The establishment of partnerships has been a central feature of British social welfare policy since 1997 when the New Labour government came to power. Although the academic attention given to partnership working since then has grown considerably, there have been few attempts to link conceptual models of partnerships with existing forms. This paper addresses this gap and finds that, while there are links between actual and model partnerships, there is little evidence that actual partnerships have been designed or structured to meet their particular tasks.

The inherent problems and limitations of managing risk and uncertainty are examined in a salient case setting – the English NHS. The ‘dark-side’ of simply trusting professionals to pursue their own craft, as acknowledged by Sennett, has been politicised to under-gird an increased use of quasi-markets, via the choice agenda, and governance. It is argued that these alternatives to trust – price and control – are further dysfunctional still. The innate tendencies of governance, and therefore choice, to lose sight of patient care are even more pronounced than the fallibility of professionals. A new, qualified form of trust is proposed in resolution.

The Teenage Pregnancy Strategy (TPS) has been implemented in England since 1999 and has two aims: to halve under 18s conceptions; and to reduce the risk of social exclusion among young mothers. The TPS portrays young motherhood as problematic, the cause of poor outcomes. Yet, the problematisation of teenage fertility has been contested, especially by qualitative researchers who have demonstrated that early motherhood can be experienced positively. This research is discussed here, as are findings from a small-scale study in three English locations, where teenage mothers reported good experiences of parenthood. The discrepancy between these accounts of motherhood and policy is considered.

Whilst there is ample literature on the governance and management of partnerships in welfare, particularly within mixed-economy states, much of it has focused on the governance and organisational capacity issues. This paper draws on that body of literature and evidence from health and social care partnerships, and attempts to develop the theoretical and empirical work in the area to address the issue of citizens' social rights, asking whether collaborative governance and partnerships between agencies are the solution to promoting citizens' social participation, or another state-driven method of indirectly enhancing social exclusion.

New Labour's national childcare and family support strategies have been aimed at improving mothers' labour market participation and children's future educational achievements. As such, they constitute a key component of the child poverty agenda. HM Treasury has assumed a pivotal role in furthering the strategies' objectives. This article explores whether the mixed market economy selected as the vehicle to deliver childcare and family support provision, promotes separate markets for the poor and the better off, while hindering the achievement of child poverty strategy outcomes.

Debate on pension privatisation in Europe has provided useful insights into the diversity of European pension systems in terms of ideological orientation, design features and reform paths followed. However, the gender dimension has often been neglected. Thus a recent analysis states that, depending on predominant social values, pension privatisation may be ‘consistent with the notion of collective responsibility for needs-satisfaction’ (Hyde et al., 2003: 189). Yet the unequal effects of privatisation on men and women are ignored. This article argues that, despite considerable variation among countries in the nature of their private pension schemes, the latter share a failure to incorporate allowances for periods of unpaid caring work over the lifecourse. Comparison of the needs-satisfying capacity of private and public pensions must take account of the situation of those who raise the next generation of producers and taxpayers.

‘Whole family’ approaches to intervention and prevention have raised the profile of ‘family’ within social policy, where the family is constructed as a site of child care and protection, neglect and disadvantage. However, ‘family’ is a taken-for-granted and narrowly defined concept within policy documentation, and often used interchangeably with ‘parents’. This paper uses Sevenhuijsen's (2003) ‘Trace’ approach to explore the use of the concept of ‘family’ across a number of interrelated social policy streams. The efficacy of familial approaches is considered through a feminist ethic of care approach that questions both gendered and generational assumptions about families in practice.

As the number of forced migrants entering Britain has risen, increasingly restrictive immigration and asylum policy has been introduced. Simultaneously, successive governments have sought to limit the welfare entitlements of forced migrants. Drawing on two sets of semi-structured qualitative interviews, with migrants and key respondents providing welfare services, this paper considers the adequacy of welfare provisions in relation to the financial and housing needs of four different groups of forced migrants i.e. refugees, asylum seekers, those with humanitarian protection status and failed asylum seekers/‘overstayers’. There is strong evidence to suggest that statutory provisions are failing to meet the basic financial and housing needs of many forced migrants.

