The integration of welfare services in activation policies has been one of the common answers to welfare challenges in EU member states over the last two decades. The process has been interwoven with the rescaling both downwards and upwards of welfare regulative authorities. The article discusses the role of integrated services in activation policies in relation to the centralisation and decentralisation of welfare policies in a comparative perspective of different EU welfare regimes and highlights the role of local institutional milieus in shaping path-dependent modes of governance in integrated services.

Although research into parent abuse is scant in the context of the UK, there is now a burgeoning of interest into how this form of family violence fits into the historically well-defined arena of domestic violence research. This article investigates one aspect of the phenomena of parent abuse; that is, how teenage boys, who are often perceived as perpetrators of such violence due to problematic ‘cycle of violence’ or ‘intergenerational transmission of violence’ theories, are constructed in relation to it. These now widely discredited theories, which correlate being a man with being violent, are problematic, but may re-emerge as a possible explanation for parent abuse. This article questions these theories in the context of both domestic violence and parent abuse by demonstrating how they are based upon a culturally constructed notion of masculinity.

Across numerous countries with advanced welfare states, governments have relied on a hybrid of publicly funded and delivered welfare services and voluntary charity to meet the needs of people in poverty. Driven by austerity and economic downturns, many scholars agree that governments are increasingly relying on charity as a response to poverty. Taking Australia as a case study, this article demonstrates how the decayed welfare state is not just about outsourcing welfare provision to charities, but also a part of a broader project to cultivate a society in which social problems are responded to through spontaneous, community-led initiatives, powered by the ethical commitment of everyday citizens. We show how this project produces poverty through welfare state retrenchment, whilst simultaneously cultivating charity through material and symbolic support from the state. This results in the construction of charity as an end in itself, with little consideration given to its effectiveness in alleviating poverty.

This paper examines how ‘welfare state’ and ‘welfare’ have been displaced by a ‘social development’ agenda within New Zealand. The discussion outlines a growing attention to language and the place of vocabulary and discourse as a valid research agenda. The paper then traces the end of welfare and the rise of ‘social development’, assessing the impact on citizenship debates. It suggests reasons why ‘social development’ must be handled carefully given its assumptions around temporality, its elevation of the market, the diminishing of the social, the stunted vision of development and its peculiar view of progress.

This article investigates the idea of ‘the social’ in Europe after the UK's EU Referendum vote, with reference to the ‘European social model’. It is argued that the key drivers of the vote outcome did not feature in the referendum campaign but are features of longer running and deeper fractures in both British and wider European society. Especially, the lack of response to societal problems, the downplaying of individual participation, and a crisis in democracy created by an increasingly neoliberal direction within an EU concerned with austerity and social control, contrary to the values of the ‘European social model’ (Walker, 2005). In the absence of action for better ‘social quality’, this overall neoliberal direction has also weakened the progressive and integrative potential of social policy. The result is the regressive nationalist populist backlash against neoliberal technocracy. Instead, we argue that answers to contemporary European challenges must focus on improving social quality and democracy.

Children's lives have been transformed over the past century. Family incomes have increased, children lead lives that are more solitary, attitudes to childhood have changed, new products have been developed and commercial pressures on children have increased. The importance of these commercial pressures is analysed. Do children understand advertising? How is child poverty affected? How does increased materialism affect psychological well-being? The issues raised for public policy are discussed in terms of children's freedom.

The need to extend working life is being increasingly emphasised in policy debates in the developed economies. Recent years have seen the emergence of new policies on work on retirement aimed at closing off ‘early exit’ pathways and promoting the employment of older workers. This article summarises recent developments in selected countries, concluding that the effectiveness of policy making to date is difficult to gauge, that as yet, it lacks the necessary sophistication and that, as a consequence, it may not provide appropriate pathways for older workers or employers.

This article assesses how social innovations in the field of local domiciliary long-term care are shaped and implemented. It proposes a mapping of innovations in terms of two structuring discourses that inform welfare state reforms: a libertarian and a neo-liberal discourse. It then provides an analysis of the concrete trajectories of three local innovations for elderly people in Hamburg (Germany), Edinburgh (Scotland) and Geneva (Switzerland). Theoretically, social innovation is considered as a discursive process of public problem redefinition and institutionalisation. New coalitions of new actors are formed along this double process, and these transform the original discourse of innovation. The comparative analysis of the three processes of institutionalisation of local innovation shows that, in the context of local policy making, social innovations inspired by a libertarian critique of the welfare state undergo differentiated processes of normalisation.

