Work Enforcement in Liberal Democracies

The paper aims to contribute to the normative debate concerning work enforcement in liberal democracies. In the late 1980s, OECD countries began to revert to the pre-welfare- state tradition of attributing unemployment to personal failure. The new welfare-to-work policies emphasised individual responsibility for securing employment. Stepping up job search requirements and sanctions for f…

Earned Citizenship: Labour Migrants’ Views on the Welfare State

In policy and research, migration and the welfare state are often seen as being at odds. When ‘strangers’ enter the welfare state, the financial and social foundations of solidarity are said to crumble. A prominent question, therefore, is whether immigrants should have the same rights as the autochthonous population. Within this frame, migrants are often ‘objects’. This paper reports on…

Social Quality and Work: What Impact Does Low Pay Have on Social Quality?

Using Confirmatory Factor Analysis models in conjunction with the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) this paper reports the first application of the concept of Social Quality to a UK data set. Social Quality is concerned with the quality of society, or social relations, and consists of both a theoretical model and an empirically tested set of measures. Social Quality is explored in relation …

Constructing new global models of social security: How international organiza…

Social cash transfers to the poor have mushroomed in countries of the global South and on global agendas since the 2000s. Around 2000, there was no clear picture if social cash transfers would make it to global agendas. By the end of the 2000s, a repertoire of four models of social cash transfers had been codified by international organizations. Based on an in-depth analysis of all major docume…

Private Schools and the Provision of ‘Public Benefit’

Legislative changes and a recent court ruling allow private schools in England and Wales to determine how to provide the public benefits required to justify their charitable status. We investigate how private school headteachers and other informed stakeholders perceive their public benefit objectives and obligations. We find that schools interpret public beneficiaries widely to include one or m…

Street-level Practice of Russia's Social Policymaking in Saint Petersburg: Fe…

Despite the growth in studies of Russian social policy, the reality of the social policy process – most of which is regionally based – remains a puzzle. In this article, we stake a claim for the importance of studying street-level social service provision in Russia's regions to advance the understanding of social policymaking in authoritarian-leaning regimes. We show that – albeit in small ways…

Are you really Financially Excluded if you Choose not to be Included? Insight…

Around one in five people in developed countries are ‘financially excluded’. But how meaningful is this when the current definition does not differentiate between those who choose to be excluded and those who are forced to be? This conceptual paper draws on frameworks from social exclusion, resilience and ecological systems theory to critique the current definition of financial exclusion and to…

The Social Construction of Retirement and Evolving Policy Discourse of Workin…

This article is concerned with the evolving social construction of older workers and retirement. Evolving and competing ‘world-views’ from public policy, and social advocacy of productive and vulnerable older workers, are described and critiqued. Contradictions and disjunctions, in terms of public policies aimed at changing employer behaviour towards older workers, are identified. It is argued …

Who are Non-Resident Fathers?: A British Socio-Demographic Profile

Despite international growth of, and policy interest in, divorce and separation since the 1970s, there is still surprisingly little known about non-residential fatherhood. This paper presents a ‘father-centric’ analysis and provides one of the first profiles of non-residential fatherhood in early millennium UK. Using data from Understanding Society Wave 1, a nationally representative survey of …

Getting Citizens to Save: Media Influence on Incentive-Based Policies

Governments often introduce financial incentives to citizens in order to encourage ‘personally responsible’ behaviour. Examples of these types of incentives include tax-deferral or tax-free incentives around retirement savings. These types of incentives are shown to matter to investment strategies in the aggregate, but we still lack a full explanation as to how individuals respond to these type…

The stigma of claiming benefits: a quantitative study

Stigma has long been viewed by some as essential to discourage excessive claims, yet seen by others as a cause of non-take-up by people in need and as a form of symbolic violence. More recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in the links between shame and poverty (including the role of benefits), and particular concerns about media/political rhetoric in the UK. Yet while our knowledge…

Journal of Social Policy, Volume 45, Issue 3 - July 2016

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0047-2794

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Journal of Social Policy, Volume 45, Issue 2 - April 2016

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ISBN/ISSN

0047-2794

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Shattering the silence: The power of Purposeful Storytelling in challenging s…

This article reports on a pioneering engagement project between team members from the Poverty and Social Exclusion in the UK (PSE UK) study, the Community Foundation for Northern Ireland and marginalised communities, located in areas of high deprivation in Northern Ireland. Community conversations and a tailor-made methodology of ‘Purposeful Digital Storytelling’ to capture and share data, enge…

Risking peace in the ‘war against the poor’? Social exclusion and the leg…

Discourses around poverty, dependency and austerity take a particular form regarding Northern Ireland which is seen as ripe for economic ‘rebalancing’ and public sector reduction. The Welfare Reform Act 2012 is pivotal in that it provides the muscle for disciplining claimants for a low-waged, flexible labour market. But the Northern Ireland Assembly has not passed the Act or agreed a budget and…

The parenting and economising practices of lone parents: Policy and evidence

UK governments have historically viewed lone parents as a political and social problem. This article argues that present-day political discourse increasingly positions lone parents as deficient parents, suggesting that they are more likely to fail to engage with good parenting practices than parents in couple households and may lack the resource management skills of successful families. We crit…

Exclusionary employment in Britain’s broken labour market

There is growing evidence of the problematic nature of the UK’s ‘flexible labour market’ with rising levels of in-work poverty and insecurity. Yet successive governments have stressed that paid work is the route to inclusion, focussing attention on the divide between employed and unemployed. Past efforts to measure social exclusion have tended to make the same distinction. The aim of this artic…

Child poverty in the UK: Measures, prevalence and intra-household sharing

There is cross-party agreement on the urgency of addressing child poverty in the UK, but less consensus on how to define and measure it, and understand its causes and effects. The Conservative/Liberal Coalition government’s policy and rhetoric favoured individual explanations for poverty, portraying poor parents as making bad spending decisions, and transmitting their attitudes and behaviours o…

Navigating the stigmatised identities of poverty in austere times: Resisting …

Behavioural explanations of poverty and disadvantage have figured heavily in political rhetoric in the era of austerity, as a means to understand trajectories into poverty and subsequent relationships between benefit claimants and the state. These discourses are not restricted to political debate, as previous studies demonstrate they impact upon public consciousness and structure the ways that …

Policies and discourses of poverty during a time of recession and austerity

This article introduces this themed issue which challenges government policies and discourses using evidence from the UK 2012 Poverty and Social Exclusion Study. Policies and discourses prioritising the role of individual deficiencies and highlighting the structural problems of the welfare state in poverty causation are nothing new. However, they re-emerged vigorously in the UK following the 20…