Welfare governance in elder care has undergone significant changes, but we know less about the processes and actors of making welfare governance. This is problematic, as the concern for process is a key strength of the welfare governance perspective. Based on a case study of elder care in Denmark, and drawing on studies of professions, the aim is to analyse how welfare professions contribute to the making of welfare governance. Our analysis shows that welfare professions bring unique resources into play. They have strong professional agency, drawing on both broader institutional roles and more specific professional projects. The institutional work itself is highly complex and the welfare professions combine not only formal and informal coordination, but also do so in ways that are closely tailored to specific contexts. The analysis makes important empirical and theoretical contributions to the study of welfare governance in elder care.

Many social workers today are critical of what they regard as their profession's conventional concern with remedial social welfare. This criticism has been voiced with special reference to developing countries, and some social workers have suggested alternative roles for social work in the third world. Among these it has been suggested that social workers should take prime responsibility for social development planning in the developing countries. But this suggestion is unrealistic. Social workers are not likely to be asked to participate in national social policy formulation and planning until they have legitimized their claim to professional status and public recognition and demonstrated their ability to deal with the pressing problems of poverty in the third world through direct service.

Public support for the welfare state – and the policies constituting it – has long been a topic of research. Previous research on support for redistribution has tended to focus on how either country-level characteristics (particularly those relating to the macro-economy such as levels of economic development or income inequality) or individual-level political factors (such as left-right political orientation and sociodemographic factors) shape support for redistribution. To date, empirical research has insufficiently tested how macroeconomic context and individual political orientations interact. Research has also obscured whether the effects of macroeconomic context hold cross-sectionally (across country contexts) or longitudinally (within countries over time). Drawing on data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), this article examines the cross-sectional (between-country) and longitudinal (within-country) interactive relationships involving economic development and income inequality (on one hand) and left–right political orientations (on the other) in shaping preferences for redistribution. Results indicate that there are larger left–right cleavages in attitudes in wealthier countries, more unequal countries, and countries where inequality is increasing. These findings challenge the dominant practice of focusing exclusively on additive effects of individual-level or country-level factors by showing the importance of paying attention to cross-level interactions.

In this paper, we analyse the impact of government policies on income distribution and poverty in Switzerland. First, we give an overview of the Swiss welfare system and provide an estimate of the poverty problem in this country. Second, we discuss some major problems of fiscal incidence analysis. Third, we examine the impact of taxes and expenditures on income distribution in Switzerland using a budget incidence approach. The analysis is based mainly on the first nationwide representative Income and Wealth Survey 1980 conducted by the authors. The major findings are the following:

1 The government budget, including the social security system, has a significant redistributive effect which is due mainly to expenditures rather than to taxation.

2 Direct taxes reduce income inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient; indirect taxes increase it. The net effect of all taxes is to reduce income inequality.

3 The redistributive effect of social welfare expenditures is larger than that of other government expenditures.

In the past two decades ‘decarceration’ and ‘deinstitutionalisation’ have been key themes of youth justice in the West. Restrictions have been imposed on the courts, limiting their ability to hand out residential and custodial training sentences to young offenders. As an alternative, resources have been redirected into the development and expansion of community-based rehabilitation programmes. However, in Hong Kong large numbers of young offenders continue to be placed in residential and custodial institutions after very brief criminal careers, and for crimes which do not pose a serious risk to the community. This article makes use of a recently published research study to discuss the experiences of young male offenders in the Hong Kong youth justice system, and to consider why community-based rehabilitative programmes as direct alternatives to residential training and custody have been slow to develop. It then goes on to explore how from a cultural perspective the use of community-based programmes might be justified and how they could be developed around existing sentencing guidelines.

Danish social policies have a gender neutral approach, combined with an aim of autonomy for individuals and a system of universal social policies. This approach has moved Denmark away from the use of moral regulation of single mothers and a strong male income earner model in social policy. It has highlighted men's roles as fathers, as well as women's roles as workers and has therefore a lot of advantages. Problems do occur though when the obligation to work or to be a parent in reality differs for men and for women; this becomes clear when we focus on single parents.

