The social and economic status of children and the social construction of childhood have become subjects of increasing interest over the past decade. Children in Families provides a rich collection of essays on children and childhood from a variety of perspectives. The first few papers address some important theoretical issues. Chris Jenks discusses the social construction of childhood in post-modern society and the way in which childhood has come to represent security and stability in a world where adult life and relationships are increasingly insecure and unstable. He argues that the social response to child abuse is an attempt to preserve childhood and parent–child relations as a last remaining symbol of stability.

In terms of form and subject content, this is a finely organised, carefully balanced, and well-presented book. The eight chapters vary from 11 to 55 pages in length – reflecting, presumably, both the author's estimate of a topic's relative value and the quality of information on it that was known to her. Each chapter, too, is carefully sub-divided into up to twelve sub-sections. There is a excellent bibliography (over 400 items). Though the subject index could have been more detailed in a book with so much internal density as this, it passes muster. If there is any economically literate guide to research and debate on trends in patterns of paid employment amongst women that is more clearly written than this, it could hardly offer more condensed yet comprehensive coverage than that offered here. As a populariser, Dr Hakim has formidable skills, which she perhaps undervalues. However, this is a guide and think-piece for fellow professionals, not for the undergraduate readership duly invoked in accompanying publicity material.

Occasionally it seems as if it might have been more pleasant to have studied Social Policy in, say, the 1950s. From the fluid and turbulent perspective of the 1990s it appears an era of relative tranquillity and certainty: there were fewer books to read, apparently more certainty of both purpose and means (although it is a sign of our times that there is currently a revisionist debate going on about the reality of the so-called ‘Butskellite consensus’), and generally less to know. It is said that in the thirteenth century Roger Bacon was able to compend all the scientific knowledge of his day in a single work. This has long been impossible even for any single discipline, but at least the latest edition of the Social Policy Review does give the reader a taste of the range and diversity of issues which now characterises the subject.

Lady Thatcher welcomes this book enthusiastically as a telling exposé of the failings of state welfare and the damage it has done to the British people; she is slightly more cautious about endorsing the whole of David Marsland's package of ‘reforms’, amounting to a total demolition of the welfare state. Lady Thatcher's approval suggests that this book lays bare much of the implicit and often unacknowledged ideology which has co-ordinated so many attacks on welfare provision since 1979. The book should be read attentively, for it betrays what many influential politicians really think.

This book is a collection of essays most of which have been published elsewhere but are now conveniently assembled in one volume. The range of the themes, the methodology of analysis and the style and scrupulous scholarship exhibited in this volume give plenty of evidence to confirm Skocpol's achievement as the doyenne of social policy writers in the United States.

In Scotland, where the traditional house form was (like other European countries) the tenement flat, housing has continued to develop in a different way from the rest of Britain. Since the First World War a higher proportion of public sector housing was built and a lower proportion of Scots have moved into owner occupation. This book has both a historical and a contemporary focus. It examines not only the development of Scottish housing throughout the twentieth century but also recent housing policy, particularly the situation since 1979 when the Thatcher government came to power.