The first part of the paper argues that the care relationship is crucial to securing care quality, which has implications for the way in which quality is achieved and measured. However, for more than twenty years, governments have emphasised the part that increasing market competition and, more recently, user choice of services can play in driving up the quality of care. The second part of the paper analyses the development of social care services for older people, from the reform of 1990 to the changes following the general election of 2010. The paper goes on to examine whether competition and choice are in any case enough to result in ‘good care’, given the evidence of limitations both in the amount of choice available and in how far older people are able or willing to choose. It is argued that if ‘good care’ depends disproportionately on the quality of the care relationship, then more attention should be paid to the care workforce, which has received relatively little comment in recent government documents.

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.

There is evidence that teacher judgements and assessments of primary school pupils can be systematically biased. This paper tests the proposal that stereotyping plays a part in creating these judgement inequalities and is instrumental in achievement variation according to income-level, gender, special educational needs status, ethnicity and spoken language. Using 2008 data for almost 5,000 pupils from the Millennium Cohort Study, it demonstrates biases in teachers’ average ratings of sample pupils’ reading and maths ‘ability and attainment’ which correspond to every one of these key characteristics. Findings go on to suggest that stereotypes according to each of income-level, gender, special educational needs status and ethnicity all play some part in forming these biases. The paper strengthens the evidence that stereotyping of pupils may contribute to assessment and thereby attainment inequalities, and concludes that an increased focus on tackling this process may lead to greater parity and a narrowing of gaps.

The article is focused on the analysis of flexicurity arrangements in the Italian case with a twofold aim. The first aim is substantive: analysing and evaluating recent labour market reforms in Italy with particular reference to the possible emergence of a new flexicurity model. The second goal is to contribute to the debate on labour market development and flexicurity by enriching and refining the available analytical tools. More specifically, we argue that the traditional conceptual ‘lenses’ focusing on the ‘insiders’/‘outsiders’ divide are inadequate to grasp the ongoing changes in the Italian labour market. This leads us to identify a third category of workers, the ‘mid-siders’, who are increasingly relevant in the Italian case and may prove to be relevant in other labour markets too. Moreover, we introduce the concept of ‘selective flexicurity’, referring to the fact that in the Italian case flexibility and security measures have been applied differently across the various categories of workers.

This paper presents findings from a qualitative longitudinal study into the lived experiences of welfare reform in the UK. The study set out to explore how individuals directly affected by changes to the benefits system experienced and responded to these reforms. A small group of out-of-work benefits claimants were interviewed three times between 2011 and 2013. The research found that ‘getting by’ on benefits often entailed substantial hard ‘work’, which was frequently time intensive, with many participants also engaged in other forms of socially valuable contribution such as caring and volunteering. A strong orientation towards paid employment was evident across most of the sample and fluid movements in and out of work, characteristic of the ‘low-pay, no-pay’ cycle, was quite common. Alongside a discussion of these findings, this paper considers the (mis)match between the government rhetoric of benefits as a ‘lifestyle choice’ and individual lived experiences.

Individuals and families may encounter difficulty making ends meet on many dimensions and there are a large number of measures designed to identify this group. In general, there is agreement that all of the approaches capture different pieces of the puzzle, while no single indicator can yield a complete picture. In an attempt to understand this multidimensional aspect of poverty, several measures are examined in this article: the official US poverty measure, a relative poverty measure, an experimental measure following recommendations of the US National Academy of Sciences, an index of material hardship, a measure of household debt, and responses to a question about inability to meet expenses. This study uses the 1996 panel of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). The SIPP is a longitudinal survey that allows us to examine all of these various indicators for the same people over the period from 1996 to 1998. The study uses regression analysis to assess the relationship between and among the various indicators of economic hardship.

Debates on welfare reforms have revolved around institutional inertias with the emphasis on institutions as structures. We argue that political discourses work in the same vein and create continuities constraining the array of possible policy options – political frames as carriers of institutional inertia and path dependence. The data are based on political debates on child home care in Finland and Sweden. The ‘trap for women’ frame became dominant in the Swedish discourse, while in Finland ‘freedom to choose’ has been hegemonic. According to the Swedish frame, public day care offers children the best preconditions for later development and enhances social equality, whereas in Finland care at home with all its positive characteristics was contrasted with bureaucratic institutional care. The article highlights how politicians have used these hegemonic discourses to maintain the legitimacy of certain policy options.

The welfare state is the distinctive contribution of Europe to the modern world. Other places do market capitalism better, and democracy, art and culture at least as well. However, the future of the European welfare state is in question, as a result of economic globalisation, pressures from population ageing and other social changes and the dominance of an EU primarily committed to creating an open market to rival that of the US. An important recent critique of the welfare state project argues that social cohesion and diversity are simply incompatible – with the implication, that as Europe grows more diverse, welfare states will wither. An influential variant of this argument uses statistical modelling to support the argument that greater ethnic diversity accounts for the failure of the US to develop political support for a welfare state on European lines (and implies that Europe's future is American). This article demonstrates that the model used fails to take into account the significance of left politics in European countries. The evidence is that the left substantially counteracts the impact of greater diversity on welfare states in Europe. The case that increased migration will undermine popular commitment to social spending is not proven.

