Recent decades have witnessed changes in welfare states, shaped by a neoliberal ideology that has reduced state responsibility for weakened populations and transformed definitions of citizenship from the universalist notion of social citizenship to the idea of market citizenship. Contemporary welfare policy is based on a disciplinary regime, which aims to produce self-disciplined citizens who adhere to market rules as the most essential civic rules. Following this change in social contract between the state and its citizens, the notion of entitlement to social rights has been transformed into disentitlement to public support. However, economic independence via labour market participation is not always possible and many must rely on welfare support for material survival. This study aims to pinpoint the factors shaping welfare recipients’ perceptions of entitlement. Drawing on 76 in-depth interviews with welfare recipients in Israel, we argue that people’s perceptions of their entitlement to public support are disciplined by the “new” welfare regime of market citizenship, yet simultaneously influenced by “old” perceptions of universal citizenship rights. This kind of “hybrid entitlement” allows welfare recipients to resist exclusion and to avoid disconnection from work and welfare.

This article analyses the interaction between two policy areas affecting young people in England – housing and student funding. It is the first of its kind exploring a range of dynamics in the relationship between housing and student loan debt. Young people today are far less likely to own their home and are more likely to live with their parents than earlier generations. In parallel, higher education tuition fee increases have led to a growing share of students taking out loans and graduating with higher debt, which they will be repaying for most of their working lives. This research examines the relationship between student loans – having borrowed for higher education and attitudes towards debt – and housing tenure at age 25, using the Next Steps dataset. We find that young graduates who did not borrow for higher education are more likely to own their home and less likely to rent or live with their parents than graduates who borrowed for their studies or young people who never attended higher education. These results suggest that higher education funding policies and student loan debt play important roles in structuring young people’s housing in England.

Britain’s Household Benefit Cap restricts the amount of benefit income unemployed households can receive. In this article, it is examined using material held at the UK’s National Archives recording debates about a proposal to introduce a similar policy – a benefit limit – in the first Thatcher Conservative government elected in 1979. It was rejected, but the Household Benefit Cap was introduced three decades later. The article locates debates about, and the practice of restricting benefit income, in perennial social security concerns with the financial incentive to do waged work. The article argues that while there are material differences that help explain the different policy outcomes in 1980 and 2010, they can primarily be explained by changing ideas about the roles of social security policy, including the development of the ‘incentive paradigm’ concerned with manipulating behaviour; a loss of concern with the hardship that would come with the introduction of a benefit restriction and a view that institutions other than the state are better placed to address poverty and buttress work incentives.

Topics such as climate change, diversity and inequality are likely to dominate the future of Social Policy. This is also a time of a generational change in Social Policy.

In this paper I will address the questions of the future challenges for Social Policy by mapping the trajectories of the second generation of Social Policy Academics. There is much to learn from this generation such as the importance of epistemic communities, of mentoring and sustained engagement with policy-makers. However, the argument put forward in this paper is that Social Policy as it developed into an academic subject from the 1960s lost the connection to policy-makers due to expanding outside London; focusing on establishing social policy as an academic subject, academic careers and moving into comparative Social Policy. One effect of this is that an explicit focus on policy innovation and design has gone missing. Instead, this space in the policy landscape has been claimed by think tanks that continue to be highly successful in influencing government policy. A re-discovery of policy design as a key part of Social Policy together with the other lessons from this generation will be needed if we want to tackle the big challenges of tomorrow.

The research literature is characterized by a fundamental controversy about what parenting support is and what it aims to be: A health-promotion measure that supports child development or a “totalizing tendency […] of defining the relation between parents and children in technical terms” (Smeyers, 2010). This paper presents a study from Norway, where parenting support is offered as a “universal”, publicly funded service. It presents and discusses findings based on in-depth interviews with 45 parents from different social (educational, economic) and cultural (migration) backgrounds, focusing on how they perceived the purpose and outcomes of parenting support programs in which they participated. A key finding is that parents with majority backgrounds are less enamoured with the quality and usefulness of provision, and tend instead towards other sources for advice on parenting (primarily their social and familial networks). Many also express scepticism of broad approaches to parenting support provision. In contrast, minority parents lacking “Norwegian” social and familial networks genuinely find the courses valuable, both for their own integration and self-confidence and also the development of their children. The findings help address the need for further research into the effectiveness of parenting support and its potential role in reducing social inequality.

Unemployment strongly influences a person’s economic resources and life chances. Especially for unemployed individuals who have to rely on means-tested benefits, episodes of unemployment often go along with substantial material restrictions. Therefore, from a policy perspective, measures or regulations that might shorten unemployment episodes and reduce overall unemployment are particularly important.

