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Formal social citizenship is limited in how it enables us to think about informal social citizenship and informal welfare. This informal perspective is important in all contexts where access to social rights is negotiated through local and transnational spaces, and where the state is a relatively minor player. By drawing on work on moral economy (Scott, 1976) and informal welfare (Gough and Wood, 2006) the article aims to propose a new theoretical model to understand the nature and social practice of both informal citizenship and welfare. This model departs from a western-centric understanding of nation-state-based citizenship and national welfare states, adopting instead the perspective that informal social citizenship and welfare have existed independently of the nation state as long as there have been human communities. Formal citizenship together with formal welfare rights represent just one particular crystallization of such informal practice. Our proposed model highlights the interdependent (rather than evolutionary) relationship between formal welfare at national level and informal welfare practices at local and transnational levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new group of Western development donors has emerged as increasingly influential actors in global social policy. Big philanthropies have begun implementing social protection projects on a vast scale across the Global South and have become integrated within global governance structures. It is essential to examine whether their approach to social policy in the South is effective, legitimate and desirable for the substantive agendas and programmes in these countries and for analysis of social policy in a development context. This study investigates contemporary big philanthropies through a qualitative case-study of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and its role in the health sector in Tanzania. It examines the ways in which big philanthropies engage and seek to influence policy on the ground, directly exploring the views and experiences of local stakeholders. The study finds that big philanthropies have distinctive features and mechanisms as global social policy entrepreneurs. In contrast to the vertical and linear processes associated with traditional policy transfer, a more messy and complex set of mechanisms are observed. The study also indicates that despite considerable resources and authority, philanthropic donors may not be effective in securing policy reform within aid-receiving countries due to a lack of transparency and embeddedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article investigates how begging performed by citizens of new EU-member states in Eastern Europe was debated in parliaments in Denmark, Sweden and Norway during the period 2007–2017. The empirical analysis shows significant cross-country divergences: In Denmark, efforts targeted controlling migration, either directly or indirectly, via various deterrence strategies. In Sweden, the emphasis was rather on alleviating social needs while migrants reside in the country and trying to decrease their incentives to migrate in the first place by ameliorating conditions in sending countries. In Norway, one predominant framing revolved around the issue of human trafficking of beggars. Despite substantial differences, the analyses show a gradual shift in a similar direction in all three countries. While a social frame was initially more commonly understood as the appropriate way to approach begging, over time a criminal frame has gained ground in all three countries. The article argues that this development must be understood in light of marginalized intra-EU migrants' legal status as both insiders and outsiders in the Scandinavian welfare states. Due to these individuals' "in-between status", neither conventional social policy nor immigration control measures are perceived as available, making policymakers more prone to turn to criminal policy tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social policy developed as a research field and academic discipline to ensure protection from social risks in the era of emerging capitalism and industrialization. While welfare states have successfully increased their citizens' wellbeing, they have also contributed to the ecological crisis, while the shared scientific understanding of exceeded planetary boundaries and worsening climate change scenarios has not (yet) reshaped mainstream social policy research. In this article, we suggest that the established traditions in social policy research can nevertheless provide a solid ground for responding to the climate emergency and facilitating the sustainable transformation of society and the economy. With a focus on four of the research fields that are central in social policy scholarship – risks, citizenship, welfare regimes, and wellbeing – we develop an ecosocial research agenda. By discussing the classic and climate-adjusted understandings of these fields, we open future pathways for social policy research and invite scholars to engage with our proposed research agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A welfare state's tax system does not solely redistribute from rich to poor (vertical) but also between family types (horizontal). Different types of families are treated differently due to gendered (de)familialization policies in the tax code, such as joint filing for spouses or single-parent relief. In this study I aim to examine the tax system's modification of horizontal income inequality between the six most prevalent family types of non-retiree households. To answer my research aim I draw on harmonized data from 30 countries provided by the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). I estimate pre- and post-fiscal income inequality measured as between-family-type Theil indices. Using multivariate linear regression, I examine the association of the percentage change in inequality and the prevalence of family type-related tax characteristics. The results show that welfare states with familialization tax policies reduce less horizontal income inequality compared to welfare states without familialization tax policies. As familialization tax policies provide additional benefits for breadwinners with dependents, they discourage labour market participation of secondary earners and might exacerbate gender inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Topics such as climate change, diversity and inequality are likely to dominate the future of Social Policy. This is also a time of a generational change in Social Policy. In this paper I will address the questions of the future challenges for Social Policy by mapping the trajectories of the second generation of Social Policy Academics. There is much to learn from this generation such as the importance of epistemic communities, of mentoring and sustained engagement with policy-makers. However, the argument put forward in this paper is that Social Policy as it developed into an academic subject from the 1960s lost the connection to policy-makers due to expanding outside London; focusing on establishing social policy as an academic subject, academic careers and moving into comparative Social Policy. One effect of this is that an explicit focus on policy innovation and design has gone missing. Instead, this space in the policy landscape has been claimed by think tanks that continue to be highly successful in influencing government policy. A re-discovery of policy design as a key part of Social Policy together with the other lessons from this generation will be needed if we want to tackle the big challenges of tomorrow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been an explosion of interest in the "four-day-week" movement across the globe, especially due to its potential in