The COVID-19 pandemic destabilised the political, social, and economic life of countries as it spread around the world. It posed multiple threats to individuals, societies, and across different domains of life, highlighting their intersectionality and uneven impacts. The paper focuses on the UK and South Korea, countries which took very different paths in framing and addressing the crisis. It draws on secondary data and an integrated critical human security and state capacity approach to compare how state responses, institutional capacity, and the mobilisation of policy instruments themselves construct constellations of insecurity which intersect with human security and vulnerability. It will demonstrate the structural constraints that have continued to shape vulnerability and the dynamics of human security and insecurity in turbulent times.

This article explores the effects of language hierarchies within SFI (Swedish for Immigrants) and LINC (Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada) national integration programmes and how discourses of civic integrationism framed around monolingualism and neoliberalism position adult migrant students in the liminal spaces between belonging and othering. Based on research findings obtained during multiple case study fieldwork in Finland and Canada, I examine the underlying norms and subtexts upon which practices of host language acquisition are founded. How students are positioned depends greatly on who serves as an arbiter over which expressions of linguistic diversity are deemed beneficial or obstructive to integration. Migrant liminality within integration educations could be debilitating while simultaneously fostering resistance in transgressing and reimagining essentialist integration policy and pedagogical goals, thus creating opportunities for transformation.

Guided by Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical approaches of symbolic capital and symbolic violence, this article examines the everyday mechanisms of ‘otherising’ language practices in schools that reinforce racism against marginalised youths in Sweden. The empirical material is based on focus group discussions and individual in-depth interviews with youths with migrant backgrounds in Sweden. The stories told by the participants in this study indicate how young people with immigrant backgrounds are discursively racialised and otherised as a group that does not belong to Swedish society, through the articulation of negative opinions, attitudes, and ideologies as part of established colonial discourses. It is argued that the marginalisation of migrants in Sweden, which is a consequence of social policy, has even resulted in utilisation of a marginalised language — one that deviates from the majority language in several different ways.

This article analyses burnout in governmental psychosocial and community programmes considering training/knowledge, the technical-professional field, the institutional framework, and networking, based on the experience of the intervention teams of three Chilean programmes. A qualitative methodology was used. Fifty people, most of them psychologists, participated in interviews and focus groups. The data were analysed according to Grounded Theory. Results indicate that burnout is a corrosive process in governmental psychosocial and community programmes. The causes of burnout are related to three gaps: between academic training and professional performance, between formulation and implementation, and between the obligation to work as part of a network and the limitations of this approach. Furthermore, we observed manifestations consequences and effects of burnout, and guidelines for improving the programmes. We discuss the institutional dimension of burnout in governmental psychosocial and community programmes and reflect on aspects that may improve team well-being and the quality of social policies.

The UK welfare landscape is increasingly challenging due to ongoing austerity involving public sector cuts, service retrenchment, and withdrawal of statutory responsibilities. This article shows that as the welfare state contracts, precarity increases and responsibility for service provision is progressively devolved to front-line individuals and service users. To illustrate, the article examines the use of assistive and everyday technologies to improve social housing residents’ quality of life based on a longitudinal mixed methods study conducted between 2020 and 2022. The findings highlight how housing providers can support person-led technology interventions for older residents, where minor improvements positively impact day-to-day living. However, interventions are often limited by practicalities, capacity, and cost. This article connects technological engagement in housing to the ongoing ‘responsibilisation’ of many areas of housing provision to social landlords and tenants. This suggests an extension of responsibility where social housing providers are papering over the cracks in the welfare state.

In 2022, the Welsh Government announced a basic income pilot for care leavers in Wales. This article uses this policy experiment to provide an insight into the relationship between devolution and social citizenship. This article makes two claims. First, the basic income pilot is part of an approach the Welsh Government has taken over the past twenty years to expand the idea of social citizenship to include rights to money. This is justified by a principle of progressive universalism, but this principle also has a wider UK context. Second, the financial constraints imposed by the UK Government frustrates the extent to which the Welsh Government can turn such experiments into reality.

