Social policy
An Equal Start?
Providing Quality Early Education and Care for Disadvantaged Children
In this book, leading experts examine how early education and care is organised and funded in eight different countries. Bringing together recent evidence, the book provides rich insights on how policies work in practice, and the extent to which they help or hinder the provision of high quality education and care.
Fatherhood in the Nordic Welfare States
Comparing Care Policies and Practice
In this topical book, expert scholars from the Nordic countries, the UK and the US demonstrate how modern fatherhood is supported in Nordic countries through family and social policies, and how these shape and influence the images, roles and practices of fathers in a diversity of family settings and variations of fatherhoods.
Critical Geographies of Childhood and Youth
Contemporary Policy and Practice
This original book explores the importance of geographical processes for policies and professional practices related to childhood and youth. Contributors from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds explore how concepts such as place, scale, mobility and boundary-making are important for policies and practices in diverse contexts.
Social Work on Trial
The Colwell Inquiry and the State of Welfare
This book describes the local and national politics, professional concerns and public interest that surrounded the inquiry following the death of Maria Colwell in 1973.
Reclaiming Individualism
Perspectives on Public Policy
Reclaiming individualism reviews the scope of individualist approaches, and considers how they apply to issues of policy. It argues for a concept of individualism based on rights, human dignity, shared interests and social protection.
Researching Voluntary Action
Innovations and Challenges
With case studies from around the world, this accessible book explores the methodological complexities of research into voluntary action, charitable behaviour and participation in voluntary organisations.
Analysing the Trust–Transparency Nexus
Multi-level Governance in the UK, France and Germany
Drawing on fieldwork from the UK, France and Germany, this volume addresses the relationship between trust and transparency in the context of multi-level governance.
The Impacts of Welfare Conditionality
Sanctions Support and Behaviour Change
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.
Local Civil Society
Place, Time and Boundaries
Drawing on place-based field investigations and new empirical analysis, this original book investigates civil society at local level.
The Criminalisation of Social Policy in Neoliberal Societies
From anti-terrorism agendas, to the punishment of the poor and the governance of parenting, this book explores how diverse fields of social policy intersect more deeply than ever with crime control and in so doing, deploy troubling strategies.
Ageing and the Crisis in Health and Social Care
Global and National Perspectives
Current and future provision of health and social care for older people is explored in this timely study. It draws on examples from Germany, Sweden and the UK to measure the impact of trends including neoliberalisation and marketisation and it considers new solutions to contemporary challenges in a complex care system.
Welfare and Punishment
From Thatcherism to Austerity
From Margaret Thatcher’s first government to austerity politics, Ian Cummins traces changing attitudes to imprisonment and the social state. With fresh insights and critical thinking, he demonstrates how increasingly punitive approaches to crime and welfare have shaped the neoliberal economy and created stigma around those living in poverty.