Throughout Western highly industrialised countries, there has been a marked shift toward more conservative social policies signalling a dismantling of the welfare state as part of the process of globalisation. This paper examines the aetiology of the (un)employment insurance programme in the Canadian context. Recently, legislators have tightened eligibility rules, lowered earnings replacement rates and altered coverage requirements. While these changes signal a shredding of the social safety net, they differentially impact on certain segments of the population. Despite official pronouncements of fairness, employment insurance changes intensify the subordination women experience in the paid labour force.

The paper addresses two dimensions of the debate on social capital – the analytical concept of Robert Putnam and the way it may become interrelated with political concerns debated in public. It is argued that in Putnams' concept two dimensions of social capital – social bonds and civic commitment – are interrelated in a way that suggests that social capital is something like the basis for good policy making. Against this, the open interrelationship between the two is stressed: one does not only need ‘social capital to make democracy work’ (Putnam) but often more democratic politics in order to make social capital work.

This article explores the findings of a research project carried out into the political awareness and attitudes of first year social science undergraduates. The results initially suggested that students generally lacked understanding of, and interest in, political structures and concepts and possessed poor news awareness and information-gathering skills. However, a more complex picture emerged that indicates a degree of engagement through responses to personal, moral and social questions, suggesting some degree of politicisation, yet such issues seem dislocated from their studies. This mixed picture poses serious challenges for social policy teachers seeking to enhance political awareness among their students.

In constructing this edition in the role as ‘guest editors’ Alan Aldridge and I believe that the theme of consumerism to be both stimulating and timely for social policy. The implications of consumerism – as a political ideology, as a set of social movements, and as the values of a consumer society – are being felt in a wide range of policy areas. Within social policy analysis, consumerism, along with welfarism, clientism and privatism has been advanced as one of the four key elements in the provision of and public orientation towards welfare services. Within sociology, there has been a rapid growth of books and journal articles addressing consumption as a key concept in the analysis of contemporary culture. One manifestation of this is the recent launch of the international Journal of Consumer Culture.

The concept of consumerism has multiple meanings, many of which are heavily value-laden; similarly, there are conflicting stereotypes of ‘the consumer’. After exploring the key dimensions of debates about consumerism and the consumer, this paper addresses some paradoxical consequences of the discourse of consumer empowerment in the field of health promotion and specifically in the ‘new public health’ movement.

This paper presents a case study of frauds committed by offshore companies in the California auto insurance market in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The opportunities for these crimes were created by two factors: the departure of legitimate insurance companies from the market and the adoption of deregulatory policies by state regulators. The case study illustrates some of the consequences of the increasingly common situation in the US in which consumers find themselves abandoned both by government and by legitimate providers of goods and services. The criminal consequences of this situation have also been observed in other markets.

Feminists campaigning for the abolition of prostitution have long argued that it is men who buy sex, rather than prostitute women, who should be penalised and reformed. In recent years, the phenomenon of ‘trafficking’ in persons has provided feminist abolitionists with a more high profile platform from which to lobby on prostitution issues, and they have found policy makers increasingly receptive to calls to penalise men who buy sex. This has encouraged some feminist abolitionists to forge alliances with those who would more usually be viewed as ‘enemies’ of feminism and other progressive social movements (police chiefs calling for more extensive police powers and tougher sentencing policy, anti-immigration politicians calling for tighter border controls, and moral conservatives urging a return to ‘family values’). This paper is concerned with the dangers of such liaisons. It begins with a brief review of the findings of recent research on the demand for commercial sexual services, then puts forward some reasons why feminist abolitionists should be cautious about calling on the state to penalise sex buyers.

This article focuses on two aspects of the real or imagined conflict between welfarism and consumerism; whether the experience of being a welfare user is somehow changed by living in a society in which people may see themselves less as workers and more as consumers; and whether the providers of welfare services and benefits can or should treat their users more like consumers than beneficiaries or even citizens with welfare rights.

C. Lodziak (2002) The Myth of Consumerism, Pluto Press, London. S. Miles, A. Anderson and K. Meetham (eds) (2002) The Changing Consumer: Markets and Meanings, Routledge, London and New York.