This article takes a novel approach to exploring the business case for diversity (BCD) as it has been adopted in the British National Health Service (NHS), principally in terms of ‘race’ and ethnicity for the sake of clarity and manageability. It draws on realist perspectives that consider issues of context, mechanism and outcome. It concludes that transferring policies from other countries and sectors is problematic, and consequently that the application of the BCD to the NHS must be treated with extreme caution.

Rights problems such as debt, employment, welfare benefits and family problems are widespread. They are problems of everyday life, affecting many people and many aspects of people's lives and are now well documented. In contrast, there has been little research on the role of family and friends when experiencing a problem and seeking advice. Drawing on comprehensive qualitative research, this article explores how people seeking advice for their rights problems rely on family and friends for help in the advice-seeking process. The research shows that help lies on a continuum from encouraging people to seek advice to assistance with the tasks necessary for problem resolution. The implications of this for service design are considered.

This article examines how social policy influences social cohesion within a London borough. The focus is on the degree to which civil society organisations facilitate the representation of migrants within the public sphere. The policies considered are those introduced by New Labour and the current Coalition government. The theories adopted in this article are based on social cohesion and the public sphere, and the research is based on grey literature and interviews with civil society practitioners. The study concludes that, although the previous government gave visibility to migrants, the conditions imposed for their access to social provision have contributed to the demotion of cohesion. The Coalition's reforms have reinforced social divisions and given rise to two identities within civil society: the insiders, who are in dialogue with the authorities, and the outsiders, who have no contact with the decision makers.

Elder abuse is a ‘social problem’, as illustrated by the production of policy documents and legislation that define and revise the scope and nature of the problem. This article synthesises and discusses the policy documents and legal changes that have taken place in England since 2000, when the first policy guidance to address adult safeguarding as a whole was produced. The focus of this article is on particular locations, namely care home and hospital settings, and the applicable policy and legislation. The policy documents and legal changes identified are analysed using Blumer's five phases of policy implementation and Matland's ambiguity-conflict matrix to explore their implications for policy implementation and coherence. The analysis suggests that responses to elder abuse have created different kinds of ambiguity and conflict, requiring both top-down and bottom-up policy interventions.

Critics have called for more attention to be paid to the health impacts of the economic downturn and policy responses to it. Other research has reported that, without any protective measures, deprived communities will be badly hit by austerity. This article uses evidence from fifteen deprived communities to look at the changing incidence of financial difficulties among key at-risk groups, and their associations with mental health, from the pre- to the mid-recession period. High and increasing rates of affordability difficulty were found in respect of the costs of fuel, council tax and clothes, particularly among households with disabled adults, under-occupiers and families with part-time workers. Moreover, increased affordability difficulties were consistently associated with a decline in mental health, at all time periods and for all items of expenditure. The evidence supports a policy counter-narrative focussed on preserving and enhancing mental wellbeing for all rather than the current ‘austerity hegemon’.

Gosta Esping-Andersen's (1990) The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism has become one of the most cited works in social policy (over 20,600 Google Scholar citations; 20 October 2014). This path-breaking work, with its identification of three distinct forms of welfare capitalism in high income countries, has become the basis for a whole academic industry described as the Welfare Modelling Business (Abrahamson 1999; Powell and Barrientos 2011). According to Headey et al. (1997: 332), it has become a canon in comparative social policy against which any subsequent work must situate itself. Abrahamson (1999) notes that, since the publication of the book, every welfare state scholar has referred to Esping-Andersen's tripolar scheme. Scruggs and Allen (2006: 55, 69) remark that it ‘is difficult to find an article comparing welfare states in advanced democratic countries (or a syllabus on social policy) that does not refer to this seminal work’, and ‘it is hard to overstate the significance of the impact of The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (TWWC) on comparative studies of the welfare state’. Its seminal status is evidenced by the extent to which it continues to be cited in articles on comparative welfare states. It also remains required reading for most (graduate) students of comparative political economy and social policy (Scruggs and Allen, 2008). Kröger (2011) claims that, with few exceptions, comparative social policy research is shaped by welfare regime analysis. Arts and Gelissen conclude that TWWC is a defining influence upon the whole field of comparative welfare state research (2010: 569). Danforth (2014) writes that the ‘three worlds’ typology has become one of the principal heuristics for examining modern welfare states. In short, TWWC is a ‘modern classic’ (Arts and Gelissen, 2002).

