Our recent paper on state-mandated private pension schemes in Western Europe has been criticised by Ginn because it did not look specifically at the impact of private provision on women. This was not our intent, but she raises important issues that are largely ignored in economics-driven pension privatisation policy discourses. She has addressed this omission by demonstrating that private pension provision may result in significant levels of economic disadvantage among women retirees. We do not disagree with the broad thrust of her analysis and its conclusions. However, because she has failed to appreciate the crucial difference between voluntary and state-mandated private pension provision, her thoughtful analysis does not invalidate our proposition that the state-mandated provision of private pensions in Western Europe is consistent, to varying degrees, with the notion of collective responsibility for needs satisfaction.

In this article, I discuss why steps towards basic income (BI) ‘from within’ the state are institutionally plausible in Denmark, yet this ‘inside-out’ transition is contested in Danish society. I argue that implementation since the 1990s of the flexicurity regime – labour flexibility with social transfers and training – has stretched the developmental tradition that historically has fed the case for broadly inclusive reforms. An ‘Equality Paradox’ is shaped by two relationships, between high social equality and feasibility of basic income, on the one hand, and high social equality and developmentalism, on the other. The upshot is basic income rests on developmentalism indirectly, as state-promotion of economic equality, cooperative public finance, and human development-oriented governing of core institutions all contribute to the feasibility of a BI reform. The ‘Equality Paradox’ explains why rising inequality and precarity in Denmark make a case for basic income within the public sector but the source of this inequality – neo-liberalism – also puts it at risk.

Family policy now has greater prominence in UK politics than ever before. These policies are developing in the context of major constitutional change across the UK, which has the potential for significant policy divergence. Devolution has generated greater interest in Scottish family policy, and how its policy processes have been reconfigured. New Scottish legal and policy initiatives with a family focus have emerged from both Westminster and Holyrood. This paper reviews the present context for family policy in Scotland, some recent family policy developments at both UK and Scottish levels of government, and identifies key issues these raise.

‘Just transition’ is a concept originally developed by the labour movement to reconcile workers’ rights with the necessity to combat climate change. More recently, supra- and international organisations have also adopted this idea. However, it remains unclear to what extent these actors follow the eco-social ambitions of organised labour. In this article, we develop a conceptual framework to capture diverse just transition approaches by distinguishing between the goal, policy, and governance dimension. We apply a multi-method approach to gauge the extent of variation in the just transition conceptualisations of three actors: the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Union (EU). We identify a cleavage between the ILO where just transition refers to an ambitious eco-social agenda on the one hand, and the IMF’s emphasis on macroeconomic adaptation on the other. The EU takes up a middle position by promoting a ‘green growth’ strategy with medium emphasis on environmental and social risk mitigation.

This article reviews the recommodification of social policy in the context of financialised austerity capitalism and post-crisis welfare states. It sets out an understanding of recommodification as a multiple set of processes that involve the state in labour market-making, by shaping labour’s ‘saleability’. Under conditions of finance-dominated austerity capitalism, the article argues that recent dynamics of recommodification complicate the long established Piersonian observations. For Pierson, recommodification signifies how elements of the welfare state that shelter individuals from market pressures are dismantled and replaced with measures which buffer their labour market participation. This article examines ways in which recent policy trends in recommodification, whether by incentivising or coercive means, increase exposure to labour market risks and connect with the growing inequalities between capital and labour under post-crisis re/financialised austerity capitalism. This analysis is paired with a synoptic review of recent labour market trends and reforms across the European Union. As recommodification evolves, the insecurity it institutes raises fundamental questions about the underlying nature of social citizenship which are also addressed.

Based on research in Australia, this article offers explanatory concepts about how welfare workers deal with contradictions between the rationalising ‘informationalisation’ of welfare system governance and the demands of people-centred welfare practice, or ‘technologies of care’. While the situation in Australia with respect to the relationship between government, funders and welfare workers may not be mirrored in other places, the concepts are relevant for the development of local research, insights and practice.

Suggestions are also made for further action to bridge the gap between information systems design and welfare practice through the adoption of a dialogic and representational system for more effective interoperable design that reflects the needs of the major parties involved, including funders, designers and particularly welfare workers.

