POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Social Security

This book provides an overview and comparative analyses of the arrangements for the care of children, disabled and older people in Europe, within the context of changing labour markets and welfare systems. Gender, family change, social integration and citizenship are all explored in a report based on original empirical, cross-national research.

Throughout Europe, standardised approaches to social policy and practice are being radically questioned and modified. Beginning from the narrative detail of individual lives, this book re-thinks welfare predicaments, emphasising gender, generation, ethnic and class implications of economic and social deregulation.

The impacts of austerity and welfare reform on work and employment relations are explored in this perceptive assessment. This book highlights the role of trade unions and social movements in challenging the insecurities and inequalities imposed by work-focused welfare policies such as Universal Credit and proposes progressive new paths for welfare.

Using the idea of the social division of welfare as a template, this book assesses different approaches to retirement pensions policy, highlighting their relative strengths and weaknesses. An invaluable resource for social science students and for those who teach them. Economists and pension practitioners will also find food for thought here.

While reforms of welfare policies have been widely analysed, the reform of welfare administration has received little attention. Using empirical case studies, this book provides new insights into the way welfare administration is being internationally transformed. Particular attention is given to the effect on welfare clients, staff and agencies.

This book challenges the underlying presupposition that regular employment is the royal road to inclusion. Drawing on original empirical research, it investigates the inclusionary and exclusionary potentials of different types of work, including activation programmes.

This ambitious book explores the employment effectiveness of minimum income schemes, and provides the first comprehensive examination of its dependency on how the rights and obligations of the recipients are defined.

'An offer you can't refuse' compares, in depth, international 'work-for-welfare' (workfare) policies objectively for the first time. It considers well-publicised schemes from the United States alongside more overlooked examples of workfare in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, The Netherlands and Norway.