In this paper, we analyse whether concessions regarding the characteristics of the job searched for influence an individual’s unemployment duration. In doing so, we focus on a particular aspect of availability requirements in Germany. This is the fact that for unemployed recipients of means-tested benefits almost all types of jobs count as suitable employment and, therefore, recipients are obliged to make job-related concessions if offered a job requiring such concessions.

The results indicate that there is no positive effect of making concessions regarding qualification requirements or status on employment chances. In contrast, there are positive effects of wage concessions. However, searching for a job in a different occupation (that does not necessarily imply a concession) has a comparable, positive effect on finding employment. Thus, it appears that being generally flexible regarding one’s future occupation might be at least as important for employment chances as making concessions.

Universal Credit is the UK’s globally innovative social security reform that replaces six means tested benefits with one monthly payment for working age claimants - combining social security and tax credit systems. Universal Credit expands welfare conditionality via mandatory job search conditions to enhance ‘progression’ amongst working claimants by requiring extra working hours or multiple jobs. This exposes low paid workers to tough benefit sanctions for non-compliance, which could remove essential income indefinitely or for fixed periods of up to three years. Our unique contribution is to establish how this new regime is experienced at micro level by in-work claimants over time. We present findings from Qualitative Longitudinal Research (141 interviews with 58 claimants, 2014-17), to demonstrate how UC impacts on in-work recipients and how conditionality produces a new coerced worker-claimant model of social support. We identify a series of welfare conditionality mismatches and conclude that conditionality for in-work claimants is largely counterproductive. This implies a redesign of the UK system and serves as an international warning to potential policy emulators.

This paper focuses on recent developments in UK health research policy, which place new pressures on researchers to address issues of accountability and impact through the implementation of patient and public involvement (PPI). We draw on an in-depth interview study with 20 professional researchers, and we analyse their experiences of competing for research funding, focusing on PPI as a process of professional research governance. We unearth dominant professional narratives of scepticism and alternative identifications in their enactment of PPI policy. We argue that such narratives and identifications evidence a resistance to ways in which patient involvement has been institutionalised and to the resulting subject-positions researchers are summoned to take up. We show that the new subjectivities emerging in this landscape of research governance as increasingly disempowered, contradictory and fraught with unresolved tensions over the ethical dimensions of the researchers’ own professional identities.

Utilising Abbott’s work on professions and disciplines we trace the broad development of Social Policy in UK universities over the past 50 years. As with all subjects, Social Policy is enmeshed in continuous boundary protection, and at the same time may seek to extend jurisdiction by laying claim to areas and activities undertaken by others. We draw on a range of sources to inform our analysis including: overviews of contributions to Journal of Social Policy; reviews of selected available UK Social Policy Association documents such as newsletters; reviews of research quality (Research Assessment Exercise/Research Excellence Framework) submissions; and student numbers data. In conclusion we consider whether reassessment of some of the jurisdictional battles of the past 50 years might provide routes forward for the subject to flourish in the current environment.

This article describes and explains labour market reforms in Portugal during the sovereign debt crisis from 2011 to 2014. Policy outputs were not homogenous, but differentiated between a first phase where recalibration co-existed alongside hard liberalising measures and a second phase, from late 2012, where recalibration was dropped and liberalisation further deregulated employment protection and security and eroded collective bargaining. This variation is explained by the changing coalitional politics and blame allocation underpinning policymaking under conditionality. Initial reforms resulted from a broad informal political coalition spanning the governing centre-right parties, the main opposition party, a trade union and employer confederations; its breakdown in late 2012 led to the executive’s increasing centralisation, the shut down of social concertation, and more radical policy outputs. The article shows that cooperation between government and opposition and government and social partners is possible even under external conditionality, how coalition politics affects the nature and direction of reforms, and highlights how political dynamics of blame allocation drive the process of coalition building and breakdown.

Raising employment has been at the heart of EU strategies for over twenty years. Social investment, by now a widely debated topic in the comparative welfare state literature, has been suggested as a way to pursue this. However, there are only a couple of systematic comparative analyses that focus on the employment outcomes associated with social investment. Analyses of the interdependence of these policies with regard to their outcomes are even more scarce. We empirically analyse the extent to which variation in employment rates within 26 OECD countries over the period 1990-2010 can be explained by effort on five social investment policies. We additionally explore the role of policy and institutional complementarities. Using time-series cross-section analyses we find robust evidence for a positive association between effort on ALMPs and employment rates. For other policies we obtain mixed results. ALMPs are the only policies for which we observe signs of policy interdependence, which point at diminishing marginal returns. Additionally, our analysis demonstrates that the interdependence of social investment policies varies across welfare state regimes. Together, this indicates that the employment outcomes of social investment policies are also contingent on the broader framework of welfare state policies and institutions.