Bourdieu conceptualises most aspects of social life in terms of fields, which constitute sites of struggle over a central stake. The resources which are used in these struggles, and whose appropriation is at stake, are defined as types of capital: economic, cultural, social and symbolic. Each field involves a set of players, of agents who are engaged in practices and strategies on the basis of an habitus. It is contended in this article that such an approach can be usefully mobilised to develop a sociological analysis of welfare. The model has to be slightly altered to make it more adequate for the study of the welfare field. First, what Bourdieu calls political capital is given a more prominent place. Secondly, the focus is more definitely set on the rates at which types of capital are converted in the welfare field. It is argued that such a model satisfies the central requirements of a sociology of welfare, in that it places welfare activities within the wider social context while grasping their internal dynamic. It provides an effective framework for addressing the main questions which are raised by a sociology of welfare.

Rights and responsibilities lie at the heart of New Labour's social policies. Children and young people present a challenge to the social contractual model of responsibility evident in policy spheres. Government is torn between the notion that children are dependent on parents for well-being, and the idea that individuals should take responsibility for their own actions. The article examines the problem of childhood in social policy through an examination of the conflicting messages emerging out of family policy and anti-social behaviour policies. Policy discourses are then critically evaluated with reference to a qualitative study of children's ideas about responsibility. The authors suggest that policies relating to children can learn from children's private experience of responsibility in the home, and from the complex and rich ways in which children understand the moral and relational components of responsibility.

This paper examines the ‘sport, development and peace’ (SDP) sector which has grown substantially at a global level over the past decade. The SDP sector is located conceptually within the broader ‘global civil society’, a highly contested policy field that features diverse political actors and ideologies. The main discussion sets out four ideal-types within the SDP policy domain that tend to be associated with specific institutions: first, neo-liberal social policies, as embodied by private or commercial interests, such as transnational corporations and forms of ‘corporate social responsibility’; second, ‘developmental interventionist’ policies associated with non-governmental and community-based organisations; third, ‘strategic developmentalist’ policies associated with national and international governmental organisations, and sport federations; and, fourth, social justice policies associated with new social movements and critical NGOs. Each of these domains is examined in detail. Three main types of interrelationship across the domains are then identified. The paper concludes by arguing for a more sophisticated understanding of sport's policy capabilities, stronger cross-domain partnerships and a renewal of the SDP sector through a fresh focus on social justice issues.

A conceptual framework is developed for analysing UK social policy with respect to work, employment, inclusion and income. A range of possibilities for ‘productive engagement in work’ (PEW) outside the home are identified, ranging from formal employment, through informal employment, working for local community currencies, to unpaid voluntary work, each attracting particular policy responses, according to the hegemonic discourse of social exclusion, namely a liberal individualistic model which sees insertion into the labour market as the solution to exclusion. A new initiative is examined which is increasingly being adopted by local authorities in their efforts to tackle social exclusion and build social capital, namely ‘time banks’: a type of community currency which rewards people in time credits for the work they put into their neighbourhoods. Time banks are found to occupy a space in between what is already known about informal employment, LETS (Local Exchange Trading Schemes) and volunteering, raising a number of issues for policy makers and practitioners. While time banks may be promoted within the UK government's social inclusion remit as a means of increasing job-readiness through volunteering, they have wider and deeper implications. They represent a response to a radical social democratic understanding of social exclusion and hence exert a collective effort to redefine what is considered ‘valuable work’, and thus present an alternative to hegemonic paradigms of work and welfare; their greatest potential is as a radical tool for collective social capital building, resulting in more effective social, economic and political citizenship, and hence social inclusion. Policy recommendations are made to enable time banks to flourish and provide a powerful tool for achieving social inclusion objectives.

The life-history method is a valuable tool for social policy research. Taking an anthropological approach to studying policy, the article analyses the usefulness of the method using data drawn from a set of recently collected life-work histories from the UK. These life-work histories document the experiences of individuals who have crossed over between the public sector and the ‘third sector’ during their careers. The article first briefly reviews the strengths and weaknesses of the life-history method, then goes on to analyse selected issues and themes that emerge from the data at both the contextual and the individual levels. The article concludes that life-history work adds to our knowledge of the relationship between these two sectors, and of the processes through which ideas about ‘sector’ and policy are constructed and enacted.

This article argues for the centrality of the concept of social identity in contemporary analyses of social policy. It attempts to transcend arguments for or against postmodernism and argues that debates about ‘identity and difference’, when combined with an analysis of social relations, need not undermine a focus on structural inequalities and should be at the heart of theoretical considerations in social policy. It suggests that the concept of social identity is still poorly understood in recent debates and goes on to outline a provisional theory which distinguishes between ontological and categorical identity. Such a discussion, it is argued, may help suggest ways in which the role of social policy in the process of identity formation may be better understood.

