This book combines an understanding of aspects of theory with an account of specific housing issues. Its aims are ambitious, as the hope is to offer a fresh way of looking at social policy in general which copes with agency and structure as well as with diversity and continuity, while also exploring important facets of housing. Much of this writing has covered new territory for housing studies, particularly when introducing a notion of social regulation to embrace social control, social support, and responses to difference. Some readers may feel that I have been too bold; for example in rejecting oppression as an analytical tool, or in deciding to give no coverage directly to the literatures on postmodernism or reflexivity (albeit partly due to constraints of space). On the other hand, I have also been conservative, drawing on ideas for theorising social policy systems which I have written about since the early 1980s.

Many colleagues and students, as well as other informants and friends, have contributed to the development of ideas that have found their way into this book. At the start of the enterprise I was fortunate in persuading Cathy Davis to take on the chapter related to gender. Thus Cathy wrote Chapter Seven, and made valuable observations on other sections of the book. Thanks are due also to the people who read or advised on parts of the volume at various stages: Pete Dwyer, Austin Harrington, Ian Law, Geof Mercer, Chris Oldman, Ray Pawson, Deborah Phillips, Mark Priestley, Alison Ravetz, David Robinson, Ian Varcoe, and Terry Wassall. In addition, I have a debt to Colin Barnes, of the Centre for Disability Studies at Leeds, for advice and encouragement as I have begun to try to take proper account of disability within my analysis of the welfare state. Direct thanks are owed to Stuart Cameron, David Naylor and Kesia Reeve for permitting me to refer to unpublished writings. Valuable comments were also provided by two anonymous referees. Above all, throughout the writing process Gill Harrison has provided a great deal of support and advice. Any faults in the text or arguments of the book, however, are errors of the authors alone.