In the UK, food banks and other forms of food aid have become a normalised support mechanism for those living at the sharp end of poverty. Drawing from accounts of those who have used, worked, and volunteered in two of England’s food banks during the Covid-19 pandemic, this article explores some of the key challenges that emerged for food aid during this unique period. In documenting these experiences, the paper concurs with previous work that has identified the expanding role of food banks in providing core welfare support, suggesting an increasingly extended welfare function of food aid. This has implications for understanding the effectiveness of welfare – and the appropriateness of our reliance on voluntary aid – in the post-pandemic period.

Improving community attitudes and behaviours is core to improving inclusion for people with disability. To identify ways to achieve such change, we analysed data from qualitative interviews with sixty-one expert stakeholders in Australia, informed by our preceding literature review on effective interventions. We identified five themes describing factors with the potential to change attitudes and behaviours to improve inclusion and reduce discrimination: ensuring people with disability have active presence across all life domains; leadership by people with disability, together with organisational and governmental leadership that values the diverse contribution of people with disability; a holistic approach to policy and interventions that targets multiple levels of change; long-term and adequately resourced initiatives to achieve structural and sustained change; and commitment to measuring and monitoring change interventions, to inform decisions and maintain accountability.

Despite significant evidence that age is an important factor in homelessness, life course considerations have not been systematically incorporated into the most influential theories of the factors that heighten the risk of becoming homeless. To address this oversight, this article examines variations in the risk of transitioning into homelessness among single adults in Dublin, Ireland. Consideration is given to how these transitions are shaped by the interaction between life course stage and changing personal circumstances, experiences, and relationships. It reveals that while some triggers of homeless, such as leaving institutional or private rented accommodation, are common experiences among all age groups, younger and older adults both experience distinct patterns of transition into homelessness. This understanding can help to strengthen the traditionally weak evidence base for homelessness prevention strategies, and in particular inform the design of targeted measures, that address the specific homelessness risks faced by some age groups.

The role of housing in providing a welfare asset has been widely explored. With the growth in home ownership between 1979 and 2008 and erosion of the welfare state, housing wealth has become part of the welfare mix in the UK. Here, we present analysis of housing outcomes, as measured in the UK Household Longitudinal Survey (UKHLS), among people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual in Great Britain. This shows that lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people have poorer housing outcomes than heterosexual counterparts: they are less likely to be homeowners; more likely to be private renters; and more likely to be social renters. With growing intergenerational inequalities in access to home ownership, we argue that, as openly LGB (and broader trans and queer) people being on average younger than the rest of the population, this could lead to LGB people, as a group, being excluded from asset-based welfare in the future as they age.

In this study the authors examine the impact of social incomes on social inequalities and social integration in the post-2010 populist welfare system in Hungary. A detailed quantitative analysis reveals the structure and distribution of social incomes among different groups in contemporary Hungarian society. This analysis includes factors such educational attainment, demographic structure and income of households, number of children, and deprivation index. The results of the research show that welfare redistribution has lost its ability to reduce inequalities and instead serves as a means of perpetuating social disparities.

This article used text mining processes to map continuity and change in policy principles of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in Australia and reflect on the underlying agendas of reform. Specifically, this research aimed to: (1) examine the substantive content of the NDIS legislative, operational and reform documentation, (2) assess changes in objects, principles and issues over time, and (3) discuss the implications of these shifting logics and agendas. To achieve this, text mining approaches were applied to ten key NDIS documents from 2011 to 2019.

The findings included a low prevalence of ‘rights’-based terminology, sustained attention to Scheme ‘costs’ but limited latterly attention to ‘sustainability’, and increasing prominence of interpersonal (e.g., ‘family’, ‘community’) and decision-making terminology (e.g., ‘decision’, ‘review’). How these shifts have influenced subsequent proposed reforms is explored and ongoing dilemmas about designing policy that ensures rights and entitlements, while balancing cost, sustainability and consistency are identified.

