The broad contours of the move from the old to the new welfare are well established but the changes in social theory which bear on this have been relatively neglected. Also neglected are the links between these theoretical positions and contemporaneous shifts in economic thought. Drawing on the works of Titmuss, Marshall, Putnam and Etzioni, this paper traces how understandings of social cohesion, social provision, responsibility and obligation have shifted over time. It then indicates the relationship between these constructions and parallel developments in economic theory. Here attention is drawn to a fundamental ideological tension between communitarian and neo-classical accounts. It is argued that governments attempt to resolve this tension by projecting notions of moral disintegration onto welfare claimants. Alternatives to the new welfare are canvassed in the final section of the paper.

This article describes trends in Dutch (un)employment from the 1980s onwards, it reviews activation measures that were taken in the field of social security and labour market policies, and it critically discusses the successfulness of these measures. It concludes that it may not be justified to attribute the ‘Dutch miracle’ – the recent decrease in unemployment and the explosive growth of employment – directly to the measures taken, and that activation policies have endangered social rights and citizenship, especially of those groups which traditionally are most vulnerable. The ‘Dutch miracle’ is further put into the perspective of a small employment growth in terms of the total of hours worked annually, the large proportion of part-time employment, and the large degree of hidden unemployment. If a future recession hits the Netherlands, the miracle will turn into a nightmare for many due to the significant overall loss of social protection.

The paper explores the relevance of recent theorising around the body for the discipline of social policy. It aims to show how such work opens up new ways of thinking within the core areas of social policy as well as proposing new subjects for social policy consideration, arguing that the common image of the body as an absent presence that has been characteristic of sociological accounts in the recent past still applies in relation to social policy, but that considerable gains can be made from incorporating this new theorising and new subject matter into the scope of the subject. It explores this by means of six areas of relevance: health care, community care, disability, no-power consumption, as well as cross-cutting themes of age, ‘race’, gender, sexuality.

This article is based on a unique empirical investigation of the contribution that informal childcare – relatives, friends or neighbours looking after children, usually on an unpaid basis – makes in allowing parents to go out to work. There has been little research on either the use of such complementary childcare by parents, or of the carers who undertake it, and this is a review of a two-stage investigation of both. One of the earliest initiatives of the Labour government elected in 1997 was to put a National Childcare Strategy in place. The strategy recognised the importance of childcare both for the development of children and in enabling parents – particularly mothers – to go out to work. To date, however, childcare needs and provision have been assessed almost entirely in terms of formal childcare. A clear understanding of why working parents use complementary childcare (particularly from grandparents) is essential for any childcare policy that hopes to be attuned to what families actually want. The article argues that policy makers, lured by a simplistic vision of economic vitality into adopting a behavioural paradigm from economics – in which parents are assumed to respond to purely financial incentives – are likely to find themselves distracted from important issues of the social well-being of working families with children. Childcare needs are related to dramatic changes in women's labour market participation over recent years, where the largest increase in female employment has been among mothers of children under the age of five. Neither mothers nor fathers may be in a position to provide the desired amount of childcare inside the nuclear household. This situation gives rise to the possibility of a ‘childcare deficit’. In failing to acknowledge and underpin the value which parents place upon complementary forms of childcare, policy makers are in danger of committing themselves to institutional arrangements which may make that deficit worse in the longer term.

The label ‘modernisation’, originally coined to signify reform within the Labour Party, has since 1997 increasingly been used as a descriptor of various facets of public policy. This paper addresses three questions, all in the context of health policy. What (if anything) is the impact of the notion of modernisation on NHS medical labour process, what is its substantive content, and how might we explain its rise to prominence? On the first question, I suggest that a model of medicine (which I term ‘scientific-bureaucratic medicine’) is being developed that embodies many of the specific characteristics of Fordist labour processes. On the second question, I suggest that ‘modernisation’ denotes a philosophy towards the governance of the NHS which entails the distinctive characteristics of the project which social theorists have termed ‘modernity’. The third question has particular significance in a social context (variously termed ‘late modernity’ or ‘postmodernity’) generally thought of as characterised by trends towards postFordist labour processes. I tentatively suggest that scientific-bureaucratic medicine can be viewed as the state's (not necessarily successful) strategy for coping with radical consumerism and changing perceptions of risk and expertise in the context of health and medicine.

The triumph of George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential election is further evidence of the waning viability of the American welfare state. Since 1980 various strains of conservatism have vied for control of domestic policy through the Republican party, the most recent variant being ‘compassionate conservatism’. Democrats have responded by disavowing their liberal heritage and moving toward the centre. This reflects the replacement of a ‘social model’ with an ‘economic model’ for social policy. The Left can be rejuvenated by adopting three themes for domestic policy: mobility, empowerment and restructuring. These are consistent with the ‘third way’ in social policy, as centrists have advocated in the United States and the United Kingdom.

1 Social security and income maintenance

2 Health

3 Education

4 Housing and environment

5 Personal social services

6 Law and the treatment of the offender

7 Unemployment and the labour market

8 Race relations

9 Voluntary sector

10 Government

11 Gender and sexuality

12 Demography