Richard Titmuss: social policy and social life

2018 ◽  
pp. 145-164
Author(s):  
Noel Timms
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Richard Titmuss

Rejoinder: Contradictions and Irony in Policy Research

1995 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 327-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfonso Morales ◽  
Steven Balkin ◽  
Joseph Persky
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Informal Sector ◽  
Real World ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
Policy Decisions ◽  
Negative Effects

We have been stimulated by this exchange on both personal and intellectual levels. Intellectual pursuits have been subdivided by scholars with various interests. However, specialization is not in itself an evil, except when it constrains fruitful analysis of empirical issues that have real-world implications for social policy and people's lives. Problems of social life and social policy typically speak to and provoke scholars of all kinds. Hence opportunities to investigate empirical interests from a variety of perspectives are opportunities forus all to learn the strengths and limitations of our tools. We wish this kind of discussion about the importance of the informal sector and marketplaces had occurred before the destruction of the Maxwell Street Market. This exchange might have further informed policy decisions and perhaps avoided some of the negative effects of dismantling the market. Nonetheless, we thank those who commented for their thoughtful responses. We agree with many but not all of their views, as the responses below suggest. Our methodology involved integrating ethnography and analytical economics; throughout, we have tried to strike a reasonable balance between analysis and participation.

Richard Titmuss and Social Policy

2002 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 747-752 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAMESH MISHRA
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Richard Titmuss

David Reisman, Richard Titmuss: Welfare and Society (2nd edn), Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001, vii+307 pp., £50.00.Peter Alcock, Howard Glennerster, Ann Oakley & Adrian Sinfield (eds.), Welfare and Well-Being: Richard Titmuss's Contribution to Social Policy, Bristol: Policy, 2001, vi+249 pp., £16.99 pbk.

‘For Richer, For Poorer’

2020 ◽  
pp. 77-100
Author(s):  
Lise Butler
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Family Policy ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Full Employment ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
London School ◽  
Policy Document ◽  
London School Of Economics ◽  
Richard Titmuss

Chapter 3 examines an unpublished policy document that Young submitted to the Labour Party Policy Committee in 1952 called ‘For Richer, For Poorer’, which marked a transition from Young’s public policy career towards sociology and social research. Young left his position in the Labour Party Research Department after the Conservative election victory in the 1951 general election, and undertook a Ph.D. in social administration at the London School of Economics supervised by the social policy thinker Richard Titmuss. Responding to the Labour Party’s failure to appeal to women voters in the 1951 election, ‘For Richer, For Poorer’ urged the Labour Party to pay more attention to family policy. Young integrated a historical vision of declining social cohesion caused by industrialization and suburbanization with contemporary concerns about the poverty of women and children that built on the work of earlier social poverty researchers and the feminist campaigns for a family allowance led by Eleanor Rathbone. This document reflected a turn in Young’s thought away from the focus on full employment and macro-economic planning which had characterized much of his policy work during the Attlee government, and towards thinking about social policy from the perspective of those he conceived of as non-workers, including the elderly, the unemployed, children, and women.

Robert Pinker, the Idea of Welfare and the Study of Social Policy: On Unitarism and Pluralism

2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 615-634
Author(s):  
JOHN OFFER
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Policy Studies ◽  
Welfare Systems ◽  
Welfare Pluralism ◽  
Richard Titmuss

AbstractThis article reappraises the distinction upon which Robert Pinker has insisted since the 1970s between the heuristic and the normative dimensions of concepts and theories associated with ‘welfare’ in social policy studies, a distinction prompted by, for instance, the writings of Richard Titmuss. It discusses Pinker's differentiation of forms of study which seek to account for the likenesses and unlikenesses within and between the welfare systems of different countries from forms of study aiming to establish moral criteria by which one system of welfare can be deemed superior to another. In particular, it highlights his emphasis on the need for social policy as a subject to attend to: (a) the reality of everyday ideas of social welfare and ‘faring well’ in general; (b) how everyday ideas of ‘faring well’ are exhibited in what he has called ‘conditional altruism’, whether exercised within families, towards strangers or across nations; (c) the practices undertaken by individuals and families to attain freedom and security as well as to meet those of their needs commonly taken within social policy studies to be the components of ‘welfare’; (d) the difficulties, moral, political, social and economic, associated with Titmussian welfare unitarism, in contrast to welfare pluralism. The article thus provides a review of aspects of Pinker's many published papers as well as his influential Social Theory and Social Policy and The Idea of Welfare.

Robert Pinker on rethinking approaches to welfare

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Offer
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Welfare Pluralism ◽  
And Migration ◽  
The 1960S

This book examines Robert Pinker's selected works on social policy and welfare pluralism, past and present. Pinker began writing on social policy in the 1960s, undertaking research work on issues such as the development of health care within the poor law. He published books devoted to social policy, including Social Theory and Social Policy (1971) and The Idea of Welfare (1979), along with various articles on complementary topics. Pinker's main concern was to rethink the study of social policy, arguing that ‘theory’ should not be confused with ideology or rhetoric. His ideas were primarily built around such themes as stigma, conditional altruism, access to land and property, giving and receiving, and migration and civil war. In Social Theory and Social Policy, Pinker highlighted the distinction in social life between ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’. He also made explicit the areas of study under the heading of ‘sociology of morals’.

scholarly journals An Assessment of Important Issues Concerning the Application of Benefit-Cost Analysis to Social Policy

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aidan Vining ◽  
David L Weimer
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Cost Analysis ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Shadow Prices ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Reentry Programs ◽  
Benefit Cost Analysis ◽  
Public Investments ◽  
Benefit Cost

AbstractBenefit-cost analysis (BCA) provides a framework for systematically assessing the efficiency of public policies. Increasingly, BCA is being applied to social policies, ranging from preschool interventions to prison reentry programs. These applications offer great potential for helping to identify policies that offer the best returns on public investments aimed at helping the disadvantaged or otherwise improving social life. However, applying BCA to social policies pose a number of challenges. The need for a comprehensive approach to assessing social policies generally requires making predictions based on data from multiple sources and using available shadow prices. As these predictions and shadow prices are inherently uncertain, special effort must be made to explicitly address the resulting uncertainty of predictions of net benefits. Prediction and valuation are complicated by behaviors, such as addiction, that do not clearly satisfy the assumptions of neoclassical welfare economics. As distributional goals are often an explicit motivation for social policies, BCA may be an incomplete framework for public policy purposes unless analysts can find ways to incorporate people's willingness to pay for changes in the distribution of consumption across society. If BCA is to reach its potential for contributing to good social policy, analysts must be aware of these challenges and researchers must help address them.

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