning of, support for older carers and carers of people with dementia. The study highlights the importance of: embedding carers’ perspectives in service developments; the provision of both generic and targeted support which adopts a nuanced and tailored approach; titrating the delivery of information and advice at a pace to match carers’ needs; capturing quantitative and qualitative dimensions in service evaluation; and increased quantity and longevity of funding. Such insights not only complement existing research but are also generalisable to other countries at a similar stage in the development of carer support.

It is unclear how much gendered social exclusion and disconnection reflects a problem or a preference. Women may prefer market-disengagement despite the risk of exclusion from ‘normal’ social activities through financial incapacity, and men may prefer market-engagement despite the risk of disconnection from informal social networks. This article examines these issues amongst Australian men and women. It finds women, particularly single and low-income mothers, are more socially excluded, and men, particularly single middle-aged men, are the most socially disconnected, after preferences. Future policy should be cognisant of contact preferences, intra-household support dynamics, long work hours and prevailing gender norms.

This article will situate public debates about – and experiments in features of – basic income within European countries in the context of welfare state crisis and change. Treating access to basic income security as a policy problem, I argue basic income policy debate highlights the need for multi-level and multifactorial analysis of public governance capacity as a key factor in driving the relationship of basic income with welfare state transformation. Drawing on the cases within this themed section, I attempt to tease out what comparatively are long-run conditions for basic income within state and society, and what are the political and institutional trade-offs at the current juncture. Exploring contributing determinants of governance corrosion and adaptation of public economic security structures under globalisation contributes to deepen our understanding of contemporary patterns of institutional change.