Whilst philanthropy has long helped fund private initiatives for public good, governments are becoming more interested in expanding this income source as pressures on public spending increase. One outcome of multiple efforts to enhance philanthropy is the growth of giving circles, which involve individual donors collaborating to support causes of mutual interest. This research examines the degree to which giving circles are a good mechanism for enhancing philanthropy. Our overarching interest is to understand if giving circles in the UK and Ireland might serve to grow philanthropy as well as shift the logic of charity to meet the expectations of policy-makers.

There has recently been public discussion of the rewards available to senior staff in English and Welsh charities. However, that discussion is usually based on examples of individual salaries, or on unrepresentative and small subsets of the charity population. To provide a robust and informed basis for debate, we have conducted analyses of evidence on the payment of high salaries (defined as the numbers of people paid above £60,000 p.a., a reporting threshold used by the Charity Commission) in: (a) a representative sample of c.10,000 English and Welsh charities, and (b) surveys of individuals regarding comparative salary levels in different sectors of the economy. Overall, survey data show that the proportion of staff in receipt of high salaries is lower than average in the third sector than in other sectors. Information from charity annual accounts is used to demonstrate which charities are more likely than others to pay such salaries, and to relate the likelihood of paying high salaries to charity characteristics (income, location and subsector). We show that the distribution of high pay in the charitable sector is largely a function of the size and complexity of organisations, and is generally unrelated to subsector or income mix.

In the context of increased marketisation in welfare provision, formal information and advice (I&A) is widely assumed to enable users, as consumers, to make informed choices about services, support and care. There is emerging evidence that telephone I&A services represent important ways of providing such services. This article proposes a framework that identifies key areas of focus delineating the efficacy of I&A, which is then used in a comprehensive literature review to critique existing research on outcomes and/or impact of telephone I&A. Existing, predominately quantitative, research has critical weaknesses. There is a lack of adequate contextual focus, understanding agency, and how I&A is used in different contexts to influence causal processes. The article contends that the efficacy of I&A is not adequately reported and provides much needed theoretical clarity in key areas, including the desirability of further realist evaluation approaches.

The Troubled Families Programme (TFP) is the latest example of a tradition of family intervention projects (FIPs) for which the evidence basis for success is ambiguous. However, research does suggest that features of such projects – for example, time and flexibility of FIP workers, afforded by relatively small caseloads – offer some benefits for service users. This article draws on an evaluation of a FIP delivered by a Unitary Authority as part of the wider TFP to consider such features and found similar benefits. The article frames the research in terms of the expansion of the TFP and the implications this may have for its practical successes. It concludes by underscoring that by extending the programme whilst reducing its funding the most recent round of the TFP threatens precisely the features previously identified as most advantageous.

The UK Conservative government has committed to increasing funding for domestic violence and abuse (DVA) services in England but this has not been extended to Wales. Wales has however made clear commitments to developing these services, through the Violence against Women, Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence (Wales) Act 2015. This article draws on focus groups and interviews with fifty-three service users and thirty-one purposively selected service providers to explore their perspectives on Violence Against Women (VAW) service provision in Wales. There are clear shared priorities and some tensions between service user and provider perspectives on appropriate services. Drawing on the long history of intermediate co-production in VAW services, the article argues that co-production at the strategic level is now needed. This would provide an arena for resolving tensions, setting standards and developing funding criteria to enable co-produced VAW policy and build resistance to funding cuts.

Beneficiary advocacy organisations, which provide advice to individual claimants about how best to navigate the welfare system, exist in the context of complex and opaque benefit-claiming processes that have resulted from workfare policies. Drawing on a case study of Auckland Action Against Poverty, an organisation specialising in poverty activism and services for welfare beneficiaries, this article examines the provision of beneficiary advocacy services as a form of everyday resistance to workfare policies. Everyday resistance is less overtly political, less confrontational, and more ordinary than spectacular acts of resistance such as protests, but one that should not be seen as accommodating workfare policies and the market-based reform projects to which they are connected. By supporting individuals to defiantly persevere with their benefit claims, beneficiary advocates help to actively resist the operational logic of dissuasion that defines contemporary workfare.

Among scholars and practitioners, there is a growing recognition of the important role of employers in the success of active labour market policies in Europe. However, there is a lack of systematic evidence about why and how employers engage in active labour market policies. In this article, the preferences and behaviour of employers towards active labour market policies are untangled. A typology of four types of employers is constructed for analytical and empirical analysis. By distinguishing positive and negative preferences from participation and non-participation, four types of employers are identified: the committed employer, the dismissive employer, the sceptical employer and the passive employer. The utility of the typology is tested with survey data on employer engagement in Danish ALMPs. The findings indicate that only a minority of Danish employers can be classified as ‘committed employers’, and the majority are either ‘dismissive’ or ‘passive’ employers. In the final section, this finding and the usefulness of the typology for analytical and empirical research is discussed.

