Social Policy and Society

There is a growing interest in ‘evidence-based policy making’ in the UK. However, there remains some confusion about what evidence-based policy making actually means. This paper outlines some of the models used to understand how evidence is thought to shape or inform policy in order to explore the assumptions underlying ‘evidence-based policy making.’ By way of example, it considers the process of evidence seeking and in particular the systematic review as a presumed ‘gold standard’ of the EBP movement. It highlights some of the opportunities and challenges represented in this approach for policy research. The final part of the paper outlines some questions of capacity that need to be addressed if the social sciences are to make a more effective contribution to policy debate in Britain.

This article explores the progressive and regressive potential of ‘user involvement’ in research and evaluation, with particular reference to social policy. There is growing political and research interest in user involvement. This article critically explores key different approaches to user involvement in research and relates them to consumerist and democratic models of involvement in policy and practice, management and development. The article highlights the need to approach user involvement in research critically and systematically, taking account of the diversity of approaches that have developed and to take forward user involvement in research in equal association with service user organisations and movements.

The phenomenon of migrant workers finding domestic and care work in the homes and institutions of countries wealthier than their own uncovers much about social change in the twenty-first century. First, it reveals the consequences of women taking on more responsibilities to earn income but without a significant rebalancing of their care responsibilities either with male partners or through state support. In the poorer regions of the world, unemployment, violence, poverty and aspirations for a better life push some women into emigrating to earn for their families. This also exposes an asymmetrical geopolitical solution to the so-called ‘care deficit’ pursued by richer states, accentuated by the demographics of ageing societies and restructured welfare regimes on the one side, and the care crises in the poorer regions on the other. The transnational movement of (mainly) women into care and domestic work, as well as nurses, pharmacists and doctors into health care saves social expenditure costs while intensifying the lack of care resources in the countries of origin of those migrant workers.

This article explores the meaning of ‘the visit’ to Pakistan by a sample of people living in the North of England, with relatives in Pakistan. It argues that the visit has a particular symbolic and practical significance in the maintenance of transnational kin relationships. Visiting involves travelling and ‘co-presence’ with people, as well as in a place – in this case, Pakistan. It is particularly important in the process of ‘knowing’ one's geographically distant relatives, and in ‘doing things together’ and ‘being there at key moments’. These elements are woven together with other ways of keeping in touch in between visits, and help to sustain family narratives of ‘the regular visit’ and the kinship network that is active over distances and over time. The visit was also important in helping to confirm a sense of belonging or affinity with Pakistan, even though for many in the study England was seen as home. However, visiting involves complex and sometimes difficult sets of negotiations and decisions about propriety, morality, exchange, and belonging in transnational kin relationships.

The concept of co-production – also called co-creation – is gaining widespread attention as a way to increase user involvement in service provision in the UK. It is usually taken as self-evident that more co-production will improve services. However, it is necessary to be clear about how far and in what ways co-production can improve public services. This article looks at the purported advantages of co-production, and considers how these can best be accessed. A case study workshop involving social housing users and providers, conducted as part of the National Consumer Council-Unison Shared Solutions project, is used to illustrate the need for collective dialogue and deliberation between co-producers rather than purely transactional forms of co-production.

This paper explores the increasing significance of domestic workers in Spain, a country that has the highest figures of registered household employees in the EU, many of them female migrant workers. The paper focuses on how the domestic sector has grown in recent years along with mass migration flows. The growth of the household sector in Spain is situated within the context of the welfare and migration regimes. The household sector in Spain is currently absorbing a large part of the demand for childcare and elderly care provision. Although the domestic sector in Spain is more regulated than in many other countries, greater efforts to formalise and improve the labour and employment rights of household employees are needed to counterbalance occupational segregation and social inequality.

