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.

Readers of the latest issue of the Journal of Social Policy will be aware that one of its regular features, the Social Policy Digest, is being relaunched as a web-based publication.

Readers will be aware that one of the Journal of Social Policy's regular features, the Social Policy Digest, is being relaunched as a web-based publication.

Readers will be aware that one of the Journal of Social Policy's regular features, the Social Policy Digest, is being relaunched as a web-based publication.

This paper reports findings from research into the possibility that mobility-related social exclusion could be affected by an increase in access to virtual mobility – access to opportunities, services and social networks, via the Internet – amongst populations that experience exclusion. Transport is starting to be recognised as a key component of social policy, particularly in light of a number of recent studies, which have highlighted the link between transport and social exclusion, suggesting that low access to mobility can reduce the opportunity to participate in society – a finding with which this research concurs. Following the identification of this causal link, the majority of studies suggest that an increase in access to adequate physical mobility can provide a viable solution to mobility-related aspects of social exclusion.

This paper questions the likelihood that increased physical mobility can, by itself, provide a fully viable or sustainable solution to mobility-related aspects of social exclusion. Findings from both a desk study and public consultation suggest that virtual mobility is already fulfilling an accessibility role, both substituting for and supplementing physical mobility, working to alleviate some aspects of mobility-related social exclusion in some sectors of society. The paper incorporates an analysis of the barriers to and problems with an increase in virtual mobility in society, and concludes that virtual mobility could be a valuable tool in both social and transport policy.

This article presents a theoretical critique of the employment provisions of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) (1995), focusing on the definition of disability. It argues that the underpinning medical assumption of the statutory definition of disability is detrimental to the achievement of disability equality in the workplace and is problematic for practitioners and Employment Tribunals. In particular there are four areas of significant confusion arising from the need for medical evidence, the lack of congruence between managerial and legal definitions, the focus on the negative aspects of disability and the fact that disability is often hidden. By exploring these four themes and drawing on comparisons with the other equality laws, the article concludes that the definition of disability contained in the DDA (1995) contradicts many of the principles of the liberal equality framework that underpins it. Finally the article considers the public policy implications and suggests a new statutory approach.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 was a landmark in American social policy. There were a number of objectives, but the primary purpose was to end the Aid to Families with Dependent Children programme which was a cash benefit paid to poor, very largely single-parent, families. The underlying theme was that AFDC had constituted a ‘something for nothing’ programme which had violated the primacy of work. The Act acknowledged that government had an initial duty to aid those falling on hard times, but also stated that there comes a time when government's obligation diminishes. This legislation has generated much interest in the UK, but there is a danger of important elements of the American story being overlooked. In order to understand, therefore, just what is going on this paper looks at the US welfare-to-work experiment on its own terms. The article looks at the movement behind reform and at why, despite evidence of increased hardship for some, five years on from passage the conventional wisdom is that PRWORA has been a success.

The independent sector domiciliary care market has always been an integral part of the social care system in England, but has become especially important in recent years. Its smooth running is crucial for the delivery of an effective community care policy. This paper argues that the motivations of these providers is an important aspect of this system's functioning, and derives a typology which captures the most important ingredients which theory and practice suggest should be taken into account in this regard. Four provider types are identified; they can be labelled satisfied team players; demoralised isolates; ambivalence-experiencing go-getters; and ambivalence-experiencing quiet lifers. The categories reflect both the balance of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, and these providers' situational contexts, including the nature of the relationships developed with local authority purchasers. The latter exert exceptional power and influence in social care markets in England.

The Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey of Britain made it possible first time to explore poverty using three different measures applied at the same time on the same sample. The measures were: lacking socially perceived necessities; being subjectively poor and having a relatively low income. These approaches are all commonly used to identify the poor and to measure poverty but rarely if ever in combination. In this article we have found that there is little overlap in the group of people defined as poor by these dimensions. There are reasons for this lack of overlap, connected to the reliability and validity of the different measures. However the people who are defined as living in poverty by different measures of poverty are different. This inevitably means that the policy response to poverty will be different depending on which measure is employed.

We have attempted to analyse overlap in two ways. First, by exploring the dimensions of poverty cumulatively, we have found that, the more dimensions people are poor on, the more they are unlike the non-poor and the poor on only one dimension, in their characteristics and in their social exclusion. Second, by treating particular dimensions as meriting more attention than others, we explored three permutations of this type and concluded that, while each permutation were more unlike the non-poor than those poor on a single dimension, they were not as unlike the non-poor as the cumulatively poor were. These results indicate that accumulation might be a better way of using overlapping measures of poverty than by giving priority to one dimension over another.