In the context of the discussion about the governance capacity of small states in the world market raised by Katzenstein, the case of East Asian newly industrialised countries is an interesting one. This article takes the development of social policy in Taiwan as a case study through which to explore the role of social policy in the process of rapid industrialisation in small states. It is argued that in the initial phase of industrialisation the productive component of social policy was highlighted by the developmental state to serve the goal of economic development. Social policy functioned at this stage as an effective instrument to dampen the cost of labour and thus contributed to the low-cost strategy of developmental state. Since the 1980s, however, social policy has been profoundly transformed as a consequence of economic globalisation on the one hand and domestic democratisation on the other. It is argued that social policy making since the 1990s in Taiwan has shifted in emphasis from the productive to the consumptive component. Finally, it is suggested that three factors will be decisive in determining Taiwan's social policy in the future: limited governmental revenues, fiscal strain due the public debt problem and the steering capacity of minority governments.

This article reviews critical literature on sex trafficking policy through a cultural studies lens. It argues that the conflation of ‘trafficking’ and prostitution that pervades anti-trafficking policy makes trafficking victims out of sex workers. On another register, anti-trafficking policy creates ‘victims’ through curtailments on mobility and work eligibility that make workers more dependent on third party managers and less able to secure assistance when these parties abuse the power that the state has effectively granted them. The article calls upon policy makers to undertake the policy making process with sex workers’ continued experiences of the state as a primary source of violence and exploitation in view.

This paper illustrates the social and health consequences of the politics and policies of Gypsy sites in the UK. Recent research concerning health status shows that Gypsies and Travellers have significantly poorer health than other UK resident English speaking ethnic minorities and economically disadvantaged white UK residents. Interview data from the qualitative study of Gypsy and Traveller experience of health and access to health care illustrate the impact of inequality and the association of accommodation factors with health outcomes health. This paper explores how policy on Gypsy sites impacts on the availability of suitable accommodation for Gypsies and Travellers and examines the practical implications for their status in society and the wider health consequences.

This article explores the findings of a research project carried out into the political awareness and attitudes of first year social science undergraduates. The results initially suggested that students generally lacked understanding of, and interest in, political structures and concepts and possessed poor news awareness and information-gathering skills. However, a more complex picture emerged that indicates a degree of engagement through responses to personal, moral and social questions, suggesting some degree of politicisation, yet such issues seem dislocated from their studies. This mixed picture poses serious challenges for social policy teachers seeking to enhance political awareness among their students.

This article reports the results of a case study on the introduction of the living wage. Three employers in the City of York became living wage employers. Using data derived from a sample survey of their employees and qualitative interviews, this article explores what impact the receipt of the living wage had on poverty and deprivation. It found that not all living wage employees were income poor or deprived, although those on living wage rates were more likely to be poor and deprived than those on even higher wages. The more important determinant of the employees’ living standards was the household they lived in, and there were a high proportion of living wage employees living in multi-unit households. Also important were the number of earners in the household and the hours worked by the living wage employee. Lone parent families and single people appeared to be most vulnerable to poverty and deprivation. In addition, whether the employee took up their entitlement to in-work benefits was critical and, using benefit checks by welfare rights experts, it was found that some were not.

The feminisation of international migration for care labour has gained prominence in the last three decades. It has been theorised mainly in the context of the changing care regime in the Global North; the changes in other parts of the world have been largely neglected. This article explores the dynamics between changing care regimes, labour markets and international migration in the East Asian context through the case of Korean Chinese migrants to South Korea. Korean Chinese came to South Korea through various legal channels beginning in the late 1980s and occupy the largest share of both male and female migrants in South Korea. Korean Chinese women have engaged in service sector jobs, including domestic work and caregiving, since their influx, yet such work was only legalised during the 2000s in response to demographic changes and the care deficit. This article sheds light on the female Korean Chinese migrants’ engagement in care work in the ambiguous legal space of migration and the care labour market, and their changing roles in the process of development of the care labour market. Based on interviews with Korean Chinese migrants in South Korea, immigration statistics, and the Foreign Employment Survey in 2013, this study explores how the care regime intersects with migration in the process of the care regimes development.