This article assesses the methodological contribution of Esping-Andersen's Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism to welfare regime analysis. It revisits the methods deployed in the Three Worlds and assesses their influence on the practice of welfare regime researchers. It finds that welfare regime researchers have embraced the methods presented in the Three Worlds in a piecemeal fashion. Data reduction techniques, such as cluster and latent variable techniques, compete with index construction as the tools of choice for identifying clusters. Although regression analysis has been used extensively in linking welfare programme design and outcomes with welfare regimes, few researchers have followed Esping-Andersen in employing regression analysis in the context of linking policy and politics. Qualitative comparative analysis methods are increasingly employed by welfare regime researchers as an alternative. Finally, the article considers the methodological implications associated with extending welfare regime analysis globally.

This article examines developments in parenting and family support services in France. Drawing on qualitative empirical studies, the article considers two types of initiatives ‒ the Programmes for Educational Success (PRE) and parenting interventions delivered alongside child protection services. Both of these services are examples of new types of parenting and family support interventions in the French context targeted at ‘children at risk’, seeking to address and prevent problems of educational underachievement, youth offending, poor health in children and young people and child neglect and maltreatment. The article critically reviews tensions between principles of more responsive, partnership-based family support and more prescriptive parenting education and family interventions. Drawing on empirical findings, the article examines frontline practice and professional‒family relationships, highlighting the significance of ‘parental involvement’ practice and conflicting professional and parental perspectives about children's needs, family support and professional–client relationships.

Despite promotion of evidence-based policy responses, there remains a knowledge gap between policy-makers and academia particularly in transport policy making, which is steeped in positivist traditions. A number of social policy academics have conceptualised research utilisation in relation to particular elements of social policy, but less attention has been paid to the integration of deliberative and interpretative research into transport policy. This article explores this through a study of the journey to school that used mobile and visual methods in an in-depth exploration of this element of everyday life.

Social enterprise has become an important component of governmental social and economic policy in both the UK and South Korea over the last decade. Both countries have experienced a growth in social businesses, with the UK recently adopting targets for the number of social enterprises established. Whilst the emphasis in the UK has been on their role in developing mixed economies of care and building entrepreneurial skills in deprived communities, the South Korean model has been more closely allied to US ‘welfare to work’ strategies. The paper explores these differences and critically examines the capacity of social enterprises to meet wider social and economic objectives.

This article traces the influence of Front National (FN) on the transformation of mainstream French narratives of laïcité since 1989, with particular attention to education policy. It argues that the FN’s right-wing populist rhetoric, particularly the systematic securitisation of Islam as a threat to the ‘people’, facilitated the more widespread reframing of laïcité as a Republican defence mechanism, operating primarily through the school system. Laïcité was increasingly deployed in mainstream discourses and legislative measures to address two interrelated security concerns: the immediate safety of the school by the promotion of neutrality, and the overall wellbeing of the Republic via the prevention of radicalisation. Analysing this process in two specific periods (1989–2004 and 2005–2019), the article demonstrates that the FN’s populist agenda came to be in a symbiotic relationship with the centre-right and centre-left parties. While established parties gradually incorporated the FN’s securitisation narrative in their policymaking, the FN went through a process of ‘normalisation’ by claiming ownership of laïcité as a way to frame its anti-Islam stance in a more acceptable Republican discourse.

An ageing population in Europe is currently putting pressure on long-term care services, creating demand for foreign workers. Using a life-course perspective, this article aims to contribute to the understanding of how life trajectories shape decisions about migration and employment in social care. Based on fifty-one life story interviews with migrant care workers in Norway and UK, two typologies are found: a Norwegian migrant life trajectory of downwards social mobility combined with settlement and a British trajectory combining stronger downwards social mobility with further migration. The article contributes to the discussion of contextualised migratory lives involving care work.

