POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Social Services & Welfare

This revised edition uses extensive updated research and survey evidence to challenge the view of 'skivers versus strivers', showing how much our lives vary not just as we age, but from week-to-week and year-to-year.

This provocative short book is a valuable introduction to social security in Britain and the potential for its reform.

This unique perspective on the academia-society nexus is the first cross-national comparative study on academic engagement in social policy formulation.

'For whose benefit?' explores how those at the sharp end of welfare reform experience changes to the benefit system. It looks at how the rights and responsibilities of citizenship are experienced on the ground, and whether the welfare state still offers meaningful protection and security to those who rely upon it.

A substantial, authoritative, third edition of this important textbook about the impact of economic priorities and pressures on social policies at a time when neo-liberal arguments for reducing the burden of welfare are more dominant than ever before.

This book looks at what is needed to prevent the proliferation of harm and the gradual collapse of civil society. A wide range of expert contributors outline what might help to make better societies and which mechanisms, interventions and evidence are needed when we think about a better society.

Amid urgent debates around the function of welfare in the post-industrial 21st Century, and how we pay for it, David Byrne and Sally Ruane deploy the concepts and analytical tools of Marxist political economy to better understand recent developments, and the possibilities they present for social change.

Using new research, Anne Daguerre examines Obama’s legacy on welfare and antipoverty policies, focusing in particular on the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Exploring secular and faith-based grassroots social action in Germany and the UK, this book provides new ways of thinking about social and political belonging and about the relations between individual, collective and State responsibility.

A fascinating interpretation of the evolution of social policy in modern Ireland, as the product of a triangulated relationship between church, state and capital.

In Broken Benefits, Sam Royston argues that social security isn’t working, and without a change in direction, it will be even less fair in the future.

He provides an introductory guide to social security, correcting misunderstandings and presents practical ideas of how benefits should be reformed.

This book presents the first collection of Robert Pinker’s influential essays in one edited volume, discussing the key concepts underpinning the study of social policy and the ways in which welfare theories and ideologies together with public expectations have shaped the political processes of policy making.