A major problem for voluntary organisations service providers under contract has been their independence in regard to both the relatively narrow issue of the terms and conditions of service provision, and the broader issue about the part voluntary organisations might play in policy shaping and democratic renewal. I examine the way in which New Labour has developed its ‘partnership’ approach to the voluntary sector since 1998. I argue that better terms and conditions have been secured for voluntary organisations providing services, and that large and umbrella organisations now have more impact on the implementation of central government policy. However, the more equal partnership required for a policy-shaping role in the sense of agenda-setting is likely to remain elusive, while at the local level there are tensions between the idea of voluntary organisations as agents of ‘civil renewal’ and as service providers.

The nature of welfare state regimes has been an ongoing debate within the comparative social policy literature since the publication of Esping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990). This paper engages with two aspects of this debate; the gender critique of Esping-Andersen's thesis, and Kasza's (2002) assertions about the ‘illusory nature’ of welfare state regimes. It presents a gender-focused defamilisation index and contrasts it with Esping-Andersen's decommodification index to illustrate that, whilst individual welfare states have been shown to exhibit internal variety across different policy areas, they are both consistent and coherent in terms of their policy variation by gender. It concludes, in contrast to both the gender critique of Esping-Andersen, and Kasza's rejection of the regimes concept, that the ‘worlds of welfare’ approach is therefore neither gender blind or illusory, and can, if limited to the analysis of specific areas such as labour market decommodification or defamilisation, be resurrected as a useful means of organising and classifying welfare states.

In this article, we deal with contradictions and paradoxes of the German policies on migration and domestic care work. Although the demand for care workers in private homes is increasing, the German government has turned a blind eye to the topic of migrant care workers. As a result of the mismatch between demand and restrictive policies, a large sector of undeclared care work has come into being. This veritable ‘twilight zone’ can be coined an ‘open secret’ as it is the topic of extensive discussions among the populace and in the media. We will address various discrepancies in the debate on migrant domestic work in Germany by providing a view from multiple actors’ perspectives. Examining the intersections of gendered migration and care regimes, we assert that undeclared care migration is an integral part of German welfare state policies, which can be characterised as compliance and complicity.

This article explores recent developments in the modernisation of adult social care through the lens of changes to English day services. Drawing on wider policy debates, it argues that Disabled Peoples' Movement and governmental ideas on self-directed support, although superficially similar, are growing increasingly apart. It is argued that in the absence of adequate funding and exposure to organisations of disabled people, day service recipients risk moving from a position of enforced collectivism to an enforced individualism characteristic of neo-liberal constructions of economic life.

The nature of welfare regimes has been an ongoing debate within the comparative social policy literature since the publication of Esping-Andersen's ‘Three Worlds of Welfare’ (1990). This article draws upon recent developments within this debate, most notably Kasza's assertions about the ‘illusory nature’ of welfare regimes, to highlight the health care discrepancy. It argues that health care provision has been a notable omission from the wider regimes literature and one which, if included in the form of a health care decommodification typology, can give credence to Kasza's perspective by highlighting the diverse internal arrangements of welfare states and welfare state regimes.

Issues surrounding the role and provision of evidence to inform policy and practice have become topical and problematic. The context of these controversies is discussed, with particular emphasis on systematic approaches to synthesising research evidence. We contrast the ‘positivist’ emphasis with interpretative qualitative synthesis, and suggest that many of the viewpoints have become unnecessarily and unhelpfully polarised. The methods for systematic research syntheses will vary as they depend on the question being asked. The process is transparent, allowing readers to see how conclusions have been reached, and forms the basis of reviews which can be updated to help provide sustainable and relevant evidence.

Neoliberal reforms in social welfare policy have been common across the developed capitalist democracies in the latter decades of the twentieth century. A central question for political economists has been whether or not economic globalisation has played a significant role in fostering these reforms in public social welfare provision. In the present paper, I review the best recent work on globalisation and the democratic capitalist welfare state. I also provide a synopsis of recent arguments about the domestic political sources of contemporary trajectories of the welfare state. After brief surveys of welfare state retrenchment and recent scholarship, I utilise newly available data to offer an analysis of the impacts of globalisation and key features of domestic politics on 1981–2000 variations in social welfare entitlements and decommodification.