Whilst it remains a criminal activity to solicit sex publicly in the UK, it has become increasingly popular to configure sex workers as ‘vulnerable’, often as a means of foregrounding the significant levels of violence faced by female street sex workers. Sex work scholars have highlighted that this discourse can play an enabling role in a moralistic national policy agenda which criminalises and marginalises those who sell sex. Yet multiple and overlapping narratives of vulnerability circulate in this policy arena, raising questions about how these might operate at ground level. Drawing on empirical data gathered in the development of an innovative local street sex work multi-agency partnership in Leeds, this article explores debates, discourses and realities of sex worker vulnerability. Setting applied insights within more theoretically inclined analysis, we suggest how vulnerability might usefully be understood in relation to sex work, but also highlight how social justice for sex workers requires more than progressive discourses and local initiatives. Empirical findings highlight that whilst addressing vulnerability through a local street sex work multi-agency partnership initiative, a valuable platform for shared action on violence in particular can be created. However, an increase in fundamental legal and social reform is required in order to address the differentiated and diverse lived experiences of sex worker vulnerability.

For a decade, Scotland has had a declining natural population, dispersed throughout a diverse geography, including remote highlands and islands, which presents a policy making context that is very different from other parts of the UK. Rural Scotland accounts for 95% of Scotland's landmass and only 18% of the population (Scottish Government 2008). In particular, the familiar challenges, presented by the combination of population ageing with below-replacement level fertility rates, have, until 2007, been reinforced by the extent of out-migration amongst people of working age. Evidence suggests that following EU enlargement in 2004, rural areas have experienced an influx of labour migrants from Central and Eastern European countries on an unprecedented scale. Whilst such large-scale migration into rural communities has provided a major challenge for public service provision and ‘social integration’, it has also addressed local labour market shortages and created opportunities for regeneration. This article explores critical questions about the role and impact of migrant labour in rural communities in Scotland and the role of agencies in addressing the needs of all rural residents.

This article focuses on ‘the turn to parenting’ in the Netherlands and embeds it in a major reform called ‘transition and transformation’. While support for parenting by way of public healthcare and denominational family care and advice has a long tradition in the Netherlands, the field gained new importance in the 1990s under the influence of medical and psychological ‘scientification’ and the introduction of evidence-based methods. Current reforms are modulated with a critique of specialised forms of parent support and (re-)introduce a community- and family-based approach in which professionals are charged with helping families to help themselves and with guiding and supervising volunteers who actually do the job of parenting support.

Policy discourses around child poverty and its causes and effects on families emerged in the 1990s, culminating in the Coalition government's emphasis on the quality of couple relations in improving child outcomes and in reducing child poverty. This article reviews and updates the current evidence base around the relationship between parenting and poverty. Evidence suggests an intricate relationship between complex and mediating processes of, for instance, income, parental stress, disrupted parenting practices and neighbourhoods and environments, as opposed to a simplistic causal relationship between poverty, parenting and child outcomes. The article then proceeds to suggest responses to enhance the evidence and research. Lastly, it considers the implications for child poverty policy, arguing that current responses are too simplistic and do not sufficiently reflect the evidence base.

Relational social work engages with existing networks to enhance their resilience and capacity to resolve difficulties. It does this by addressing the identified problem, and by engaging, mobilising and developing both supportive and problem-solving networks. These networks can include family members, friends, teachers and any other significant actors who have a contribution to make. The participative approach offers a way of translating policies that aspire to social inclusion into practice.