Definitions of frailty are much debated. The focus of this article is on the representation of frailty; who employs the terms ‘frail’ or ‘frailty’ in social care, about whom and with what meanings? We report secondary analysis of interview data from two waves of a longitudinal study starting in 2008. Study participants were 240 social care managers/practitioners working in four English localities. Social care managers and practitioners did not talk at length about frailty as characterising the increasing needs of care users. The minority who talked about frailty used the term in three ways: describing a physical state not including dementia; describing a stable state, as distinct from those dying; and as a combination of physical and mental disabilities (i.e. dementia). Differences among the participants in this study about the meaning of frailty could have implications for policy makers and for communication with other staff, health professionals, older people and their relatives.

Little research has been conducted exploring the relationship between public-sector accountability and the law. This is a significant oversight given the potential for this relationship to cause unintended consequences around issues of liability, especially in the context of a growing litigation culture. The purpose of the current research is to explore this relationship, using qualitative studies of public-sector professionals in England. The findings of the study suggest that increasing emphasis on accountability has led to a growing magnification of legal risk in the public sector, with consequences for the ways public-sector professionals perceive their relationships with the public.

This article reports the results of a case study on the introduction of the living wage. Three employers in the City of York became living wage employers. Using data derived from a sample survey of their employees and qualitative interviews, this article explores what impact the receipt of the living wage had on poverty and deprivation. It found that not all living wage employees were income poor or deprived, although those on living wage rates were more likely to be poor and deprived than those on even higher wages. The more important determinant of the employees’ living standards was the household they lived in, and there were a high proportion of living wage employees living in multi-unit households. Also important were the number of earners in the household and the hours worked by the living wage employee. Lone parent families and single people appeared to be most vulnerable to poverty and deprivation. In addition, whether the employee took up their entitlement to in-work benefits was critical and, using benefit checks by welfare rights experts, it was found that some were not.

There has been little comparative policy research hitherto on the substantial differences in law and order policies between Western industrialised countries. Instead, criminologists have filled this void and used concepts such as Esping-Andersen's worlds of welfare or Lijphart's patterns of democracy to interpret cross-country variation. However, the state of the art has two weaknesses: it almost exclusively relies on imprisonment data as dependent variable and it remains silent as to why welfare state regimes or types of democracy should be responsible for similarities in law and order policies. The present article tackles these shortcomings by (1) examining differences and commonalities in law and order policies in twenty Western industrialised countries and by (2) investigating whether the clustering of countries is associated with features of the welfare state or the political system. We find three distinct clusters and show that their formation is related to the characteristics of the political economy of the countries.

This article contributes to the search for suitable approaches to combat social exclusion faced by disabled people in capitalist wage labour markets. Referring to policy and service examples in Hong Kong, it reviews four social exclusion approaches – the Moral Underclass (MUD), Social Integrationist (SID), Redistributive (RED) and Collective Production (COP) approaches. These approaches are explored in relation to three key issues: (1) the diverse preferences of disabled people; (2) the myth of infeasibility regarding unconventional approaches and (3) the defects of the medical model of disability. The article argues that the MUD and SID approaches are more associated with the medical model of disability and emphasise individual changes. The RED and COP approaches contain more features of the social model of disability and are in favour of social and structural changes. The COP approach stresses the diverse preferences of disabled people and supports innovative services to combat social exclusion.

The feminisation of international migration for care labour has gained prominence in the last three decades. It has been theorised mainly in the context of the changing care regime in the Global North; the changes in other parts of the world have been largely neglected. This article explores the dynamics between changing care regimes, labour markets and international migration in the East Asian context through the case of Korean Chinese migrants to South Korea. Korean Chinese came to South Korea through various legal channels beginning in the late 1980s and occupy the largest share of both male and female migrants in South Korea. Korean Chinese women have engaged in service sector jobs, including domestic work and caregiving, since their influx, yet such work was only legalised during the 2000s in response to demographic changes and the care deficit. This article sheds light on the female Korean Chinese migrants’ engagement in care work in the ambiguous legal space of migration and the care labour market, and their changing roles in the process of development of the care labour market. Based on interviews with Korean Chinese migrants in South Korea, immigration statistics, and the Foreign Employment Survey in 2013, this study explores how the care regime intersects with migration in the process of the care regimes development.