The rapidly ageing population and increasing care needs provide the rationale for care systems progressively shaped by a growing market in a global context. In China the approach to policy making, which has been largely experimental, has involved market-oriented reforms since the 1980s. While marketisation processes have been well studied in various European care systems, very little is known about their implementation in the Chinese context. Based on qualitative interviews with local government officials and care providers in Shanghai, this article discusses the Chinese policy process in the field of care for older people and the barriers to effective implementation. It investigates the experiment-based marketisation policy process, the power hierarchy and the lines of accountability of the state in the care field. Multi-layered barriers are identified in the market-oriented policy process. These include (1) inherent bureaucratic obstacles at practice level: reluctance to exercise discretionary power, administrative inefficiency, incoherence of care schemes and poor inter-department communication; and (2) complexities and failures at policy-making level: the infeasibility of policies, underestimation of operational capacity and inadequate involvement of practice knowledge. These findings have implications for balancing the efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability of care policies in an era of public service austerity.

The environment remains on the margins of social policy. Bringing degrowth literature into conversation with social policy debates about decommodification, we argue that a re-imagined decommodification remains central to addressing the social-ecological challenges we face and to forging a post-growth, post-productivist ecosocial welfare state. We explore the implications of this for re-imagining and mapping three core areas of an ecosocial welfare state revolving around the work/welfare/care nexus: the redistribution of time across work and care; repurposing of active labour market measures; and reorienting cash transfers and services. In each case we discuss what decommodified social policy in the service of a post-growth, post-productivist future might entail. Acknowledging challenges, we identify how instances of prefiguration of policy programmes and experiments across various countries offer concrete compass points for further transformation and a necessary paradigmatic shift.

Welfare conditionality, and the underlying understanding of unemployment because of lack of motivation, has been widely criticized. This article analyses if and how more co-created services can be a pathway to address some of these challenges. As Denmark currently is moving towards a softening of welfare conditionality for the vulnerable unemployed, and local authorities try to develop models ‘in between’ welfare conditionality and genuine user involvement, this constitute a good case for analysing this question. The analysis build on comprehensive ethnographic data from a four-year research- and innovation project in six Danish municipalities. The employment services in the project have tried to design new strategies involving clients in the development and implementation of services. Among other things, this includes developing integrated services, qualifying the meeting and the talk between front-line workers and clients, engaging the employer side and NGO’s outside the public services and promoting other measures to ensure real involvement of the citizens in the processes. The analysis lists some of the potentials and pitfalls in these innovative processes and reflects upon the feasibility of such new type of co-created services.

The exercise of administrative discretion by street-level workers plays a key role in shaping citizens’ access to welfare and employment services. Governance reforms of social services delivery, such as performance-based contracting, have often been driven by attempts to discipline this discretion. In several countries, these forms of market governance are now being eclipsed by new modes of digital governance that seek to reshape the delivery of services using algorithms and machine learning. Australia, a pioneer of marketisation, is one example, proposing to deploy digitalisation to fully automate most of its employment services rather than as a supplement to face-to-face case management. We examine the potential and limits of this project to replace human-to-human with ‘machine bureaucracies’. To what extent are welfare and employment services amenable to digitalisation? What trade-offs are involved? In addressing these questions, we consider the purported benefits of machine bureaucracies in achieving higher levels of efficiency, accountability, and consistency in policy delivery. While recognising the potential benefits of machine bureaucracies for both governments and jobseekers, we argue that trade-offs will be faced between enhancing the efficiency and consistency of services and ensuring that services remain accessible and responsive to highly personalised circumstances.

Rapid technological change – the digitalization and automation of work – is challenging contemporary welfare states. Most of the existing research, however, focuses on its effect on labor market outcomes, such as employment or wage levels. In contrast, this paper studies the implications of technological change for welfare state attitudes and preferences. Compared to previous work on this topic, this paper adopts a much broader perspective regarding different kinds of social policy. Using data from the European Social Survey, we find that individual automation risk is positively associated with support for redistribution, but negatively with support for social investment policies (partly depending on the specific measure of automation risk that is used), while there is no statistically significant association with support for basic income. We also find a moderating effect of the overall size of the welfare state on the micro-level association between risk and preferences.

This article examines young people’s experiences of open access youth work in settings in the UK, Finland, Estonia, Italy and France. It analyses 844 individual narratives from young people, which communicate the impact of youthwork on their lives. These accounts are then analysed in the light of the European youth work policy goals. It concludes that it is encouraging that what young people identify as the positive impact of youth work are broadly consistent with many of these goals. There are however some disparities which require attention. These include the importance young people place on the social context of youth work, such as friendship, which is largely absent in EU youth work policy; as well as the importance placed on experiential learning. The paper also highlights a tension between ‘top down’ policy formulation and the ‘youth centric’ practices of youth work. It concludes with a reminder to policy makers that for youth work to remain successful the spaces and places for young people must remain meaningful to them ‘on their terms’.