Poverty & unemployment

Paul Spicker offers an original take on the British welfare state. He outlines the structure of services, the impact of false narratives, the real problems that need to be addressed and how we can do things better.

Welfare states are a major feature of many societies. This book draws on qualitative interviews with people receiving various working age welfare payments in Ireland to analyse welfare conditionality and explore stigma, social reciprocity and the notions of the deserving and undeserving poor.

This book synthesises the challenges of researching everyday life for families on low incomes during the COVID-19 pandemic to improve future policy and practice.

Drawing on first-hand accounts from those living under the systems, this novel study explores the impact of Australia and New Zealand’s income management policies and asks whether they have caused more harm than good.

Experts review the leading social policy scholarship from the past year in this comprehensive volume. Published in association with the Social Policy Association, this volume addresses current issues and critical debates throughout the international social policy field.

Telling the stories of low-income families, this book exposes the ways that pre-existing inequalities, insecurities and hardships were amplified during the pandemic in the UK and offers key policy recommendations for change.

Drawing on the largest database available on labour migration to Europe, this book examines the poverty outcomes for three generations of settler migrants spanning multiple European destinations, as compared with their returnee and stayer counterparts living in Turkey.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This book examines the unique implications of the pandemic in the Global South. With international contributors from a variety of disciplines, it investigates the pandemic’s effects on development, medicine, gender (in)equality and human rights among other issues.

This book uses qualitative longitudinal data, from repeat interviews with people subject to compulsion and sanction in their everyday lives, to analyse the effectiveness and ethicality of welfare conditionality in promoting and sustaining behaviour change in the UK.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This book explores the labour market integration of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers across seven European countries. It investigates how legal, political, social and personal circumstances combine to determine the work trajectory for migrants who choose Europe as their home.

Many people living in rural areas face hardship but the UK’s welfare system is poorly adapted to meet their needs, with the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit and cutbacks exacerbating pressures. This book combines person-based and place-based approaches to tackling rural poverty.

Active labour market policies aim to assist people not in work into work through a range of interventions including job search, training and in-work support and development. While policies and scholarship predominantly focus on jobseekers’ engagement with these initiatives, this book sheds light for the first time on the employer’s perspective.