Old-age poverty in Korea remains exceptionally high among OECD countries despite a significant expansion in pension expenditure. This article presents an institutional explanation for such a puzzle. Using ‘targeting within universalism’ as the analytic framework, this study examines the institutional effects of pension models on old-age poverty in Korea. Firstly, comparative analysis finds that universal provision of pensions negatively affects old-age poverty independent of the expenditure size, identifying Korean pensions as the least universal among OECD countries. Secondly, institutional analysis of the Korean pension system explains why the expenditure growth left a large share of the elderly with no or a partial pension. Finally, microsimulation analysis examines alternative assistance pension models for their potential to alter poverty outcomes. Strikingly, universal models alleviate old-age poverty more cost-effectively than the extant targeting model, questioning the efficiency-based justification for low-income targeting. In particular, the universal floor model appears to be the most effective, allowing greater benefits to the poorer without a means test. Even for assistance benefits, universal models may better remedy poverty under such conditions as low take-up among the needy, prevalence of low-income incidence, and pro-rich distribution of extant social transfers.

Introduced in the United Kingdom in 2012, Universal Credit (UC) is a welfare benefit that replaces six working-age ‘legacy’ benefits for out-of-work and low-income people. Designed with the aim of simplifying benefits and incentivising paid work, UC represents a deepening of conditionality in the British welfare state. Considering these developments, this paper quantitatively investigates the effect of UC on recipients’ life satisfaction. Data from the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study is analysed, primarily using a fixed-effects regression approach. Results reveal a significantly negative effect of UC recipience on life satisfaction. Robustness checks and alternative model specifications, including difference-in-differences and inverse probability weighting, confirm this finding. Additionally, mediation models give credence to the idea that UC also negatively affects life satisfaction indirectly by increasing psychological distress. Heterogeneity tests indicate that UC has a less negative effect on single parents’ life satisfaction compared to non-parents. Meanwhile, UC has a significantly more negative effect on the life satisfaction of people not in paid work (for reasons other than unemployment) than those in paid work. Discussion focuses on the potential effect of welfare conditionality specifically, and implications for future research and policy are explored.

Britain’s Household Benefit Cap restricts the amount of benefit income unemployed households can receive. In this article, it is examined using material held at the UK’s National Archives recording debates about a proposal to introduce a similar policy – a benefit limit – in the first Thatcher Conservative government elected in 1979. It was rejected, but the Household Benefit Cap was introduced three decades later. The article locates debates about, and the practice of restricting benefit income, in perennial social security concerns with the financial incentive to do waged work. The article argues that while there are material differences that help explain the different policy outcomes in 1980 and 2010, they can primarily be explained by changing ideas about the roles of social security policy, including the development of the ‘incentive paradigm’ concerned with manipulating behaviour; a loss of concern with the hardship that would come with the introduction of a benefit restriction and a view that institutions other than the state are better placed to address poverty and buttress work incentives.

This article uses extensive ethnographic methods to explore the lived reality of a Danish workfare programme. The programme requires social assistance recipients to perform manual labour for their benefits at municipal work sites. The contrast between the political rhetoric that justifies the workfare programme and the lived reality of it is striking. While the programme is justified as a means to put the passive unemployed to work, there is a norm of working less, not more at the site. The participants spend most of their time waiting or conducting seemingly meaningless work assignments. However, over time, the majority of the participants begin to embrace this modus operandi at the site. This article answers this apparent paradox by turning to concepts from the anthropology of industrial work. Such concepts allow us to analyse how camaraderie exists amongst participants as well as work supervisors at the site. Particularly, the camaraderie is based on group solidarity, an informal regulation of work efficiency and an alternative system of value. Hereby, the article adds to previous findings on the ‘lived experiences’ of welfare recipients.

This paper presents qualitative evidence about managers' perceptions of retrenchment in the National Health Service in England. It outlines the financial situation of six case-study district health authorities during the expenditure crisis of 1987/8, and presents the results of an interview survey of district general managers and directors of finance about the implementation of cutbacks. Similar policies of cost-containment and service reduction are mirrored by similarity in the views held by managers and treasurers. Key concerns included the need for a reconstruction of local priorities in service provision, and the advocacy of an extension of managerial control over hospital consultants. These issues are discussed briefly in the context of the recent government proposals to introduce market mechanisms into the NHS, and wider arguments about medical dominance and bureaucratic/professional conflicts.