‘Choice’ and ‘voice’ are two of the most significant means through which the public are able to participate in public services. Choice agendas position public service users as consumers, driving improvements by choosing good providers over bad, which then thrive through greater allocations of funds as money follows their selections (Le Grand, 2007). Choice-driven reforms tend to be about trying to make public services more locally responsive (Ferlie, Freeman, McDonnell, Petsoulas and Rundle-Smith, 2006). Voice-driven reforms, on the other hand, tend to position public service users as citizens, suggesting an emphasis on accountability mechanisms to drive service improvements through elections, with the possible removal of low regarded officials, or a greater involvement of local people in the running of services (Jenkins, 2006). Voice implies that citizens hold the right to participate in public services either through the political process, or through their direct involvement in the running or delivery of the services themselves. Of course, it is also possible to combine choice and voice mechanisms to try and achieve greater service responsiveness and accountability. In this review, choice reforms will be treated as those which are based upon consumer literature, and voice reforms those based upon attempting to achieve greater citizenship.

Citizenship and consumption are two areas with significant literatures in their own right, but whereas the citizenship literature is widely cited in the social policy literature, the consumption literature appears rather more selectively. This review examines each area in turn in terms of its application to social policy, and then presents a synthesis of commonalties in the two literatures, which represent particularly promising avenues for exploring the relationship between public services and their users.

This article considers the defensibility of the extension of conditionality to disabled people through a qualitative investigation of welfare service users’ opinions on the applicability of conditionality for disabled people. Three focus groups took place, with participants segmented according to whether or not they were disabled, to enable a comparison between the attitudes of those who would and would not be directly affected by the extension of conditionality analysed. The qualitative research undertaken demonstrates how much more the government must do before it can justifiably make disability benefit receipt conditional on participating in work-related activities.

Two analytical tasks have been conducted in this article. The first is to construct a defamilisation typology that covers eighteen OECD members and four tiger economies (namely Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore). The second is to demonstrate this typology's contribution to the debate on the existence of two essential preconditions for the development of an all-encompassing East Asian welfare regime: (1) the existence of significant differences in the welfare systems between the East Asian countries and the non-East Asian OECD countries; and (2) the existence of significant similarities in the welfare systems of the East Asian countries.

Faced with a changing economic and demographic outlook, this article will suggest the adoption of a proactive and preventative approach to the quality of work and ‘worklife’ for the UK's ‘older workers’. Ultimately, it seeks to explore the possibilities for the implementation of the Finnish concept of Work Ability (Illmarinen, 2005) in the context of the UK policy agenda. It will be suggest that this approach provides a policy framework that addresses recessionary pressures whilst maximising quality of life and the active ageing of individuals.

This article contributes to our empirical understanding of self-respect in rising meritocracies by focusing on the experiences of unemployed, low-skilled people recruited as workfare volunteers in the Netherlands. As many theorists have argued, the long-term unemployed struggle to maintain self-esteem. We found that workfare projects that introduce them to voluntary work can help them regain self-respect through four types of emotional labour: feeling respected through their newfound status, enjoying a craft, being able to perform in less stressful working environments, and taking pride in the meaning bestowed by voluntary work. But the emotional labour necessary to experience their situation more positively also increases the risk of experiencing negative emotions, thereby posing new threats to the fragile self-respect of unemployed citizens.

This article explores the application of Lipsky's (1980) notion of street-level bureaucracy for nursing staff. This article aims to demonstrate the importance of discretion within the day-to-day work of front-line nursing staff, which is similar to that of other public-sector workers. The findings are from an exploratory case study based within a Scottish inner-city hospital. It specifically focuses on how nurses can be seen to be street-level bureaucrats and how front-line nursing staff interpret policy. Discretion can be seen to be a significant feature within the front-line practice of nursing staff and this may have implications for the implementation of health policy.

This article reports on shifts and continuities in policy relating to disabled people and the administrative apparatus of federal disability policy under the Rudd government (2007–10). It begins with a brief historical overview of disability policy in Australia. It then gives particular attention to highlighting the contentious and dramatic changes to disability policy which were instigated by the Howard government (1996–2007). Following this, attention is focused on the major developments in disability policy and administration with the election of the Rudd Labor government in 2007. Through this discussion, we demonstrate the ways the altered vocabularies, practices and instruments of the state have manifested in relation to disability policy in Australia, ultimately shaping opportunities for either inclusion or exclusion at the national level among disabled people.