This article examines ‘care’ and ‘values’ in local self-help groups and voluntary organisations which mobilise around partnering and parenting. It finds that a shared identity based upon common experiences of misrecognition and stigma is the most significant element of involvement. This provides the basis for new knowledge, for challenging professional practice, and for alternative practices of care and support based on trust, reciprocity and mutual respect. However, sometimes it also contributes to forms of social closure. The article sets these findings in the context of New Labour policy on voluntary organisations, participation, and parenting and partnering.

Flexible employment has been suggested as an important policy solution to ‘the problem’ of inactive older workers. Temporary contracts, part-time jobs, self-employment and freelance consulting have been seen as viable options for people needing to make gradual transitions into retirement and for governments wishing to encourage an extension to working lives. Using the case of the UK, the paper examines the multi-stakeholder appeal of flexible transitions into retirement. However, the term has been poorly defined and conceptualised. Drawing on her own research, the author challenges the notion of flexible extensions to working lives for the oldest members of the labour force.

Singapore's Central Provident Fund (CPF) has served well in the old economy as a macroeconomic stabilisation policy. It finessed the developmental state and created socio-political stability with home ownership extended to health, education and asset enhancement schemes. However, structural changes with globalisation, information communication technology (ICT) and the new knowledge-based economy (KBE), plus a series of crises and downturns since the Asian crisis have undermined full employment as the lynchpin of the triangulation and CPF model. Announcements made in August 2003 are germane to this paper's discussion of the reinvention of the CPF model. Profound and creative reinvention to balance between neo-liberal market-based solutions without losing the socio-political control enjoyed by the ruling regime, however, remains a political choice as in delinking the CPF–fiscal process, CPF serves members or state.

Globalisation, and its possible impacts, has been widely discussed and debated in Taiwan. The economic technocracies argue for globalisation, as a triumph of the free market and minimum state intervention, through measures of tax cuts, privatisation, deregulation, and so forth, as required to secure Taiwan's economic development in the future. However, rising unemployment accompanied by the new poverty requires more state provisions of social welfare. A strange policy orientation mixing tax cuts with welfare increases is proposed that precisely demonstrates the dilemma of the state between global competition and social reform. This is now a great challenge for Taiwan to balance economic and social requirements.

Evidence of ‘dissemination’ is now seen as part of research delivery by grant-giving bodies such as the ESRC and Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Drawing on the growing body of research into media sources (Manning 2001, Davis, 2000) and relating it to debates on the public sphere (Habermas 1989), the paper will ask what (if anything) researchers have to gain from involvement with the mass media and whether specialised help can assist in bringing social policy research from the margins into the mainstream of media discourse. It will look in particular at the special difficulties of disseminating ‘fuzzy’ qualitative research findings which do not lend themselves to obviously eye-catching headlines. The paper will draw on an ESRC funded experiment at the University of Leeds as a case study with which to explore these issues.

J. Le Grand (2003), Motivation, Agency, and Public Policy: Of Knights and Knaves, Pawns and Queens, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

R. Lister (2004), Poverty, Polity Books, Cambridge.

L. Mead (2004), Government Matters: Welfare Reform in Wisconsin, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford.

I started this paper with the objective of reviewing the literature on globalisation and welfare state in East Asia but quickly found that there was little available to review. Not only are there few published works on the topic, they are often too general or abstract to enlighten the subject. I accordingly redefined the paper's objective as reviewing the arguments on globalisation's impact on the Western welfare state and relating them to social welfare in East Asia. I will argue that globalisation's impact on social welfare in East Asia is even more multi-faceted and divergent than is the case in the Western world, due to domestic political conditions specific to the region.

Web sites about age and employment issues have multiplied in recent years. This section focuses on web sites designed and administered by Government and independently funded bodies based in Europe, the United States and the United Kingdom.

Those who would like to explore more on the issue, apart from looking at the references of each article, can find more information and analysis from these items supplied by authors of the articles, which are arranged by four parts: general, general-Asia, country-specific and statistics.

The websites listed here provide free access to a large body of information on the ‘state’ of families, care and welfare – working papers, policy position statements, lectures, book excerpts, statistical reviews, press releases, consultation papers, project reports, and findings documents. All websites were visited on 14 May 2004.