Drawing on extensive research, the article proposes a diagnostic tool for assessing official schemes to encourage participation and discusses remedial measures that might be taken to tackle problems. According to the CLEAR framework, people participate when they can: when they have the resources necessary to make their argument. People participate when they feel part of something: they like to participate because it is central to their sense of identity. They participate when they are enabled to do so by an infrastructure of civic networks and organisations. People participate when they are directly asked for their opinion. Finally, people participate when they experience the system they are seeking to influence as responsive.

One of the most substantial additions made by the ‘three worlds of welfare’ thesis to the welfare state modelling business is that comparisons should examine what welfare states actually do rather than how much they are afforded or which services they provide. This paper extends this basic principle by comparing the health outcomes (measured in terms of infant mortality rates) of welfare states and welfare state regimes. It examines whether there are significant differences in health status between the ‘three worlds of welfare’ and to what extent a relationship exists between health and decommodification. It concludes by reflecting upon the implications for the ‘three worlds of welfare’.

This paper describes the development of ‘case histories’ from a qualitative longitudinal data set that followed 100 young people's transitions to adulthood over a ten year period. The paper describes two stages in the analytic process: first, the forging of a case history from a longitudinal archive and second, bringing case histories into conversation with each other. The paper emphasises two aspects of a qualitative longitudinal data set: the longitudinal dimension that privileges the individual case, and the cross sectional dimension that privileges the social and the spatial context. It is argued that both aspects should always be kept in play in analysis. The paper concludes by reflecting on the ethical and practical challenges associated with the case history approach, heightened by the growing demand to archive and share qualitative longitudinal data sets.

This paper explores bias in the use of evidence in policy. It argues that existing models of the evidence–policy relationship neglect the tendency for attention to be paid only to that evidence helpful to the interests of powerful social groups. An evolutionary analogy is used to explain how this bias arises, without the need for irrationality or conspiracy on the part of policy makers. Examples are given in the fields of drug, asylum and other policies, and the possible responses by researchers to the biased use of research evidence are discussed.

Choice has become a central – and much debated – theme of New Labour's approach to the reform of public service. In this article we examine the conditions and consequences of the indeterminacy of choice in political discourse, policy development and organisational dynamics. We suggest that the under-specification of choice in political and policy settings risks devolving the stresses of indeterminacy to service organisations and their interactions with the public. We explore some of the public's ambivalence about choice and public services and conclude by offering two ways of thinking about the indeterminacy of choice – treating choice as a condensate and as a proxy.

This paper sets out an argument for the re-imagining of care in social policy on three interrelated grounds: epistemological–theoretical, substantive socio-historical, and normative political–philosophical. It takes up the epistemological challenge offered by queer theory to propose a different gaze be cast on care which recognizes the practices of care which take place outside normative heterosexual couples and families. Following on from this, it suggests that the care that has been the object of study in social policy has failed to keep up with transformations in the realm of sociability which characterize the contemporary world. It outlines findings of research which show the increasing importance of friendship to those at the cutting edge of processes of individualization. Finally, it points to the new and valuable lens that the study of caring practices of friends might cast on the ethics of care, and it ends with some pointers to what it might mean for social policy to take friendship seriously.

This article examines changing patterns of money management in the UK and elsewhere and argues that couples are becoming more individualised in their finances. It draws on quantitative and qualitative data and considers some of the implications of individualisation, in particular in terms of paying for children and childcare. The conclusion is that independent management of money may give both partners a sense of autonomy and personal freedom – so long as their incomes are broadly equivalent. However, if the woman's income drops, for example when children are born, while her outgoings increase, because she is expected to pay the costs of children, the situation may change. Individualisation in money management can then be a route to inequality, so long as women's earnings are lower than men's and women are responsible for paying for children and childcare.