Recent years have seen an explicit focus on parenting as a designated area of policy intervention. Parents are posed as in need of education and advice from ‘experts’, under conditions of social change. This article counterposes norms concerning who parents should turn to for support that government policies aim to inculcate with those held by parents themselves, drawing on a national representative sample of parents of 8–12 year old children. It uses a ‘consensus baseline’ approach to look at parents' perceptions of social change in parenting support, and whether or not they hold norms concerning whom to turn to and for what sort of help in parenting: practical, emotional, behaviour, health and education. Our results indicate that policy-makers have more work to do if they want to achieve a cultural step-change in norms held by parents about who is best placed to help and advice them. Family, followed by friends, are (still) regarded as the people to turn to for most childrearing issues, with ‘experts’ only providing practical help and advice about long institutionalised areas of children's lives. We also show that norms about parenting support are related to parents' differential social positioning regarding gender, class and ethnicity.

Various authors point to the connection between public perceptions of poverty and institutionalised strategies of dealing with the poor. The way the general public perceives the poor, and especially the causes of poverty, is generally assumed to have a profound influence on the legitimacy of anti-poverty policies. Yet studies on popular perceptions of and attributions for poverty are relatively infrequent. Moreover, a considerable share of existing research appears conceptually and/or methodologically inadequate. This article provides a critical review of existing literature that is interwoven into the discussion of the two most common approaches to studying lay poverty attributions: the factor analytical approach and the forced-choice-question approach. With respect to the latter, we present an empirical analysis and interpretation of the four response categories that constitute the core of the forced-choice question included in Eurobarometer.

This paper reviews recent research on take-up with a view to identifying the most promising lines of further enquiry. In the late 1970s take-up research seemed to be foundering in the face of the complexity of the factors affecting claiming decisions. Progress came via the development of models of the claiming process. The most influential postulated a series of thresholds which claimants must pass in a set sequence on the way to claiming a benefit. One question for future research is whether this model is still the best starting point or whether there are others which capture the key factors and their interaction more fully and accurately. Another approach is to look at claiming decisions indirectly by applying multivariate techniques to continuous survey data to examine the relationship between variables such as age, income and housing tenure and differing probabilities of claiming. A second question is what the two approaches can offer each other. Overhanging all the issues facing take-up research is the problem of sampling a population—eligible non-recipients—for which, almost by definition, no suitable sampling frame exists. The paper concludes by examining various options for identifying this elusive group.

The idea that the happiness and wellbeing of individuals should shape government policy has been around since the enlightenment; today such thinking has growing practical policy relevance as governments around the world survey their populations in an effort to design social policies that promote wellbeing. In this article, we consider the social determinants of subjective wellbeing in the UK and draw lessons for social policy. Survey data are taken from the ‘Measuring National Wellbeing Programme’ launched by the UK's Office for National Statistics in 2010. For the empirical strategy, we develop bivariate and multivariate logistic regression models, as well as testing for interaction effects in the data. The findings show that wellbeing is not evenly distributed within the UK. Socio-demographic characteristics such as age, gender, ethnicity, employment, household composition and tenure all matter, as does health status. Influencing population wellbeing is inherently complex, though, that said, there is a clear need to place greater emphasis on the social, given the direction of current policy.

Despite the fact that employment rates have increased in many European countries since the beginning of the 2000s, poverty rates have stagnated and in some countries even increased. In the welfare state literature, it has been argued that these disappointing poverty trends may be partly attributable to the reforming of traditional welfare state programmes into social investment policies, because the latter are less redistributive. To date, there are only a few systematic comparative empirical analyses which focus on the outcomes of social investment policies. This paper contributes to the social investment literature by empirically analysing the distributional effects of shifts from traditional welfare state arrangements to social investment policies in fifteen European countries for the period 1997–2007. Our results suggest that the detrimental effect of social investment policies, described in some specific cases in the literature, cannot be generalised across a larger group of European countries. However, for European countries other than the Nordic countries, the results provide some evidence for a linkage between stagnating or increasing poverty trends and shifts in expenditures to new welfare state programmes.

Poverty research has increasingly focused on persistent income poverty, both as a crucial social indicator and as a target for policy intervention. Such an approach can lead to an identification of a sub-set of poor individuals facing particularly adverse circumstances and/or distinctive problems in escaping from poverty. Here we seek to establish whether, in comparison with cross-sectional measures, persistent poverty measures also provide a better measure of exclusion from a minimally acceptable way of life and relate with other important variables in a logical fashion. Our analysis draws upon the first three waves of the ECHP and shows that a persistent poverty measure does constitute a significant improvement over its cross-sectional counterpart in the explanation of levels of deprivation. Persistent poverty is related to life-style deprivation in a manner that comes close to being uniform across countries. The measure of persistence also conforms to our expectations of how a poverty measure should behave in that, unlike relative income poverty lines, defining the threshold level more stringently enables us to identify progressively groups of increasingly deprived respondents. Overall the persistent poverty measure constitutes a significant advance on cross-sectional income measures. However, there is clearly a great deal relating to the process of accumulation and of erosion of resources, which is not fully captured in the persistent poverty measure. In the absence of such information, there is a great deal to be said for making use of both types of indictors in formulating and evaluating policies while we continue to improve our understanding of longer-term processes.