The idea of ‘co-production’ has been promoted by both New Labour and Coalition governments as a means to help ‘transform’ adult social care. With its emphasis on active citizenship, community support networks, voluntary effort and power sharing, the idea might have been expected to have been received more enthusiastically by those expected to put it into practice and benefit from it. However, unlike other ‘big ideas’ intended to ‘transform’ adult social care, such as ‘personal budgets’, co-production has gained comparatively little traction with either local authorities or service users. Despite the publication of much promotional literature in recent years, co-production has not yet become a significant part of either official or lay discourse on adult social care. It is concluded that apart from definitional problems and conceptual ambiguity, the inability of successive governments to effectively deploy common techniques of meta-governance might also be contributory factors to its sluggish take up.

This article focuses on the escalating shift in power from the centre to ‘community’ with specific regard to the local governance of street sex work. With reference to reforms in local governance and sex work policy, we question what localism may mean for street sex workers as both vulnerable members of the community and also anti-social subjects. Our critical examination suggests that street sex workers are susceptible to increasing marginalisation and social exclusion. To counter this, it is argued that there needs to be greater attention and investment towards improving community cohesion and democracy for ‘all’ within the localist agenda.

This study examines the conceptualisation of family in key social legislative documents guiding social workers in two European countries, whose welfare systems have previously been labelled as re-familialised (Lithuania) or de-familialised (Sweden). The focus is on the concept of family as delineated on three legislative levels: the constitutional level, the general family policy level, and the child welfare policy level. ‘Family’ is explicit in Lithuanian law, and the regulation of family formation and responsibility is imperative, while this is much less so in Swedish law. The analysis reveals how general welfare systems (regime-types) are linked to legislative frameworks, which, in turn, provide fundamentally different conditions for social work in different contexts.

Drawing on a case study generated as part of a larger evaluation, this article explores engagement between one family and an ‘edge of care’ intensive family support service, within a cold climate of public spending cuts and rising numbers of children in care. The focus on engagement in the case study illustrates theories about relationship building at the ‘edge of care’: the importance of an empathic relationship; harnessing parents’ agency for change while raising child welfare concerns; allowing parents space to maintain a positive self-conception of parenthood while supporting improvements; and engagement with family practices. The case study highlights that, despite the potential disciplinary aspects of intensive family support, the parents valued the ‘edge of care’ service because it provided them with the help they felt they needed, contrasting with their prior experience of statutory child welfare agency practice.

The UK Government's workplace pension reforms introduce major changes to the way in which employees save for retirement. Eligible employees will be automatically enrolled into a workplace-based pension scheme and, for the first time in the UK, employers will be legally required to contribute to employees’ pensions. This article critically examines the evidence from New Zealand and Australia, two countries that have undergone pension reforms similar in some ways to the UK reforms. We assess what we can learn from their experiences in two areas: firstly, how pension schemes are structured and, secondly, the outcomes for individuals. The evidence highlights the potential of automatic enrolment to overcome people's disinterest in pension saving. At the same time, relatively few UK employees are likely to choose where their pension savings are invested. As a result, default funds will play an important role in determining the pension outcomes for individuals.

The arrival of large numbers of asylum seekers in the UK, many of whom subsequently become refugees, has been an important contributor to the emergence of new migration. Integration policy and initiatives have placed a great deal of focus on securing housing for refugees and enhancing their employability. While academics stress that integration should be a two-way process, and highlight the need for institutions to adapt to meet migrant need, the vast majority of policy attention has focused on supporting refugees to adapt to life in the UK. Few initiatives and even less research attention has been paid to encouraging or exploring institutional adaptation. This article looks at the experiences of UK housing providers involved in the HACT Reach In initiative. The project was unusual in that it sought to encourage housing providers to adapt their approaches to service provision by embedding refugees into their everyday work. Using data collected via qualitative longitudinal methods, the article examines the ways in which institutions changed their cultures and approaches to service delivery. It finds that initiatives that enable hosts and migrants to access new social fields create the opportunity for embedded integration that moves beyond the individual to impact upon institutions, and argues that shifting our attention to institutions has much to offer in conceptual, empirical and policy terms.