One in six of the population is an old-age pensioner and everyone has the prospect of becoming one in their time. It is therefore unsurprising that pensions have been a subject of much political debate. There has, however, been little investigation of what people think about pensions. Politicians have tended to declare that pensions are too low but have in practice been constrained in raising them by their conception of the willingness, or unwillingness, of the working population to pay for higher pensions.

This article explores the moral politics of the welfare state and the social conflicts that underlie them. We argue that existing research on the moralism of redistributive and social policy preferences is overly one-dimensional, with a longstanding concentration on attitudes toward welfare state beneficiaries. To widen our understanding of the phenomenon, we introduce the concept of motive attribution: that is, how people answer the question “what drives others to take the positions that they hold?” Doing so allows us to shift the subject of moralistic attitudes, with a move toward uncovering what citizens think of those who hold a given social policy stance. The article then lays out a first systematic overview of motive attributions using an original dataset built from nationally representative surveys conducted in ten Western democracies. Comparing responses across these countries, we draw out important cross-national differences in ascribed motives, including within welfare state regime types.

This article investigates the impact of NPM reforms on two prominent welfare state professions; medical doctors and teachers. The case study context is Sweden, where the impact of NPM led to a series of reforms in health care and education after 1990. The focus in the paper is on professional autonomy, which can be seen as a core trait in professional work. The findings in the article point to both medical doctors and teachers having lost professional autonomy as a result of NPM-reforms, particularly with regards to the dimensions of work organization and evaluation. Autonomy in individual decision-making seems to have been least affected, even if there are indications of this being infringed upon as well. Despite these broad similarities, the loss of autonomy is found to be more pronounced in the case of teachers. One reason behind this difference, which manifests itself in teachers having become subject to higher level of direct administrative control by school managers while at the same time experiencing a more distinct loss of autonomy to evaluate their work, appears to be that medical doctors have been more successful in establishing themselves as experts in relation to new public audit agencies.

This article investigates the ethnic patterning of exit from means-tested benefits in a UK town. Lone parents in the UK face high risks of poverty and high rates of receipt of means-tested, out-of-work benefits. There has been extensive policy concern with lone parents' poverty and with potential ‘welfare dependency’. Investigation of welfare dynamics has unpacked the notion of welfare dependency, and has stimulated policy to better understand the factors associated with longer rather than shorter durations. However, within this analysis, there has been little attention paid to ethnicity. This is despite the fact that the extensive literature on the UK's minority ethnic groups has emphasised diversity in both rates of lone parenthood and risks of poverty. To date we have little understanding of ethnic variation in lone parents' welfare dynamics. Using a data set drawn from administrative records, this article analyses the chances of leaving means-tested benefit for a set of lone mothers in a single town, exploring whether there is variation by ethnic group. We find that, controlling for basic demographic characteristics, there is little evidence to suggest that ethnicity affects the chances of benefit exit, even between groups where rates of lone parenthood are very different.

The practice of social administration is founded on the human response to problems of industrialization and urbanization. Motivation and effort towards ‘social service’ were once taken for granted, but this seems no longer justified in the light of changes in the material and intellectual contexts in which service to the community is undertaken. These changes include the politicization of the service ideal; the emergence of radical social work; the managerialism of service reorganization; new interpretations of professional accountability; and new fashions in sociology and psychology. Although hitherto stable assumptions have been questioned, the dogmatic basis for recent developments and the reactions to them justify a fresh evaluation of the human factor in social administration. The human factor remains the basic resource in identifying and meeting social needs.

This article reconsiders the origins of ‘self management’ in pre-school daycare services in the light of new data from a national study of playgroups in England. In the absence of comprehensive nursery education, playgroup provision has mushroomed in Britain. ‘Parental involvement’ has been a central premise in the philosophy of playgroups. However, data now available suggest that aspects of this premise require reassessment.

The study establishes that ‘parents’ who are playgroup managers are in fact mothers mostly drawn from white, higher income, higher educated groups. Furthermore, they tend to be resistant to taking on such management functions. Playgroup workers in turn are dissatisfied with available levels of support and effective management. Both groups however are subject to structural pressures – not least of which is women's increased participation in paid employment – and many of these pressures are likely to increase in the 1990s.

The future management of this sector therefore requires reconsideration within a broader public sector policy framework. Such an approach should address both the real cost of effective management and such employment policies as may facilitate the involvement of all parents – irrespective of gender, income or ethnic group – in services for their children.