Dominant social norms relating to families shape the lives of all people. This can have negative effects upon non-traditional families. This is especially the case in terms of adoption, where a focus solely on the adoptive family can often result in the ‘disappearance’ of the birth family. This paper explores the location of birth families in relation to adoptive families by examining a sample of children's storybooks aimed at adoptive children living with lesbian or gay parents as but one example of how policy makers may come to identify dominant cultural norms that circulate about birth families in the context of intercountry adoption. A number of key tropes are identified across these books, namely the ghostly presence of birth families, and the representation of birth parents as deviant (thus warranting the removal of their children).

Most countries in Latin America have implemented human development conditional income transfer programmes to address intergenerational persistence of poverty. Typically, these programmes provide income transfers to households in poverty, conditional on children attending school and on household members attending health clinics. Evaluations have established that programmes reach their explicit short- and medium-term objectives, especially as regards nutrition, children's schooling and improved health care utilisation. It is too early to say whether they will be successful in reducing the intergenerational persistence of poverty. Crucially, this will depend on whether they contribute to the economic and political inclusion of groups in poverty. This article reviews the available literature and finds that participation in human development conditional income transfer programmes leads to improvements in productive capacity, but that favourable labour market conditions will be needed to guarantee economic inclusion. Improved political participation associated with programme participation raises the prospects for greater political inclusion.

This article provides an analysis of the Scottish Government's approach to the use of private finance in public services. It examines the budgetary drivers behind the policy in Scotland and assesses its cost-efficiency. In doing so, it considers first the standard private finance initiative (PFI) model, and then turns to the ‘non-profit distributing’ (NPD) model – a variant of PFI developed in Scotland and one that is, at the time of writing, unique to the country. It concludes that, while NPD provides the Government with an important political benefit, in being seen to safeguard the ‘public interest’ while working within UK-wide budgetary constraints, the decision to continue with private finance carries a high economic cost.

In this paper we describe regional differences in partnering and parenting within Britain, using indices of the ‘Motherhood Employment Effect’ to indicate different geographical levels of adherence to the ‘traditional’ male breadwinner/female homemaker family, and of ‘Family Conventionality’ to indicate geographical differences in ‘good-enough parenting’. The geography of family formations thus described does not follow the better known ‘north–south’ or ‘urban–rural’ geographies of economic performance and prosperity, and we speculate as to how this relatively unfamiliar family geography may be related to the existence of regional gender cultures.

Despite their geographical proximity, and similarities in ethnic composition and political contexts, Hong Kong's and Macao's social policies have not been compared in the literature. This article aims to compare the welfare regimes between these two city-states. The comparison involves two dimensions: the pattern of welfare mix, and the modification impact of social policy on the capitalist social structure. It is found that the two states’ patterns of welfare mix have much in common, and their social policies are both marked by a relatively low level of modification impact. Therefore, the conclusion is drawn that Hong Kong and Macao can be grouped into a distinct welfare regime. The major contributions of this study are that it helps add to the understanding of East Asian social policy and suggests a useful framework for comparing welfare regimes.

This article describes the social care funding and delivery arrangements of a varied selection of developed countries, focusing on long-term care of older people. International evidence and latest reforms can inform the debate as countries struggle economically. Some have opted for mandatory social insurance that provides universal coverage. A premium is paid and if the insured individual or relatives require support, they are entitled to it. Others opted for a similar universal system but with earmarked taxation, while others fund their social care entirely from general taxation. Many chose a safety-net system in which benefits are means-tested leaving wealthier individuals to secure private arrangements of care. Within the UK, the level of support varies as Scotland provides personal care free of charge, being more generous than England, Wales and Northern Ireland. There is no “one solution”, but understanding different options can help in the discussion of current and future reforms.

The present study was based on data from 100 face-to-face interviews, supplemented by findings from 316 respondents in a national postal survey, and shows that UK Chinese respondents were family-orientated and self-reliant, having low expectations of public welfare. These features challenge the myth of welfare dependency of ethnic minorities. Also, compared with Chinese welfare practices based on strong moral values and duties towards other people, New Labour's welfare culture lacks a solid social and ethical base for nurturing the concepts of duty and self-reliance.

Governments across the world have been slow in reacting to meeting the needs of disabled people during the pandemic. This has exposed existing inequalities in social policies, as well as new support barriers. Debates over social care have focused on Covid-19's impact on those living in residential care. Little is known about the experiences of disabled people who rely on daily support in their homes.

This article reports on a year-long study examining the experiences of disabled people during the pandemic in England and Scotland. It focuses on the crisis in social care and offers evidence of how lives have been disrupted. For many, this resulted in a sudden loss of services, delayed assessments and break down of routines and communities. Findings underline the weakness of social care in its wider relationship with the NHS and show how the social care crisis has challenged the goal of independent living.

Previous studies have suggested that community self-help in affluent populations revolves around engagement in formal community-based groups, whilst the participatory culture of deprived populations is more orientated towards informal (one-to-one) community participation. Reporting the findings of 861 face-to-face interviews conducted in affluent and deprived urban and rural English communities, and reading participation in community self-help through the lens of a ‘total social organisation of labour’ perspective, this article transcends this dichotomous depiction and provides a finer-grained more multi-layered mapping of the multifarious varieties of community self-help and its socio-spatial variations. The article concludes by exploring the implications for theory, practice and policy.