addressing many of the societal challenges left by the COVID-19 pandemic. Four-day-week is a movement set to shorten the working hours of full-time workers without a reduction in pay. I aim to set out the case for a national move towards a four-day-week explaining why social policy scholars should lead the debate. First, I provide evidence of the societal costs that the current long-hours work culture has on workers' and their family's well-being and welfare, social inequality, and social cohesion. Shorter working can help tackle these issues by giving workers right to time, shifting the balance between work and non-work activities in our lives and valuing them both. Social policy scholars need to lead this debate owing to our existing knowledge and expertise in dealing with these social issues and state-level interventions. In addition, without pressing for fundamental changes in our labour market, we cannot adequately address some of the key challenges we face as a society. The paper ends with key research questions social policy scholars should address as a part of this move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Disability Support Pension (DSP) is the major Australian government financial benefit program for people of working age with medical conditions and disabilities that restrict work capacity. Between 2012 and 2018 a series of policy reforms sought to restrict the growth in DSP payments and encourage more people with some work capacity to seek employment. We characterise changes in three markers of access to disability financial support over the reform period (1) DSP recipient rates (2) DSP grant (approval) rates and (3) the rate of unemployment benefit receipt in people with impaired work capacity. Results demonstrate a significant reduction in DSP receipt and grant rates, and significant increase in the rate of unemployment benefit receipt in working-age Australians with work disabling medical conditions and disability. These changes were not distributed uniformly. People whose primary medical condition was a musculoskeletal or circulatory system disorder demonstrated greater declines in DSP receipt and grant rates, while there was a more rapid increase in unemployment benefit receipt among people with primary mental health conditions. Some trend changes occur in periods during which new disability assessment and pension eligibility policies were introduced, though our ability to attribute changes to specific policy changes is limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dual or multiple earnership has been considered an important factor to prevent in-work poverty. The aim of this paper is to quantify the impact of second earnership on the risk of in-work poverty and the role of the tax-benefit system in moderating this risk. Our analysis refers to 2014 and employs EUROMOD, the tax-benefit microsimulation model for the European Union and the United Kingdom. In order to assess the role of second earners in preventing in-work poverty we simulate a counterfactual scenario where second earners become unemployed. Our results show that the effect of net replacement rates (i.e. the ratio of household income before and after the transition of second earners to unemployment) on the probability of in-work poverty is negative and statistically significant, but in relative terms it appears to be small compared to the effects of individual labour market characteristics, such as low pay and part-time employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Austerity is frequently associated with crisis-enabled spending cuts. What happens when the crisis is over? This article's original contribution lies in its in-depth exploration of one mechanism that help explain austerity's endurance post-crisis, when state elites face increased popular resistance and pressure to reinstate social spending. This mechanism calls attention to the role of economists in Central Budgeting Offices as agents of technocratization and de-politicization within social policy domains. These economists may institute an austere spending mode by changing social spending's norms and instruments. To demonstrate economists' role in mediating macroeconomic fiscal goals and social policy design over time, the article examines the development of child welfare policy in Israel before, during and in the aftermath of economic crisis. In this case, austerity attained hegemony when economists were able to delegitimize and shelve an 'irresponsible' social spending proposal – and in response to post-crisis demands for compensation – introduce an austere policy instrument to cap social spending during a period of social policy expansion. This analysis suggests that scholars regard relations between austerity and social spending as dialectical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The basic income (BI) scheme is a fundamental reform of the welfare state that has recently gained widespread attention. Proposals for different variants of BI schemes have emerged to account for varying political and societal goals. This study investigates what citizens think about the idea of a BI, and to what extent citizens' perceptions depend on the exact design of such a scheme and the context in which this policy is embedded. Empirically, we rely on conjoint experiments conducted in Finland and Switzerland – the two countries in which the introduction of a BI scheme has recently been discussed most intensely. We find that the level of public support for BI is higher in Finland than it is in Switzerland. Moreover, despite the contrasting designs of the BI proposals in the two countries, both Finnish and Swiss citizens tend to favor more generous schemes restricting non-nationals' access to the provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses some implications for gender equality and gender policy at European and national levels of transformations in family, economy and polity, which challenge gender regimes across Europe. Women's labour market participation in the west and the collapse of communism in the east have undermined the systems and assumptions of western male breadwinner and dual worker models of central and eastern Europe. Political reworking of the work/welfare relationship into active welfare has individualised responsibility. Individualisation is a key trend west--and in some respects east--and challenges the structures that supported care in state and family. The links that joined men to women, cash to care, incomes to carers have all been fractured. The article will argue that care work and unpaid care workers are both casualties of these developments. Social, political and economic changes have not been matched by the development of new gender models at the national level. And while EU gender policy has been admired as the most innovative aspect of its social policy, gender equality is far from achieved: women's incomes across Europe are well below men's; policies for supporting unpaid care work have developed modestly compared with labour market activation policies. Enlargement brings new challenges as it draws together gender regimes with contrasting histories and trajectories. The article will map social policies for gender equality across the key elements of gender regimes--paid work, care work, income, time and voice--and discuss the nature of a model of gender equality that would bring gender equality across these. It analyses ideas about a dual earner--dual carer model, in the Dutch combination scenario and 'universal caregiver' models, at household and civil society levels. These offer a starting point for a model in which paid and unpaid work are equally valued and equally shared between men and women, but we argue that a citizenship model, in which paid and unpaid work obligations are underpinned by social rights, is more likely to achieve gender equality.

