Social Policy Review 28

Drawing together a mix of internationally renowned contributors, Social Policy Review 28 provides an up-to-date and diverse review of the best in social policy scholarship. This book contains three parts. The first part focuses on the state of affairs in each of the pillars of the welfare state. It assesses to what extent the traditional ‘evil giants’ have been defeated, which new problems and unintended consequences have emerged and how this affects the policies. The focus on four policy areas are: pension policies, health care, income benefits and housing. The second part draws together a selection of papers from the Social Policy Association’s Annual Conference. The social policy implications of the outcome of the 2015 UK General Election was a major issue facing delegates. Indeed, the final day of the conference coincided with the new government’s first budget, during which details of the £12 billion of ‘welfare’ cuts promised during the election campaign were outlined. The four chapters in Section Two offer insights into what this agenda might hold and how scholars might best interrogate it. The third part explores the shift to individualised funding in different international settings, and also explores the validity of the underlying assumptions, which have driven the shift towards greater use of individualised funding. This part also offers a range of empirical lenses through which to examine these debates. Together these chapters help to deepen an understanding of individualised approaches within social policy.

2010 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
KAREN ROWLINGSON ◽  
STUART CONNOR

AbstractThere is a long tradition in social policy of discussing and critiquing the notion of ‘deservingness’ in relation to ‘the poor’. This paper will apply such debates to ‘the rich’ to consider the grounds on which this group might be considered ‘deserving’. The paper identifies three sets of arguments. The first set of arguments concerns the appropriateness of rewarding merit/hard work/effort/risk-taking etc. The second concerns more consequentialist/economic arguments about providing incentives for wealth creation. And the third considers the character and behaviour of the rich. As well as discussing the potential criteria for deservingness, the paper will also debate whether the degree of income and wealth gained by the rich is deserved. Finally, the paper will discuss the social policy implications, including taxation policies, which emerge from this debate.


Author(s):  
Peter C. Caldwell

The 1970s and 1980s saw two important changes in the West German discussion of the welfare state. First, global trade put direct economic pressure on expensive welfare states in the western world. Second, the social science discussion of the welfare state shifted to a language of systems, which no longer viewed the welfare state as a tool of state or society, but asked about how systems of social policy could have unintended consequences—how social solutions could pose their own problems. Young Marxists, breaking with the SPD, questioned the possibility of a welfare state that could aid workers under capitalism; conservative state theorists questioned whether democracy, with its demands for state solutions, could paralyze the state. The result was a more complex reading of how the modern word created complex challenges for individuals and states alike, especially well articulated in the work of Kaufmann and Luhmann.


Author(s):  
Sarah Brooks-Wilson

This chapter addresses the unintended consequences of a community youth justice sector that has been severely impacted by austerity policies and is decreasing in terms of staff, children, and the wider distribution of practice. The lens of institutional geography is used to reinterpret changes in the youth justice system of England and Wales. The analysis produces new knowledge on how location, movement, and ideology impact community sentence accessibility for children. Despite scant policy attention, practice locations and transport coverage operate in tandem, with one required to fill gaps left by the other in order to maintain service accessibility. Yet, in the context of persistent austerity, both services are affected by increasing service gaps and government accessibility guidance remains narrow in scope, with connections between poverty and service accessibility currently poorly acknowledged. The social policy implications are substantial given that entrenched poverty is overwhelmingly found within populations of convicted and diverted children.


1998 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 317-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lester ◽  
Antoon A Leenaars

A study in Canada of the accidental death rate from firearms, and of suicide and homicide rates by firearms and by all other methods, for the period 1975–85, indicated that the rates were positively associated with one another. The results were interpreted using a subcultural theory of violence, and the social policy implications of the results were discussed.


