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Experts from across the globe review leading social policy scholarship in this new volume in the Social Policy Review series.
Specialists explore local and multi-level trends in social policy including government responses to the cost-of-living crisis in the UK and decentralisation in primary health care in Thailand. They also review policy responses to working age risks in England, Italy and Australia, as well as policy developments and transformations such as social protection in Japan and Australia and immigration resettlement schemes in the UK.
Published in association with the Social Policy Association, the latest book in this respected series will be essential reading for students and academics in social policy, social welfare and related disciplines.
East Asian societies and welfare systems are rapidly changing, creating an increasing need for research that can help to establish sustainable and legitimate welfare systems.
This original volume considers welfare attitudes in East Asia, including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Macao, Singapore and Taiwan, using qualitative and quantitative research methods. Proposing new methods and approaches to analysing cross-national variations in welfare attitudes, it decentralises dominant European based concepts and measurements and takes approaches that are sensitive to cultural and political trajectories and the impact of colonialism and gender.
This book explores the influence of contextual and individual factors, such as family roles and values, on citizens’ welfare attitudes. It also studies social legitimacy and social bonds to understand how to design and implement sustainable welfare policies.
Recognising diverse groups within society is a vital part of policy research and analysis, yet few texts have drawn together the breadth of experiences of welfare provision from a diverse group of citizens.
This book fills this gap, by exploring how diverse citizens experience welfare provision. It aims to promote debate about the importance of social divisions in society and to address the gaps in research, in relation to race, ethnicity, disability, gender and LGBTQ+.
It comes at a crucial time as we emerge out of a decade of austerity, a global pandemic and Brexit, where issues of diversity have been at the forefront of debates, and renews the call for analysis within social policy, particularly on issues of diversity in the 21st century context.
Recent welfare reforms, based on austerity narratives and a gender-neutral rationale, have failed to recognise the ways in which women and men experience the different demands and rewards of paid employment and unpaid care.
This book draws on a wealth of qualitative longitudinal evidence to cast light on women’s lived experiences of welfare and work. Giving voice to social security recipients, this book uncovers the hidden gendered bias of conditional welfare reforms to challenge dominant political discourses, policy design and practice norms.
It combines and develops three interdisciplinary perspectives – feminist analysis, lived experience and street-level bureaucracy – to offer a new understanding of British welfare reform policies and practice.
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In the latest edition of Social Policy Review, experts review the leading social policy scholarship from the past year.
The book addresses current issues and critical debates within the field, with a particular focus on intergenerational research. Contributors also explore key social policy and research developments across a wide range of themes, including the impact of COVID-19 on eldercare and homelessness, research into faith-based organisations, local social services in Italy and social policies for autistic adults in England and Wales.
Published in association with the Social Policy Association, this comprehensive volume will be essential reading for students and academics in social policy, social welfare and related disciplines.
A uniquely hybrid approach to welfare state policy, ecological sustainability and social transformation, this book explores transformative models of welfare change.
Using Ireland as a case study, it addresses the institutional adaptations needed to move towards a sustainable welfare state, and the policy of making such transformation happen.
It takes a theoretical and practical approach to implementing an alternative paradigm for welfare in the context of globalisation, climate change, social cohesion, automation, economic and power inequalities, intersectionality and environmental sustainability, as well as perpetual crisis, including the pandemic.
This book offers insights into the development of social welfare policies by exploring the interconnections between policies and practice throughout history.
It challenges tacitly accepted arguments that favour particular approaches to welfare, such as conditionality and eligibility. It provides examples of enduring social assumptions which influence the way we perform social welfare, such as the equivocal position of women in social welfare and the unintended consequences of reforms such as Universal Credit.
By identifying continuities in welfare policy, practice and thought, it offers the potential for the development of new thinking, policy making and practice.
For generations women have experienced disadvantage in the paid labour market, the devaluation of their unpaid caring roles and multiple constraints on their agency.
This book analyses fresh empirical evidence which demonstrates the gendered impacts of the new conditionality regime within Universal Credit. It shows how the regime affects women's unpaid caring roles, their position in the paid labour market and their agency regarding engagement in unpaid care and paid work. Ultimately, it highlights the impacts on low-income women's position in the UK social security system and society.
Drawing on in-depth interviews with mothers, this book offers a compelling narrative and crucial policy recommendations to improve the gendered impact of Universal Credit and make the social citizenship framework in the UK more inclusive of women.
We are often told that mean welfare is what the public wants. Whether or not that's true, this book encourages us all to at least be honest about what that entails.
It explores how diverse welfare users navigate the personal and practical hurdles of Australia’s so-called social security system where benefits are deliberately meagre and come with strings attached. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a region of Sydney known for ethnic diversity and socio-economic disadvantage, Emma Mitchell brings her own experience belonging to a poor family long reliant on welfare to her research.
This book shows the different cultural resources that people bring to welfare encounters with a sensitivity and subtly that are often missing in both sympathetic and cynical accounts of life on welfare.
Should a citizen’s right to social welfare be contingent on their personal behaviour?
Welfare conditionality, linking citizens’ eligibility to social benefits and services to prescribed compulsory responsibilities or behaviours, has become a key component of welfare reform in many nations.
This book uses qualitative longitudinal data from repeat interviews with people subject to compulsion and sanction in their everyday lives to analyse the effectiveness and ethicality of welfare conditionality in promoting and sustaining behaviour change in the UK.
Given the negative outcomes that welfare conditionality routinely triggers, this book calls for the abandonment of these sanctions and reiterates the importance of genuinely supportive policies that promote social security and wider equality.