This article provides an overview of the academic debates and recent research on the dynamic perspective on poverty and anti-poverty policy. Renewed theoretical interest in dynamic analysis is discussed in the context of the more general debate about the roles of structure and agency in social relations. This is followed by a brief outline of some of the new empirical datasets now available for longitudinal research, in particular in the UK. The implications of dynamic analysis for our understanding of poverty are summarised, followed by a discussion of the impact of this on anti-poverty policy, again drawing largely on the UK, and some specifically English, developments. The article concludes that dynamic analysis and the role of agency has had a significant impact on both academic debate and policy intervention on poverty, but that this should not be interpreted as leading to an abandonment of policies for structural reform aimed at redistributing resources to the poor.

Recent writing in social policy on the role of agency has made important assumptions about social administration in the post-war period. In particular it is suggested that interpretations of the causes of poverty, and the thinking of Richard Titmuss, were characterised by a 'denial' of agency and almost total emphasis on structural factors. The implications were that this left the Titmuss paradigm vulnerable to more individualistic interpretations in the 1980s. In this article we look more closely at Titmuss's work and thought in the three decades of the 1940s, the 1950s, and the 1960s, aiming to produce a fuller and more nuanced analysis. We argue that the distinctive position adopted by Titmuss was in large part his response to earlier and on-going debates about social pathology. What he was trying to do was to make others aware of the broader context in which behaviour had to be analysed. But Titmuss himself became constrained by the paradigm that he did more than anyone else to create. Thus debates about behaviour, structure, and poverty have been marked as much by continuity as by change.