This paper is concerned with the extent to which the state offers potential for furthering farm women's status and rights. Using case studies of Australia and Northern Ireland, it examines the extent to which the state has intervened to address gender inequality in the agricultural sector. These two locations provide a particularly rich scope for analysis because while Australia has a long history of state feminism and an extensive legislative framework for pursing gender equity, this is not the case with Northern Ireland. At the same time, the restructuring of the state in Northern Ireland, following on from the Belfast Agreement of 1998 and the Northern Ireland Act of 1998, has generated new opportunities for state intervention regarding gender equality. Moreover, while gender is now for the first time being placed on the state agenda in Northern Ireland, gender reform is being wound back in Australia, as equity discourses are subsumed by the hegemonic discourses of neo-liberalism.

Neoliberal metaphors of students often describe students as consumers, managers and even as commodities, but this analysis often disregards the discursive complexity of education. We argue that frame merging is essential to understand the hybrid modalities of neoliberal images of students in the Swedish context, where the image of the student is suspended between a social democratic welfare service model, academic capitalism, new public management and welfare nationalism. We demonstrate this through the case study of introducing student fees for non-EU students in Swedish higher education, and how the merging of universal tax financing with a more individualised fee paying solution creates variegated and complex metaphors of students and higher education. These metaphors are infused with social democratic social citizenship, neoliberal reform of welfare services, academic capitalism and nationalist welfare chauvinism. This implies that, in practice, it is nigh on impossible to disentangle the neoliberal consumer metaphor from that of social citizenship; instead they merge to generate multiple contextually relevant metaphors to fit the local debates in higher education.

This article examines the relationship between tax credits and in-work poverty, drawing on the findings from a major national study on in-work poverty. We present an analysis of (i) the income packages of working families and (ii) the performance of tax credits in relation to anti-poverty objectives, drawing on data from the Households Below Average Income survey between 2004/5 and 2014/15. Our study generates five novel findings, including that tax credits reduce the poverty gap of recipient households by two-thirds; that tax credit cuts post-2010/11 have served to focus payments on single parent families and households with greater numbers of children; and that tax credits make up just one third of the social security income of working households. We argue that understanding in greater depth the interaction between tax credits and income adequacy amongst working families is necessary to provide a firmer foundation for an effective assault on in-work poverty.

Time Credits are a form of community currency based upon the reciprocal exchange of time and represent an interpretation of ‘time banking’ by a UK social enterprise, Spice. This article sets out the contribution made by research on Time Credits to the theory and practice of co-production in public services. Time Credits are intended to improve wellbeing through volunteering and ultimately increase economic participation. There is a focus on communities exhibiting high levels of deprivation within a small Cambridgeshire town (Wisbech, UK) which is geographically isolated and characterised by low-skilled, agri-food based employment opportunities that attracted high levels of inward migration from the A8 EU accession countries. In separating the rhetoric from the reality of co-production, the research aims to shed some light upon the extent to which such initiatives can realistically engender a shift towards a more reciprocal economy in the context of an ongoing programme of fiscal austerity.

Social policy and the social sciences more generally, have tended to emphasise links, activities and processes occurring ‘within’ nation states to the neglect of those cutting across them. This ‘methodological nationalism’ is increasingly being questioned as transnational processes, be they ‘from above’ or ‘from below’, institutionalised or non-institutionalised, formal or informal, have become more significant over the last half century. The spread of activities, links and ties beyond national borders has become more extensive and the interactions themselves have become more intensive. In the light of these changes, the aim of this themed section is to draw attention to the transnational dimensions of social policy and advance the study of transnationalism in relation to social policy and welfare.

Drawing on interviews with disability and income support beneficiaries, the article examines the encounters of Israeli citizens with the National Insurance Institute. Using the administrative burden conceptualisation, our analysis highlights three known types of costs: compliance, learning and psychological. The current study provides further conceptualisation of these burdens by unfolding the role of three concrete elements involved in generating these burdens: waiting, communication breakdowns, and administrative errors. These elements are discussed in terms of their contribution to a better understanding of bureaucratic procedures that constitute administrative burdens in the context of the benefit claiming process.

Participatory evaluation gives primacy to the experience of people affected by the policy. How realistic is it for researchers to persuade government of its benefits, given the gap between participatory policy theory and government evaluation practice? We apply this question to the Resident Support Program evaluation. The program coordinates support for people living in boarding houses and hostels in Queensland, Australia. We found that a participatory, longitudinal, formative evaluation process facilitated service user contribution to research outcomes, service experiences and policy implementation. In addition, the values position of participatory research can contribute to managing interest conflict in policy implementation.

Diversion services for adult mentally disordered offenders are back in the limelight twenty years after their original development. This article argues there are a number of important lessons to be learnt. Services of this kind ‘process’ different people in different ways with different outcomes. Current developments therefore need to provide an holistic, patient-centred approach across the whole offender pathway, which meets the needs of different groups of people. What works for some might not work for others, but patterns can be mapped and good and bad pathways identified and used to inform good practice and service improvement.

This article considers the impact, in terms of life and death choices, of the economic exclusion of young people in Australia, where suicide is the leading cause of death by injury. In the two decades from 1980 there was a dramatic increase in suicide rates for young males. Research demonstrates a correlation between youth suicide and unemployment but the complex relationship between the two has not been fully investigated. This article explores the perceptions of young people, parents and service providers of the cultural context of suicide and how it comes to be constructed as an option for young people experiencing economic marginalisation.

A fundamental dyad in public social services is woman to woman. In Israeli public social services, it is often mother to mother. This multi-faceted encounter is complex and in this theoretical article I wish to deconstruct and situate the social worker–mother encounter in a broader context, a social–cultural–national one. Taking a feminist perspective, I will explore how the personal and private social worker–mother encounter is a political and public one. Analysing western ideologies of the ‘Good Mother’ together with those of the Israeli-Jewish mother, this article aims to develop a theoretical understanding of macro mechanisms that shape the social worker–mother encounter. Being conscious about what influences that encounter might benefit social work clients, practitioners, researchers, and policymakers.