2006 ◽  

A hundred years after its philanthropist founder identified the social evils of his time, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation initiated a major consultation among leading thinkers, activists and commentators, as well as the wider public. This book examines the underlying problems that pose the greatest threat to British society in the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
Huck-ju Kwon

One of the biggest challenges for developing a new more productivist social policy approach has been the apparent absence of a new, post-neoliberal, economic model even after the global financial crisis. This chapter explores the social policy implications of the official ‘pragmatism’ of the new economic model with its ‘institutionalist’ emphases on nation states finding what works best in their own contexts rather than looking to the one size fits all approach of recent decades.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 227
Author(s):  
Azwar Azwar Azwar ◽  
Emeraldy Chatra ◽  
Zuldesni Zuldesni

Poverty is one of the social problems that the government can never completely solve. As a result, other, more significant social issues arise and cause social vulnerability, such as conflict and crime. As a province that is experiencing rapid growth in the last ten years, the West Sumatra find difficulty to overcome the number of poor people in several districts and cities.  The research outcomes are the models and forms of social policy made by West Sumatra regencies and cities governments in improving the welfare of poor communities. It is also covering the constraints or obstacles to the implementation of social policy and the selection of welfare state models for the poor in some districts and municipalities of West Sumatra. This research is conducted qualitatively with a sociological approach that uses social perspective on searching and explaining social facts that happened to needy groups. Based on research conducted that the social policy model adopted by the government in responding to social problems in the districts and cities of West Sumatra reflects the welfare state model given to the poor. There is a strong relationship between the welfare state model and the form of social policy made by the government.


Author(s):  
V.R. Zolotykh

The novelty of this research lies in its primary task: to study the adaptation process of American conservatism to a rapidly changing world. The article attempts to trace the formation process of a conservative socio-political strategy in the 1990s, through the analysis of 1) factors that influenced the strengthening of the consolidation of the conservative movement in the early 1990s, 2) the reaction of the Right to the implementation of the "Contract with America" in 1994, and 3) discussions that was unfolded between the leaders of the conservative movement during the election campaigns of 1992, 1996 and 2000. The analyzed material allows to conclude that 1990s became a period when a new kind of conservative model of social policy is taking shape as a real alternative to the social-liberal model. The new tendencies manifested in the conservative movement were incorporated into the conservative version of the “welfare state”. The scientific novelty of this work is also in the investigation of the social policy of conservatives alongside with the evolution of the conservative movement.


2021 ◽  
pp. 900-920
Author(s):  
Ian Gough

This final chapter concentrates on global environmental challenges to rich-country welfare states: climate breakdown and associated ecological disasters. These common threats add two new raison d’êtres for welfare states: first, that the security and equity they seek should be sustainable through time; second, that their scope is broadened to take account of global equity and well-being. With a few notable exceptions, these fundamental questions have been ignored in the social policy community. I argue here that we need to transform our understanding of social policy in four ways, each more difficult than the previous one. First, we need to develop novel eco-social programmes to tap synergies between well-being and sustainability via transformative investment programmes such as a Green New Deal. Second, we need to recompose consumption in rich countries in two ways: to realize the best principles of the welfare state by extending the range of universal basic services and to work towards a private ‘consumption corridor’ to end waste, meet basic needs, and reduce inequality. Third, we must develop strategies of ‘reduce and redistribute’ to adapt welfare systems for a future of slower, if not negative, economic growth. And finally, we need to develop a global equity framework to meet climatic and ecological threats in a globally just way that recognizes current international inequalities.


This book presents an up-to-date and diverse review of the best in social policy scholarship over the past year. The book considers current issues and critical debates in the UK and the international social policy field. It contains vital research on race in social policy higher education and analyses how welfare states and policies address the economic and social hardship of young people. The chapters consider the impacts of austerity on the welfare state, homelessness, libraries and other social policy areas. The book begins by asking what are the pressing racial inequalities in contemporary British society and to what extent is social policy as a discipline equipped to analyse and respond to them. It then discusses the key analysis and messages from the Social Policy Association (SPA) race audit, looking at the challenges facing the discipline, and moves on to examine the experience and views of young British Muslim women in Sunderland. Attention is given to the ‘othering’ of migrants, family welfare resources on young people's transition to economic independence, youths' labour market trajectories in Sweden, innaccessibility to community youth justice in England and Wales, benefits entitlement of different UK families, and the book concludes with the final chapters focussing on the impacts of austerity.


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