This paper considers how varying discourses of social exclusion have informed policies regarding young people's participation in education, training and employment. Drawing on a cohort study of over 800 16-18 olds, the research suggests that the binary categories of exclusion/inclusion, and marginalisation/participation grow less and less adequate as parameters for understanding changing patterns of post-16 participation and non-participation. It is argued that a range of statutory, structural, financial and social pressures to normalise participation produce forms of inclusion that are ephemeral and that carry very different meanings from those implied in discourses of exclusion. The paper gives a brief overview of the changing context in which participation needs to be understood, then presents evidence and analysis of young people's trajectories after 16. Some interpretations are offered of a wide range of meanings of participation, which suggest that old notions of transition to independence are un-sustainable for a substantial minority of young people, and that patterns of participation are increasingly complex, have multiple significances, and carry the potential to mask inequalities and new forms of exclusion. These readings have major implications for how we conceptualise social exclusion, and for policy developments associated with it.

The article considers the implications for family policy of the proposed new changes to the registration of births, marriages and deaths, contained in the British government White Paper Civil Registration: Vital Change (2002). It asks whether, and to what extent, the changes proposed are 'facilitative' or 'persuasive'. It is argued that, whilst the changes are in part designed to facilitate more diverse patterns of partnering and parenting now evident in the population there are limitations, for example in respect of same sex partnerships. There are also clearly 'persuasive' elements. These are consistent with changes in family policy which focus more on the individuals than on the nuclear family as the focus of policy, which are tolerant of different forms of partnering, but which place supporting parenthood as the highest priority. Changes in civil registration are seen as an essential condition for implementing other types of changes in the family policy arena.

In the context of rapid economic and demographic change, the People's Republic of China has attempted to reshape its public pension system. Although China's current pension system has drawn the attention of many policy analysts, no theoretically informed account on the politics of Chinese pension reform has yet been published. Grounded in a broad institutionalist perspective, this contribution analyses contemporary pension politics in China through the interplay of four main factors: (1) decentralisation and limited administrative capacity, which make it difficult to rationalise and transform the existing pension system; (2) feedback effects from previously enacted pension schemes that further complicate policy change; (3) liberalisation and economic reforms, which have created 'vested interests' in the newly established private sector, but which have lacked the strength to generate a mature financial system; (4) finally, the apparent dominance of the neo-liberal financial paradigm commonly associated with the World Bank. While this financial paradigm favours the adoption of new reform proposals, the economic and institutional factors mentioned above complicate their implementation.

This paper draws on the findings of a study within the ESRC's Democracy and Participation Programme. It explores the processes of participation within deliberative forums--such as user panels, youth forums, area based committees--developed as a means of encouraging a more active, participating mode of citizenship and of improving welfare services by making them more responsive to users. Our findings open up a number of issues about constraints on the development of 'collaborative governance'. To understand these constraints, we suggest, there is need to locate participation initiatives in the context of government policy, to explore ways in which such policy is interpreted and enacted by strategic actors in local organisations and to examine the perceptions of members of deliberative forums themselves. Our findings highlight the constraints on the 'political opportunity structures' created by the enhanced policy focus on public participation, and the consequent limits to 'collaborative governance'. We discuss how governance theory and social movement theory can each contribute to the analysis, but also suggest productive points of engagement through which each of these bodies of theory might enrich the other.