The implication of the paper is that it is not safe to rely on one measure of poverty – the results obtained are just not reliable enough. Surveys, such as the Family Resources Survey or the European Community Household Panel, which are used to monitor the prevalence of poverty, need to be adapted to enable results to be triangulated – to incorporate a wider range of poverty measures.

In Austria, the provision of long-term care is strongly based on unpaid female work within family networks and is characterised by a highly unequal division of informal long-term care-giving. In 1993, a major reform has been introduced in the Austrian long-term care system with a payments for care programme and a state–provinces treaty regarding service development at its heart. The objective of this article is to investigate the implications of the 1993 programme on gender divisions and on whether and in what ways the programme and processes set in train by the programme influence the role of women as carers. The question is approached by applying and broadening the concept of defamilisation in a process oriented way. The analysis suggests that from the informal carers' perspective long-term care allowances in the Austrian context mean some financial relief via ‘symbolic payments’. At the same time, the overall long-term care system prolongs existing gender divisions and sets in train new stratification processes among women as main carers with gender, class and space as dimensions reinforcing each other.

During an era of welfare retrenchment in the United States, the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Lifeline Universal Telephone Service evolved from residual means-tested programs to significant social policies. The cases demonstrate the opportunity points for social policy innovation that exist in the political climate of economic liberalisation. The essay describes patterns that do not simply prevent retrenchment but hint at politically advantageous policy designs that permit social policy expansion in the US welfare state context. I label this policy-making strategy stealth welfare. Moreover, by considering programs like Lifeline service the article draws attention to the evolving nature of social policy in advanced industrial economies.

Developing the equality agenda has been a major preoccupation of policy intervention in Northern Ireland since Direct Rule from London was instituted in 1972. This paper examines how policy has developed and its effectiveness. The paper highlights new developments since the Belfast Agreement of 1998 and examines in particular new attempts to mainstream equality in the policy process. The paper concludes by suggesting that the Northern Ireland experience has much to offer students of social policy elsewhere.

Standard accounts of unemployment protection and labour market policy reform tend to put France and the UK at opposing ends of the spectrum of values and policy directions in Europe. British efforts in the 1990s of switching emphasis from ‘passive’ benefit payment towards promoting participation in ‘active’ programmes of labour market integration are widely understood as a product of liberalism, individualism and increasing labour market flexibility, introducing a degree of workfare into the overall structure of unemployment support. By contrast, in France the resistance of traditional values and a ‘social treatment of unemployment’ are often portrayed as having put a brake on labour market reform and retrenchment of unemployment protection. After a reflection on the respective national discourses, the article challenges this view and points to a more complex reality that includes not only acknowledgement of labour market differences but also trends of convergence and counterintuitive developments. Secondly, it claims that in the 1990s Britain and France have both moved increasingly towards an unemployment policy based on activation, but in forms which reflect, to a great extent, different political incentive structures. The political implications of differentially institutionalised interests have in this way driven unemployment policy in different, but not opposing, directions. Recognition of this more nuanced reality should enable a better theoretical understanding of the social and political conditions for successful activation policies.

This paper is concerned with tracking the shifts in media discourses surrounding issues of race and social policy interventions through an examination of the newspaper media responses to the Brixton Inquiry and Scarman Report in 1982 and the Lawrence Inquiry and Macpherson Report that appeared eighteen years later in 1999. Brought about by two very different sets of historical events, albeit events which shared certain common features, this paper argues that the Scarman and Macpherson Reports have framed the changing story of ‘race relations’ in Britain in the last quarter of the twentieth century. While there have, inevitably, been comparisons between the content of the two Reports there has not been a comparative focus on the media reception of the findings and recommendations of the Inquiries. Using written and visual media text from five newspapers the paper seeks to map the extent to which media narratives around both race and race related policy-making have shifted during the course of almost two decades. The paper questions the boundaries of any such changes and examines what remains unchanged.

