This book has reviewed ‘difference’ in housing contexts, and touched on relationships with markets, paternalism, inequalities, and discourses about dependencies and economic life. Theoretically-led general analyses of housing policy remain scarce (see Dickens et al, 1985; Kemeny, 1992; King, 1996), and our study has broken new ground. The analysis has messages applicable beyond housing, offering perspectives on the welfare state in general. Experiential diversity can be brought more comprehensively into accounts of welfare systems, but analysts should not be deflected by awareness of differentiation and choice from tackling the big picture. Households vary greatly, but act in contexts which privilege some and substantially disadvantage others in regular and patterned ways. We have used the term difference within difference to locate diversity of household experiences, strategies and identities within persistent broader patterns of differentiation.

To provide stepping-stones between the detail of daily events and the idea of more longstanding structural factors, our book has deployed the term social regulation. This takes form in an ensemble of overlapping mechanisms, practices and influential assumptions through which people's varied lives and plans may be constrained, facilitated or conditioned, and through which difference is responded to, socially constructed, oppressed or celebrated. Many households are helped by institutions in empowering ways, but wealth and labour market status remain crucial for outcomes, alongside degrees of risk and conformity that households represent. Once achieved, the home itself can influence differential access to services and other resources, conferring as well as expressing status (cf Clapham, Kemp and Smith, 1990, pp 61-2). The realm of ideas is important. While competing discourses are propagated, there is a structured selectivity which helps accord some more weight than others (see comments below on property rights). Specific historical circumstances can be crucial. For example, alongside increasing social and spatial polarisation (and weakened labour market ties), discourses about conditionality and social order have gained ground, suggesting growing desires to deter or punish through administrative practices of welfare provision as well as through law and order systems.

As contributors to the social regulation ensemble, housing policies have ambiguous effects, both constraining and facilitating choice, and responding to a variety of participants against a backcloth of differentiations among households in strategies and resources. The role of agency appears here in many important manifestations, including explicit challenges or pressures from the grass roots, individual households’ decisions, and actions by professionals. Earlier in the book we indicated that agency and structure are mutually implicated. It is important to keep in mind what this means in housing, considering how the structural becomes the specific (and vice-versa), and roles that people play in interpreting, confirming and reshaping constraints.