Social welfare and social insurance

Drawing on empirical research with the UK’s two largest Food Banks, this book explores the prolific rise of food charity over the last 15 years and its implications for overcoming food insecurity.

Providing a new cross-national and international narrative on how global competition has reshaped welfare states this book captures the complexity of social policy reform process that have taken place over the past 25 years.

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.

This second edition of a highly successful textbook offers a comprehensive introduction to social policy in Ireland addressing a range of social policy topics of growing importance in contemporary Irish society including issues related to children, service users and groups, migration, ethnicity, sexuality and climate change.

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 is the first to evaluate the recent reforms of UK legal aid from a social policy perspective and assess their impact on family law courts and advocacy. It argues that the reforms effectively ‘delawyerise’ disputes, producing a more inquisitorial justice system and impacting the litigants, court system, staff and process.

'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.

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

Through a series of interdisciplinary case studies, this topical collection is the first to focus on protest camps as unique organisational forms that transcend particular social movements’ contexts. The book offers a critical understanding of current protest events and will help better understanding of new global forms of democracy in action.

Learning from professional errors in social work is vital for successful reflective practice. With plenty of practice examples and questions for reflection, this is essential reading for social work students, practitioners and managers.

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.