The aim of this paper is draw out some policy lessons from a study of self-help activity amongst 200 households in deprived urban neighbourhoods of Southampton. Commencing with a critique of the popular prejudice that promoting self-help should be opposed in case it leads to a demise of formal welfare provision, the paper then interrogates the empirical evidence to understand and explain the nature and extent of such work in deprived neighbourhoods. Finding that self-help is a crucial component of household coping practices, but that no-earner households are unable to benefit from this work to the same extent as employed households, the paper proposes both bottom-up and top-down solutions to tackle the barriers to participation in self-help amongst unemployed households. In particular, it calls for a modification to Working Families Tax Credit and the creation of Community Enterprise so as to recognise and value much of the self-help activity that currently takes place but remains unrecognised and unvalued.

This article applies Le Grand's distinction between knightly and knavish motivations to the behaviour of dentists in choosing whether to treat patients on the NHS or privately. Using national quantitative and discursive surveys, it shows that dentists' notions of their own interests centre on independent small-business entrepreneurship and their professional culture defines patient interest in terms of access to clinically autonomous practice based on a restorative paradigm. Government attempts to promote preventive dentistry in the context of the weakening in dentists' bargaining position as general dental health improves and the determination of the profession to protect high remuneration have led to conflict. Both knavish and knightly motives (understood from the perspective of dentists' professional culture) lead dentists to exit from the NHS. Any analysis of ‘robust’ policies, designed to accommodate both motivations, must take into account social factors such as professional cultures which influence how practitioners understand their own interests and those of their clients.

Five evaluations of the same community regeneration project in Newcastle upon Tyne are compared. It is argued that the separate evaluations are weak in method, atheoretical, ahistorical and lacking in a sense of social structure. To progress, community evaluations must typologise communities rather than treat community as a nebulous quality of relationships. A typology is offered. Further, it is suggested the community regeneration in this case was an extension of urban governance which artificially constructed what is called an ‘inverse’ community.

This article examines the relationship between disability, generation and social policy. The moral and legislative framework for the post-war welfare settlement was grounded in a long-standing cultural construction of ‘normal’ life course progression. Disability and age (along with gender) were the key components in this construction, defining broad categories of welfare dependency and labour force exemption. However, social changes and the emergence of new policy discourses have brought into question the way in which we think about dependency and welfare at the end of the twentieth century. The article suggests that, as policy-makers pursue their millennial settlement with mothers, children and older people, they also may be forced to reconstruct the relationship between disabled people and the welfare state.

Lone mother families are seen as a major policy problem facing governments throughout the OECD. Responses to this problem in New Zealand, as in many other countries, are couched in terms of imposing work and training programmes to encourage exit from dependency on government financial support. This article uses ideas of ‘needs talk’ and discourse coalitions to explore the language of policy framing. Two periods in the development of the women's movement in New Zealand during which opportunities within political institutions have been available to women are examined. It is argued that an unintended consequence of naming needs for many women has been to contribute to the marginalisation of needs of lone mothers and indirectly to encourage policies which seek control and normalisation of this group.

Australia's post-war programme of mass immigration has been accompanied by growing ethnic and racial diversity. This process of diversification accelerated markedly from the 1970s onwards after the abandonment of the White Australia Policy in the 1960s. Despite this diversification, Australia has been able to sustain itself as a peaceful liberal democracy. It is the contention of this article that Australia's policies of multiculturalism have played an important role in contributing to this state of relative peacefulness. This article seeks to assemble some evidence from the Australian experience to ‘test’ the notion that the peacefulness of Australian society may, in some measure, be understood as a product of the contribution of its policies of multiculturalism to engendering and reinforcing those very virtues which liberal democracies require in order to sustain themselves over time.

Contents

1 Social security and income maintenance

2 Health (formerly 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 Government (formerly Local government)

11 Gender

12 Demography