In contrast to the majority of research on the relationship between women and the state which bases its findings on nationally aggregated data and concentrates its analysis on the forces which shape national policy concerning gender, this article adopts a micro-social approach to this question. Based on the findings from an in-depth qualitative cross-national study of the child care strategies of 112 mothers working in secretarial or clerical occupations in two countries with very different configurations of ‘political motherhood’, namely, France and Britain, the article assesses the impact of these varying policy environments on the construction of mothering in the everyday lives of employed women. It finds that different configurations of political motherhood have a significant impact on the practical aspects of these women's child care strategies but less impact on their fundamental conceptions of the duties and responsibilities of mothering. It concludes by considering the significance of these findings for current debates concerning the role of the state in perpetuating or combating unequal gender relations.

This article uses data from the Survey of English Housing (SEH) 1993/4 in order to investigate patterns of residential mobility in relation to social housing in England. Such an analysis provides an insight into the contemporary dynamics of residualisation. Hitherto, much of the analysis of residualisation has, quite properly, concentrated on the operation of the Right to Buy legislation in the process of social exclusion. However, this article argues that the process of residualisation has not been due just to changes in the tenure of dwellings, it has also been due to the intensification of processes of residential movement by people which can be traced back to at least the mid-1970s. As the number of dwellings sold through the RTB declines, the movement of people is again becoming the primary mechanism through which residualisation operates. The article also examines patterns of movement within the social rented sector. It concludes that as the sector has become smaller, the rate of mobility within it has increased. This increased rate of mobility is due to a number of factors, but is primarily a function of the demographic profile of tenants in the social rented sector. The factors which predispose certain types of household to be mobile within the sector are examined.

High levels of long-term unemployment have undermined some of the assumptions of the post-war welfare state. In response most OECD governments are now replacing what have been characterised as passive income support payments with active benefit systems. Many have introduced new time limits to unconditional benefit entitlement in the form of job and training guarantees for those without work. This article describes how the 1993–6 Australian Labor government modernised its commitment to full employment by combining labour market programmes and social security reforms to create a Job Compact for the long-term unemployed. It analyses the achievements of the strategy and what went wrong, and it draws out lessons of relevance to the British Labour government which has committed itself to using job guarantees to build new bridges between welfare and work.

A Regulation Approach framework has been adopted to analyse the very rapid period of change in social security policy since the late 1980s. It is argued that the changes can be explained in terms of a number of regulatory dilemmas which emerged or were intensified under neo-liberal capital accumulation. Some of the regulatory dilemmas – high levels of economic inactivity, inflationary pressures consequent to higher employment and low levels of wages – it was thought could be managed through the social security system using what we call ‘market workfare’; by which we mean in-work means-tested social security benefits which have some measure of compulsion to work attached, such that it counts as workfare. The aim of in-work benefits is to reduce wages further so that the market can respond by creating more low-wage employment. By this stratagem it is the market which responds to labour demand, rather than the government creating work opportunities. The parliamentary neo-liberal right's approach to ‘market workfare’ is discussed, and then it is suggested that the marked similarities between New Labour and the previous parliamentary neo-liberal right can be explained because both administrations were attempting to manage the same regulatory dilemmas.

Enthusiasm for the expansion of markets in welfare reflects the currency of assumptions derived from rational choice theory among policy-makers. This article reviews recent evidence from the ESRC's Economic Beliefs and Behaviour programme that calls into question the basic tenet of the rational choice approach – that individual choices are driven by instrumental rationality – and argues that welfare markets require a normative framework in which trust plays an important role. Experimental evidence from recent work in economic psychology indicates that individuals often display a level of trust in market interactions that is hard to explain on the basis of simple rationality, but that such trust is fragile and easily undermined by egoistic action. Lack of attention to the normative issues which the rational choice approach fails to capture may lead to the design of markets which are inefficient in meeting the aims of policy-makers and which deplete the moral legacy on which many welfare markets in practice depend.

Contents

1 Social security and income maintenance

2 Health care

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 The voluntary sector

10 Local government

11 Gender

12 Demography