The ‘rediscovery’ of poverty in the 1960s in the United States and the rising welfare expectations all over the world have sharpened a continuing debate about the relative merits of a variety of proposals for dealing with want. A discussion of the Soviet approach may provide a useful perspective for us and for other countries. Income maintenance programmes in the Soviet Union, as they had developed up to 1968, have been studied by this author. In this paper, an attempt is made to bring developments up to date, focusing on what they suggest in regard to policy for the 1970s.

There is absolutely no way to attack poverty through the transfer of economic resources without also profoundly affecting, for better or ill, the social bond. Definitions of social welfare generally recognize ‘…the mutually supportive obligations of people to each other’. Yet many serious and competent social thinkers apparently deny the significance of reciprocity in those social exchanges that are arranged as a matter of social policy. The predominant view is that social policies are ‘…characterized not so much by exchange by which a quid is gotten for a quo as by unilateral transfers that are justified by some kind of appeal to a status or legitimacy, identity or community’. Titmuss refers to the grant or gift as a unilateral transfer which ‘…is the distinguishing mark of the social (in policy and administration) just as exchange or bilateral transfer is the mark of the economic’. It will be argued here that this view, useful in some ways, also seriously distorts perceptions and has a deleterious effect on the design and implementation of programmes that make up the official helping enterprise in general, and programmes of income maintenance in particular. Most often social policy transactions are erroneously conceived in ideal or pure terms, bearing little or no resemblance to economic or market exchange. In reality, however, the vast majority of all transactions, economic and social, occur on a continuum between these theoretical poles.

Reputedly some Las Vegas casinos set their roulette wheels so that overall ‘the house’ never loses although many play and some players win. In effect, the house sets the odds which remain unknown to the players. So it is with private pension plans in the United States, with the important difference that employees cannot decide whether to play or not; the decision is made for them by their employer or through collective bargaining.

In the public service a research strategy is specifically designed to yield information of value to policy-making, that is to management. This is the only ground on which the expenditure of public funds can be justified. The kind of research which I am discussing therefore is not the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake; it is research that is an integral and inseparable part of management. Because research has not often, in the past, been properly related to and integrated with management, it has tended to be regarded as an expendable fringe activity; to be restrained at all times and sacrificed in time of stringency (usually when it is most necessary). This is especially true of local government and the researchers (particularly the research directors) are often as much to blame as their political masters.

It may be that when the history of social administration as an academic discipline during the 1960s comes to be looked back upon, one of the most significant developments will be seen to have been the growing influence upon it of sociology. As social services have developed in extent and complexity, a descriptive approach to the study of them has appeared ever more inadequate; and with the rapid development of sociology, both new empirical material, new perspectives, and new methods of analysis have become increasingly accessible. Social administration now uses sociological research methods, and draws heavily upon sociological theory. At the same time, both the active interest of ‘committed’ sociologists in the field of social welfare and, specifically, the emergence of the ‘sociology of welfare’ to join other sociological specializations indicate that the tendency for the two disciplines to impinge increasingly upon each other is not one-sided.

The Department of Education defines an immigrant child as one either born abroad or born in U.K. to a parent or parents whose origin was abroad, and who came to Britain less than ten years ago. This definition does not therefore include children born to immigrant parents of long-standing, or to black parents born here. Mrs Thatcher has proposed a new definition of ‘immigrant child’ from January 1972, which will take into account grand-parents’ country or origin. It should thus be possible to estimate the total population of ‘black’ children in British schools with more accuracy after this date.

The history of the development of social work as a professional discipline from its early beginnings in the 1900s to the present time has exhibited two contradictory trends. Sometimes social work has seemed to be the conscience of society. During other periods it seems to have been an apologist for the status quo, devoting its efforts to adjusting clients to the existing social institutions. These trends can be identified by the activity of social work during changing historical periods in the United States as well as by the professional leaders associated with these eras.

The resources of sociology do not appear to have been extensively or systematically utilized in the study of social policy and administration. One source of evidence for this statement is the absence of explicit references to sociological theories in some of the most well known general texts on British social policy and administration. Pinker's recent analysis of social theory and social policy also lends support to the view that there has been, and still remains, something of a division between sociologists and students of social policy and administration. He concludes that the ‘founding fathers’ of sociology (Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Spencer) had a tendency to be ‘not greatly interested…(in)…remedies for social problems’, and makes the general observation that ‘sociologists have been oddly diffident about the subject-matter of social administration’, possibly because of the latter's atheoretical nature.

‘The lines of a great housing policy have been developed as a result of mature deliberations and far reaching enquiries’ said the Report of the War Cabinet for 1918. So they had. The decision to provide Exchequer subsidies for housing was a major development in social policy. It was the result of a prolonged and detailed study which began in the spring of 1916 and was embodied in legislation in the Housing and Town Planning Act 1919.

In recent years American universities have come under increasing attack from many students and a small proportion of faculty for being a spawning ground of ‘institutional racism’, a charge that implies various malefactions. The language of this accusation is often so inflammatory that different meanings of the term are fused and consequently policies to deal with the problems at issue are confused. Having spent a good portion of the last two years listening to the accusations, proclamations, and demands made in the name of institutional racism, we should now like to examine what some of the basic issues seem to be about and their policy implications for the university.

The so-called ‘hunger marches’ are a familiar feature of the depression and unemployment of the inter-war years. Their inspirer was the National Unemployed Workers' Movement (N.U.W.M.) which between 1922 and 1936 organized six national demonstrations consisting of contingents from various parts of the country, converging on London. They were protesting against unemployment and low rates of assistance, ‘work or full maintenance at trade union rates’ being the recurrent demand. There were also many local demonstrations and the organization won considerable support, particularly from younger unemployed workers frustrated by the inertia of the official labour and trade union leadership.

In the United Kingdom, special legislative provision for medical research was first made by the National Insurance Act 1911. On various earlier occasions public funds for the purpose had been provided on a small scale to successive central health departments in England and Wales, sporadically from 1833 and regularly from 1870; and notably to the Royal Commission on Tuberculosis appointed in 1901, which decided to ascertain facts by investigation rather than listen to opinions from witnesses.

Many things are associated with Hong Kong, but innovation in social security and social welfare is not one of them. Yet recent developments in Hong Kong are perhaps of more than local interest alone, not simply because Hong Kong has the advantage of virtually starting from scratch in developing social security but also because it has, by force of circumstance as well by inclination, had to look for what have been called ‘Hong Kong solutions for Hong Kong problems’. The results of this process might be regarded, if not as models to be copied, at least as alternative approaches to be borne in mind when other countries review the possible choices of development in social security open to them.

At the end of 1971 the Government designated the extention of the Community Development Project to the planned total of twelve areas. The project was then described as ‘a national action-research experiment’ carried out in selected urban localities in order to discover ‘how far the social problems experienced by people in a local community can be better understood and resolved through closer co-ordination of all agencies in the social welfare field – central and local government and the voluntary organizations – together with the local people themselves’. There was a special emphasis placed on the importance of ‘citizen involvement and community self-help’, together with the expectation that ‘the lessons learned can be fed back into social policy, planning and administration, both at central and local government level’.