Ethnicity and racialised identity have been salient themes in USA research and policy on teenage parenthood, in contrast with the UK context. This article presents findings from interviews with professionals in support services for young parents, with three main conclusions. Firstly, appropriate data collection systems are not in place to establish whether minority young parents face specific barriers in accessing services. Secondly, professionals’ accounts converge with young parents’ accounts, emphasising age rather than ethnicity as shaping patterns of identification and stigmatisation. Lastly, professional ‘ecologies of practice’ exist in some tension with the homogenising emphasis of UK national policy discourses.

Internationally, in-work benefits (IWBs) are widely adopted as a measure to assist parents transitioning to work and to ‘make work pay’ for low-income families. The family income supplement (FIS) is an Irish IWB, introduced at a time of rapid societal change. This article shows how changing family dynamics, and a shift in policy focus towards a ‘work-first’ approach, challenged the original values underlying FIS. We discuss FIS in the context of changes to family life and social policy. We then outline the results of ten interviews with experts using three themes: work-first approach, child poverty and encouraging care. Our analysis shows that policymakers faced new challenges to provide an income support for children while also promoting full-time labour participation. FIS continues to support working families, but in a manner that creates contradictions for the contemporary ‘work-first’ approach. It is necessary to re-examine FIS in relation to its wider policy context and to address requirements for caring.

This article uses Taiwan as an example to examine how families manage work and care when the government and workplace provide limited support. Many Taiwanese households employ live-in migrant care workers to negotiate care responsibilities and adults’ paid jobs. Based on interviews with employers of live-in migrant care workers and workers, the findings demonstrate that daughters-in-law and occasionally daughters and sons become employers of live-in migrant care workers because of the limitation of public care services and lack of support they receive in seeking to combine paid work and family care responsibility. Even after employing migrant workers, women retain greater care responsibility in daily practices than their husbands. Hiring live-in migrant care workers also imposes risks to all parties involved in the processes of organising, coordinating, and providing care due to the uncertainty of care quality and the nature of care work.

Human resource development (HRD) approaches aim to increase service users’ labour market prospects through training and upskilling. However, research on activation policy implementation suggests that individualised, tailored measures may be difficult to implement because of organisational structures, standardised procedures, contradictory professional interests, and broad framework laws. This qualitative study explored the institutional framing of the Norwegian Qualification Programme and how that framing created barriers in service users’ trajectories towards labour market inclusion. The study applied a bottom-up perspective to analyse how these barriers are entangled in a multidimensional web of interrelated and sometimes contradictory relations. Highlighting the service users’ perspective, the study aimed to examine how institutional framing may interfere with the activation policy goal of qualifying service users for the labour market. The results point to how institutional framing governs local practice and creates barriers that ultimately may impede activation policy goals.

The nature of the relationship between state and nonprofit organisations in Japan is usually described in one of two ways. It is either disparaged as an example of co-optation and state domination, with nonprofit organisations always having been the subservient partner, or lauded as the apotheosis of co-operation and interdependence. By focusing on the historical background of the welfare system in Japan, and particularly on the legal framework in which the nonprofit sector has developed, this paper attempts to explain how each has influenced the other and highlights key factors which may have been underestimated or misinterpreted in the past.

The European political landscape in the 1990s was characterised by centre-left parties returning to power in several countries after long periods in opposition. Following intensive internal debates over policy direction and policy revision, once back in power some centre-left governments in some countries have used terms such as the ‘third way’ and ‘new social democracy’, or the ‘Neue Mitte’ as an indication that contemporary policies should be seen as distinct from those pursued by both previous social democratic administrations and neo-liberal governments in the interim (e.g. Gamble and Wright, 1999; White, 2001). What, if anything, exactly constitutes the ‘third way’ has been a matter of considerable debate, as has been the question of how far traditional social democratic values and aspirations, such as solidarity and equality, are still relevant within ‘third way’ policies. More than previously, modern social democratic policy is geared towards reducing non-wage labour costs, fostering private forms of social protection, such as funded pensions, intensifying labour market integration and subsidising low-skilled jobs, but also incorporating new social risks and new social needs (Vandenbrouke, 2001).