Social Policy Review provides students, academics and all those interested in welfare issues with critical analyses of progress and change in areas of major interest during the past year. This year the Review takes the opportunity of the 60th anniversary of the key legislation founding the welfare state in the UK to provide a comprehensive overview of policy developments in the UK and internationally.
The first part brings together a selection of papers which have been commissioned to examine historical and contemporary developments in policy tackling Beveridge’s five evils of want, idleness, disease, squalor and ignorance, looking at how policy has changed since the aims and ideology of the inception of the post-war welfare state. The second part looks at the issue of the current challenges facing children’s welfare services internationally: always a contemporary and contentious issue. The final part brings together a selection of papers looking at the effect of policy development at various governance levels on social policy.
The contributions bring together an exciting mix of internationally renowned authors to provide comprehensive discussion of the some of the most challenging issues facing social policy today.
Statistical data and evidence-based claims are increasingly central to our everyday lives. Critically examining ‘Big Data’, this book charts the recent explosion in sources of data, including those precipitated by global developments and technological change. It sets out changes and controversies related to data harvesting and construction, dissemination and data analytics by a range of private, governmental and social organisations in multiple settings.
Analysing the power of data to shape political debate, the presentation of ideas to us by the media, and issues surrounding data ownership and access, the authors suggest how data can be used to uncover injustices and to advance social progress.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Single parents face a triple bind of inadequate resources, employment, and policies, which in combination further complicate their lives.
This book - multi-disciplinary and comparative in design - shows evidence from over 40 countries, along with detailed case studies of Sweden, Iceland, Scotland, and the UK. It covers aspects of well-being that include poverty, good quality jobs, the middle class, wealth, health, children’s development and performance in school, and reflects on social justice.
Leading international scholars challenge our current understanding of what works and draw policy lessons on how to improve the well-being of single parents and their children.
The economic crisis has revealed the dark side of deregulation in the labour market: rising unemployment, limited access to social security and, due to low wages, no savings to count upon in bad times.
This book casts light on the empirical relationship between labour market deregulation through non-standard contracts and the three main dimensions of worker security: employment, income and social security. Focusing on individual work histories, it looks at how labour market dynamics interact with the social protection system in bringing about inequality and insecurity. In this context Italy is put forward as the epitome of flexibility through non-standard work and compared with three similar countries: Germany, Spain and Japan. Results show that when flexibility is carried out as a mere cost-reduction device and social security only relies on insurance principles, deregulation leads to insecurity.
‘The political economy of work security and flexibility’ is essential reading for academics, students, practitioners and policy makers interested in the outcomes of labour market developments in advanced economies over the past twenty years.
Approaches based around complexity theory are increasingly being used in the study of organisations and the delivery of services. This is the first book to explore the application of complexity theory to difficult practice issues in criminal justice and social work and is intended to stimulate debate. It brings together experts in this emerging field to address complexity theory from a range of perspectives (positivist, realist, and constructivist), providing a detailed but accessible discussion of the key issues to whole systems approaches. The chapters cover theory and research on the nature of complex adaptive systems, their application to key areas of service delivery and the efficacy and ethics of criminal justice and social work interventions. The book argues for the usefulness of applying complexity theory to address significant and intractable social problems and also challenges the reductionist approaches to solving those problems currently favoured by policy makers. It will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in social work and criminal justice.
Child poverty is a central and present part of global life, with hundreds of millions of children around the world enduring tremendous suffering and deprivation of their most basic needs. Despite its long history, research on poverty and development has only relatively recently examined the issue of child poverty as a distinct topic of concern. This book brings together theoretical, methodological and policy-relevant contributions by leading researchers on international child poverty. With a preface from Sir Richard Jolly, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, it examines how child poverty and well-being are now conceptualized, defined and measured, and presents regional and national level portraits of child poverty around the world, in rich, middle income and poor countries. The book’s ultimate objective is to promote and influence policy, action and the research agenda to address one of the world’s great ongoing tragedies: child poverty, marginalization and inequality.
-emotional difficulties (Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) – 11 years). Key here is the use of the teacher version of the SDQ to offset some of the potential reciprocal influences and thus confounding that could occur if both the predictors and outcomes have the same respondent. Of central concern in this analysis is not only whether the quantile approach is revealing but whether language differentially mediates across quantiles of the outcome variable. Similar to previously, Law et al (2017) , we include both linear and quantile regression to highlight the value added by
very high levels of democracy. This paper disaggregates the Polity IV index into a vector of 20 dummy variables to explore how differing degrees of democracy and autocracy may impact economic freedom, thereby leaving open the possibility for levels of democracy modestly less than perfect democracy to have better effects on economic freedom. This paper will also consider the Vreeland re-estimate of the Polity IV index, the Grundler-Kreiger measure of democracy, the use of a quadratic term, and quantile regression. The weak evidence that is found points to a
that stands out concerns their use of quantile regression, which shows how associations that differ across a distribution may be masked when analysed through OLS analysis. I wonder how the development of children who have spent multiple months either out of school doing distance learning, or attending school but masked because of COVID-19 will be impacted in both their socio-emotional development and in their language development. Maximillian Weber’s (2022) paper on ‘Language skills in student essays: social disparities and later educational attainment’ is on a
differentials in the French nonprofit and for-profit sectors: evidence from quantile regression , Annals of Economics and Statistics/Annales d’Économie et de Statistique , 99/100 : 67 – 90 . EIGE (European Institute for Gender Equality) ( 2016 ) Gender Equality Training: Gender Mainstreaming Toolkit , Vilnius : EIGE . Eurofound ( 2018 ) Pay Transparency in Europe: First Experiences with Gender Pay Reports and Audits in Four Member States , Luxembourg : Publications Office of the European Union . Faulk , L. , Edwards , L.H. , Lewis , G.B. and McGinnis