Questions concerning what it means to be a human agent and the capacities of those who receive welfare services to reflect upon and shape their lives, and the kinds of social conditions which create opportunities for such ‘reflexivity’, have begun to move to the centre of social policy and social work analysis. Using empirical evidence drawn from a study of child and woman protection, this paper argues that, contrary to claims that the concept of self-reflexivity as developed in the work of Beck and Giddens is of little relevance to marginalised citizens, in late-modernity the socially excluded are using social work and welfare services in creative ways to critically engage in life-planning, to find safety and healing. However, the data suggest that much greater specificity is needed in relation to the areas in which it is possible to act to change and develop the self and the social world in late-modernity. The paper argues for a complex theory of agency and reflexivity in welfare discourse which takes account of the intersection of structural disadvantage, intervention practices and personal biography and how people adjust to adversity and cope with toxic experiences and relationships in their lives. This helps to account for the limits to the capacities of agents to reflect and know why they act as they do and their capacities to act destructively, as well as providing for an appreciation of the creative, reflexive welfare subject.

An important consideration when designing social policy is the expected response of individuals to new taxes and expenditures. Response is predictable when individuals are assumed to optimise instrumentally. However, the extent to which instrumental behaviour can be deemed ‘representative’ has been questioned. Behavioural experiments reveal that individuals rely more heavily on low-cost signals and heuristics than on an optimising calculus. When costs and benefits are not easy to discern the consequences of action are difficult to estimate and perceptions of the intrinsic value of action assume greater relevance. Such considerations are particularly apposite when social policy affects altruism. In this paper the proposition is that policy signals impact on motivation systematically. Policy can have a greater (or lesser) impact than anticipated by instrumental response to the sum of its parts. Two examples prove illustrative. The first considers institutional reform and the supply of ‘merit wants’. The second focuses on recent proposals to nurture the voluntary charitable sector. In both cases, policy expectations based only on instrumental response prove misleading; the impact of policy signals on perceptions of the intrinsic value of action cannot be ignored.

The purpose of the paper is to capture a few vital features of the Swedish voluntary sector and to place them in an international perspective. The size and composition of the Swedish voluntary sector are discussed against the background of dominating theories in voluntary sector research. Special attention is also given to the role of the sector in the field of social welfare.

The authors present results from comparative research projects on the voluntary sector carried out in the latter part of the 1990s. It is shown that the size of the Swedish sector is as large as in other industrialised countries, although the composition and the form of the sector differs when compared to many other countries.

In weighing the importance of the sector, the authors point out that voluntary organizations make a crucial contribution in certain areas and combining work for interest and values with contributions for members and others. The characteristics of voluntary organizations and new trends within the field of social welfare are presented with the help of three ideal types.

Finally, the authors discuss some conceivable scenarios for the future of the Swedish voluntary sector.

A convincing argument can be made that US income maintenance policy would be better housed under the Secretary of Labour than with the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Begun almost 30 years ago, the transformation of public assistance policy into labour policy reached fruition with the passage of the groundbreaking Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), a bill that would dramatically transform the face of the American welfare state. Despite the inclusion of important welfare policies, the PRWORA was essentially labour policy clothed in welfare terminology. This article examines the metamorphosis of public assistance policy into labour policy and proposes alternatives to promote durable labour force attachment as well as ways to ease former recipients into the workforce through equity-based labour policies.

This article examines the activities of the Children's Committee of the London County Council (LCC) and what a contemporary newspaper referred to as a ‘daring experiment’: its efforts to discharge children from public care to Ireland in the 1950s and 1960s. Archival evidence reveals how Irish children were identified and separated from English children in care and, in many instances, sent to Ireland. It is maintained the dominant constructions of ‘Ireland’ played a role in the scheme. In addition, the LCC policy is examined and viewed in the context of other exclusionary practices centred on Irish people in Britain in the mid-twentieth century.

China has a long tradition of Confucianism, it has also been dominated by a communist ideology for a few decades. How did these different beliefs and principles influence its welfare system in the past? Towards which direction is the system shifting when the balance of power between the state (the dominant ideology) and society (with its own traditions) has been changed? This article analyses the case of ‘Foster Mother Villages’ and the Datong Social Welfare Institution. The case of Datong shows that, although the influence of official communist ideology was dominant in the overall system of child protection in China, traditional factors were also influential. The dominant role of official ideology has to be underpinned by financial support from the state. Where the government failed to provide the support, the traditional factor became dominant in the main institutional arrangements: that is the reason why institutional care failed to replace foster care in Datong city. In the past 50 years, spanning the eras of both planned economy and market reform in China, the Datong Social Welfare Institution has protected more than 6,500 orphaned, lost and abandoned children, and most of these children have finally achieved a normal family life.