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The last three decades have seen social enterprises in the United Kingdom pushed to the forefront of welfare delivery, workfare and areabased regeneration. For critics, this is repositioning the sector around a neoliberal politics that privileges marketization, state roll-back and disciplining community groups to become more self-reliant. Successive governments have developed bespoke products, fiscal instruments and intermediaries to enable and extend the social finance market. Such assemblages are critical to roll-out tactics, but they are also necessary and useful for more reformist understandings of economic alterity. The issue is not social finance itself but how it is used, which inevitably entangles social enterprises in a form of legitimation crises between the need to satisfy financial returns and at the same time keep community interests on board. This paper argues that social finance, how it is used, politically domesticated and achieves re-distributional outcomes is a necessary component of counter-hegemonic strategies. Such assemblages are as important to radical community development as they are to neoliberalism and the analysis concludes by highlighting the need to develop a better understanding of finance, the ethics of its use and tactical compromises in scaling it as an alternative to public and private markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ricoeur's theories of justice are used here to examine the injustice of the utilitarian drive to widen participation in higher education in the UK and, in particular, the attribution of low aspirations and achievements to those young people who do not participate in higher education. Government policy is considered through Ricoeur's theory of the just state; and his ‘new commandment’ is used to consider the disproportionate sacrifice required of these young people if they are to enter higher education. Despite its specific focus, the paper's arguments are relevant to all policies that conflate social inclusion and economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]