In recent decades, populist parties and leaders have obtained great political success. Since populism plays on voter dissatisfaction with the political elite, we might expect that dissatisfaction with the welfare state should also play a role. In this study, we suggest measures to assess welfare state performance (WSP), and we examine how assessment of WSP helps to explain support for the populist political parties – both rightwing and leftwing. Our findings are based on the sixth round of European Social Survey data that has a special module on democracy, which includes questions that enables us to measure WSP. This article shows that WSP is a significant predictor in explaining support for populist parties, but the dynamics differ between how WSP influences support for leftwing populist (LWP) and rightwing populist (RWP) parties.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, governments were mainly relaying on pre-pandemic policies when introducing changes to social policies. However, the crisis did lead to transformative action as well. In this article, we explored the novel direct payments, delivered beyond existing social risk categories such as unemployment or sickness. Our exploration demonstrates that most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries did not introduce novel payments. Exceptions were Australia, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Israel, Italy, Japan, Spain, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Seven countries also continued and modified payments while the crisis continued. All the novel direct payments met some of the characteristics of universal basic income (UBI). The idea of universality was realised in Japan and South Korea. The key findings of this study suggest that the COVID-19-related novel direct payments were primarily emergency benefits for people affected by the pandemic and interpreted as quasi-basic income in times of crisis.

This article begins by discussing some of the main approaches that have emerged to gender and family policy, before proceeding to discuss more modern trends. It begins by discussing institutional approaches, such as the male-breadwinner model, defamilialisation, degenderisation. Then it discusses cultural approaches, such as the national ideals of care, gendered moral rationalities, and Hakim’s preference theory. Then this article continues by briefly discussing attempts to broaden the discussion by bringing in children (including through the capabilities approach) and by adding an intersectional perspective.

In this study, we investigated the conceptual approaches to disability and ageing in two leading social scientific journals (Ageing & Society [AS] and Disability & Society [DS]) of the research fields that form the bases of policies on disability and ageing. This study aimed to identify the journals’ trajectories of conceptual development and their differences, and through that, find possible pathways for further interaction between the yet largely separate policy frameworks for disability and ageing. Our analysis showed considerable differences between the conceptual approaches of the two journals, with the dominant approach in DS being sociomaterial and individual-functional in AS. We conclude this paper by identifying the conceptual gaps in the respective journals, suggesting a further collaboration between the approaches in research as well as policies. These gaps could be potentially narrowed, leading to a constructive dialogue on older disabled people.

We provide an overview of transnational non-state actors and their agency that shape today’s out-of-home childcare around the world, specifically institutional residential childcare. Based on existing studies and desktop research, we reveal a broad range of complexly inter-related for-profit and non-profit actors promoting diverse, often conflicting policies and practices – with ambiguous implications for children in care. We focus on secular and faith-based international non-governmental organisations, transnational companies, private regulators, and individuals. Many of them promote family- and community-based care, yet many others support orphanages and other forms of institutional care. The growing number of transnational actors in residential childcare, the emergence of private regulatory frameworks, the advance of market-based, for-profit players, and the involvement of well-resourced religious communities make the future of child institutionalisation uncertain. We discuss how this transnational agency compares with other policy fields and propose directions for future investigations of how transnationalism impacts children in care.

The introduction of Universal Credit, a new means-tested benefit for working-aged people in the UK, entails a significant expansion of welfare conditionality. Due to mothers’ disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care, women are particularly affected by the new conditionality regime for parents who have the primary responsibility for the care of dependent children. This article draws upon qualitative longitudinal research with twenty-four mothers subject to the new conditionality regime to analyse the gendered impacts of this new policy and whether there is variation in experiences according to social class. The analysis demonstrates that the new conditionality regime devalues unpaid care and is of limited efficacy in improving sustained moves into paid work. It also shows that the negative gendered impacts of the conditionality within Universal Credit are at times exacerbated for working-class mothers.

Despite increasing attention to the importance of gender as an analytic to understanding neoliberal welfare reform, little attention has been paid to how motherhood operates to structure experiences. We propose the term ‘maternal activation’ to describe how homeless mothers as a group are subject to, and yet repurpose and resist, specific forms of social control characterising neoliberal paternalistic welfare structures. Drawing on a Critical Discourse Analysis of semi-structured interviews with fifty-four frontline homelessness workers, and eighteen homeless mothers, within the newly conditionalised Welsh homelessness system, we argue that homeless mothers have distinct experiences of neoliberal welfare governance. They navigate contradictory demands of attentive caregiving and economically engaged citizenship, amid devaluation of care created by a neoliberal emphasis on entrepreneurialism. However, performing intense motherhood offers strategic advantage for homeless mothers by enabling them to be read as ‘legible’. This highlights the utility of motherhood as a framework to understand welfare citizenship.