This paper looks at the concepts of 'risk' and 'safety culture' within a Social Work context, specifically in relation to child protection. Discussion is made of the systemic and organisational issues that are apparent in many inquiries into child death from abuse, and the authors argue that these issues need to he given a higher profile to ensure avoidable tragedies do not occur as a result of organisational failure. The concept of 'safety culture' is described as a tool of best practice used by some organisations in the commercial sector to ensure their risk, for example communication failure, in relation to organisational issues is both understood and controlled. The parallels between an organisational breakdown resulting in a disaster and those relating to the breakdown of childcare services are outlined in relation to two high profile examples, the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster and the tragic death of Victoria Climbie respectively. The authors discuss how the lessons learnt from such disasters and the ways in which high risk commercial organisations give organisational issues such high priority can, and should be, successfully transferred into other sectors, namely Social Work and Child Protection services.

Debates about the meaning of citizenship have grown since the election of the first New Labour government. These debates have tended to focus on the government's assertion of the central role of work in defining the status of citizen, a stance which has increasingly been criticised for devaluing unpaid work such as caring or volunteering. However, the position of those beyond labour market age--older people--has rarely been examined in relation to how citizenship might be defined. At the same time, the concept of social exclusion, heavily utilised by New Labour to characterise those at the margins of society, has at best an ambiguous relevance to older people. This article, based on an exploration of the social, financial and other impacts of additional benefit income for older people, examines how these two concepts might be understood in relation to the position of older people and sketches out what some of the defining characteristics of citizenship might be for them.

The growing political and social significance of the voluntary sector in contemporary welfare reform is reflected in a wide body of research that has emerged in the political and social policy literature since the mid-1980s. While this work adds considerably to our understanding of the changing role of the voluntary welfare sector, these accounts are largely aspatial. Yet, geographical perspectives offer important insights into the development of the voluntary sector at both micro-and macro-levels. The purpose of this paper is thus twofold: first we wish to draw attention to what it is that geographers do that may be of interest to those working in the field of social policy; and second, we illustrate why such perspectives are important. Drawing on recently completed work in Glasgow, we demonstrate how geographical approaches can contribute to a greater understanding of the uneven development of the voluntary sector across space and how voluntary organisations become embedded in particular places. By unravelling some of the complex webs of inter-relationships that operate across the geographical and political spaces that extend from national to local we reveal some unique insights into those factors that act to facilitate or constrain the development of voluntary activity across the city with implications for access, service delivery and policy development. Hence, we maintain, that geographical approaches to voluntarism are important for social policy as such approaches argue that where events occur matter to both their form and outcome.

This paper explores the changing fortunes of the public realm during the last two decades. It poses the problem of how we think about globalisation and neo-liberalism as forces driving these changes. It then examines how different aspects of the public realm--understood as public interest, as public services and as a collective identity--have been subjected to processes of dissolution. Different processes have combined in this dissolution--in particular, attempts to privatise and marketise public services have been interleaved with attempts to de-politicise the public realm. Tracing these processes reveals that they have not been wholly successful-encountering resistances, refusals and negotiations that mean the outcomes (so far) do not match the world imagined in neo-liberal fantasies.

Socioeconomic inequalities in health have moved up the policy agenda of older industrial societies. The paper turns the spotlight on this development by exploring how the goal has been represented in England's national policy documents. Rather than one approach, there appears to be a range of understandings of what it means to tackle health inequalities. These understandings can be placed on a continuum, which runs from improving the health of poor groups, through closing the health gaps between those in the poorest circumstances and better-off groups, to addressing the association between socioeconomic position and health across the population. The paper points to common ground between the three approaches to tackling health inequalities, but also to important differences in the moral arguments and causal models on which they rest, and therefore in their policy goals and anticipated policy impacts.