POLITICAL SCIENCE / Public Policy / Social Policy

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.

Written by a highly respected team of authors brought together by the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), this second volume of The Global Agenda for Social Justice provides accessible insights into some of the world’s most pressing social problems and proposes international public policy and social responses to those problems.

Developing the new framework of ‘life-mix’, which considers the mixed patterns of caring and working in different periods of life, this book explores the interplay of productivism, women, care and work in East Asia and Europe.

Positioning social policy within political economy and social contract debates, Wistow draws on empirical evidence to show how the social contract produces longstanding inequitable consequences in relation to health, place and social mobility in England.

Bridging housing studies and social policy, this book analyses competing interpretations of the role and value of social housing in the UK.

The author provides new research on the relationship between housing and wellbeing, and challenges the pervasive policy and social consensus that owner-occupation is the ‘natural’ choice of aspiring people.

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.

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.

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.

Offering a much-needed analysis of the overlooked crisis of food poverty in Ireland, this book brings together the complex picture emerging from interviews with users of food aid, explores the international landscape of food poverty and what action should be taken.

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.

Drawing on interviews with key international informants across 16 countries, this book examines how child support systems often fail to transfer payments from separated fathers to mothers and their children. It identifies how the gender order is entrenched through child support failure and offers possibilities for feminist reform.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, flexible working has become the norm for many workers. This volume examines flexible working using data from 30 European countries and drawing on studies conducted in Australia, the US and India