Using the China Household Income Project 2007 data and imputing health and education benefits through microsimulation, this article provides evidence on how the inclusion of health and education benefits might change the estimated size, structure and redistributive effects of the Chinese social welfare system. We find that the inequalities in social welfare systems across the urban–rural–migrant populations persisted, reinforcing the multidimensional inequalities in health and education well documented in the literature. Imputed health benefits were larger and played a greater redistributive role in urban areas than for their rural and migrant peers. Imputed education benefits, on the other hand, played a more equalising role in rural and migrant populations as compared to the urban population. These results highlight the importance for China to use health and education benefits effectively to mitigate such multidimensional inequalities and enhance the life opportunities of disadvantaged citizens, especially children.

This article examines whether people aged eighty-five-and-over, referred to throughout as ‘The Oldest Old’, are more likely to suffer from social exclusion than people aged sixty-five to eighty-four. Social Exclusion is defined according to the four dimensions identified in the 1999 Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey. Using data from Understanding Society, the analysis finds that the Oldest Old have a higher likelihood of experiencing social exclusion than people aged sixty-five to eighty-four. These findings illustrate the risks facing the Oldest Old, and highlight the policy challenges presented by ageing western populations.

Knowledge of ‘what works’ in early-intervention family services has prompted moves away from approaches which see varied services working autonomously with individual family members, towards provision of multi-agency cross-sector programmes working at a family level. Latterly, some such programmes have adopted Restorative Approach in the belief that delivering services using a more participatory relationship-based framework will support families more effectively. To consider this shift towards use of a Restorative Approach this article explores the concepts and theory that underpin the approach, reflects on how these relate to recommended UK early-intervention family service practice, and constructs a model of family service provision based on the approach. The aim of this article is to consider whether adoption of Restorative Approach has the potential to improve early-intervention family service effectiveness and ultimately have a positive outcome on families.

Policy makers and researchers are alarmed by the pervasive substandard working conditions and mistreatment in domestic work worldwide. Using an original dataset from a sample of domestic workers in Portugal (n = 684), our study explores types of abuse and harassment and tries to unveil the potential factors affecting the likelihood of having been a victim. Empirical evidence pointed to three segments of domestic workers: victims of labour abuses related to contract and wages, victims of multiple abuses including mistreatment and also psychological and sexual harassment, and a segment with no occurrence of abuse. Informal workers are more often victims of labour abuses, while migrants, especially Brazilian women, are more likely to report all types of abuse and harassment. On the other hand, carers of the elderly often suffered multiple abuses. The results suggest that despite the prevalence of labour abuses in Portugal, the most severe abuses are uncommon.

Community participation has become an essential element of government policy around the globe in recent decades. This move towards ‘government through community’ has been presented as an opportunity for citizens to gain power and as a necessary part of the shift from government to governance, enabling states and communities to tackle complex problems in tandem. However, it has also been critiqued as an attempt to shift responsibility from the state onto communities. Using evidence from detailed case studies, this article examines the implementation of Localism in England and Community Empowerment in Scotland. The findings suggest a need for a more nuanced analysis of community participation policy, incorporating risk alongside responsibility and power, as well as considering the agency of communities and the local state. Furthermore, understanding the constraints on community participation is key, particularly in terms of the enveloping impacts of austerity and state retrenchment.

There has been optimism that social media will facilitate citizen participation and transform the communication strategies of public organisations. Drawing on a case study of the public police in England, this article considers whether social media are transforming or normalising communications. Arguing that social media have not yet served to facilitate interaction between constabularies and citizens in the ways that have been proposed and desired, the article considers factors that structure the transformative potential of social media. It is argued that the uses of social media are mediated by the existing organisational and occupational concerns of the police. This article reveals how an interplay of organisational, technological and individual and cultural dynamics come together to shape how social media are used in constabularies. Embedding social media into police communications is challenging and the technology itself will not bring about the organisational and cultural changes needed to transform police–citizen engagement.

Increasingly, the construct of resilience has been used by social scientists and (social) policy makers in relation to individual resilience to economic hardship. There are a number of issues within the literature on the subject that are unresolved including: whether it is an attribute or a process; the extent to which resilience is a positive phenomenon; the extent to which individuals living in economic hardship have agency; and whether it is finite. The article unpacks these issues, drawing on qualitative data from a longitudinal study in Northern Ireland. It found resilience to be a negative experience for study participants, although they did exhibit a number of attributes that may be described as being positive. They were often unable to exercise ‘positive’, transformative agency, because the choices available were limited and pernicious in nature. The article concludes that as an analytical tool for exploring the experiences of people living in economic hardship, the construct of resilience is not helpful.