In his path-breaking account of ‘The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism’, Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990) aimed to provide a ‘re-specification of the welfare state’. This article examines the claim of Esping-Andersen that his account draws on the theoretical work of Polanyi, Marshall and Titmuss. It then explores the conceptual critique of Esping-Andersen which led to his 1999 revision, with its rather different theoretical underpinnings. It concludes that some of the theoretical underpinning of this work is unclear both in the work of Esping-Andersen and in subsequent accounts, resulting in a largely atheoretical debate. Concepts such as de-commodification do not appear to be clearly drawn from their stated ‘parent’ authors, and may not sum up the content or essence of welfare states. The ‘re-specification of the welfare state’ must be a larger part of the strategy of the welfare modelling business in the future.

This article assesses the methodological contribution of Esping-Andersen's Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism to welfare regime analysis. It revisits the methods deployed in the Three Worlds and assesses their influence on the practice of welfare regime researchers. It finds that welfare regime researchers have embraced the methods presented in the Three Worlds in a piecemeal fashion. Data reduction techniques, such as cluster and latent variable techniques, compete with index construction as the tools of choice for identifying clusters. Although regression analysis has been used extensively in linking welfare programme design and outcomes with welfare regimes, few researchers have followed Esping-Andersen in employing regression analysis in the context of linking policy and politics. Qualitative comparative analysis methods are increasingly employed by welfare regime researchers as an alternative. Finally, the article considers the methodological implications associated with extending welfare regime analysis globally.

With the Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (TWWC) Gøsta Esping-Andersen (1990) intended to provide a comprehensive typology covering welfare regimes as well as their effects on the economy. However, the initial TWWC-framework fell short of its promises as it ignored welfare services and the industrial sector of the economy. In the last twenty-five years many studies have analysed these previously overlooked aspects. In this article we review this research. We find that most empirical studies on welfare services, as well as on the economy, confirm the validity of the TWWC typology. However, insufficient attention has been paid to exposing the interplay between the different areas. In the second part of the article we provide two alternative explanations for the linkage between welfare regime and capitalism typologies. There is evidence for a functionalist explanation as proposed by the Varieties-of-Capitalism (VoC) framework, as well as for a political explanation delivered by the power resources approach.

After three decades of welfare state crisis, change and transformation can we still speak of welfare state regimes when looking at their outcomes? The analysis of outcomes provides a picture of ‘the real worlds of welfare’ and is of considerable importance to understanding political legitimacy across countries. We use aggregate longitudinal data for West European countries in order to map welfare outcomes and cluster countries. The cluster results are also assessed for their sensitivity to the choice of different countries, years or indicators. All European welfare states have a significant capacity for reducing poverty and inequality. However, the degree of this reduction varies considerably, especially when examining different social groups, i.e. unemployed people, children, youths or the elderly. Outcomes cluster countries largely in line with previous institutionalist literature, differentiating between conservative, liberal, Mediterranean and social-democratic regimes. As the main exception, we identify Germany, which can no longer be characterised as the proto-typical conservative welfare state. When analysing old social risks such as unemployment and old age, Europe appears to be characterised by two groups, i.e. one consisting of liberal and Mediterranean countries and a second made up of social-democratic and conservative countries. New social risks such as child and youth poverty, by contrast, replicate very closely the theoretical four-cluster typology. Our sensitivity analyses reveal that our clusters tend to be stable over time. Welfare regimes continue to serve as a useful analytical tool and relate to outcomes experienced by European citizens.

The case selection issue has long been neglected in cross-national welfare regime studies, despite its importance in securing validity and reliability. This article reviews thirty-three studies that produced their own welfare regime typology, and analyses their case selection practices. They can be divided into five groups in terms of their case sizes: from Esping-Andersen's (1990) original eighteen nations to ‘all’ nations. Three peculiar patterns can be observed in the approaches. First, more than two-thirds of studies still focus on the old set of eighteen nations, arguably ignoring emerging welfare states. Second, theoretical tension exists between ‘isolationists’ and ‘expansionists’ on the exportability of the welfare regime concept to wider cases. Lastly only a few studies have clarified and justified their case selections. It is concluded that the welfare modelling business needs to rectify the common practice of ignoring case selection issues.