Social Policy Studies Research Articles

Include me out: critical readings of social exclusion, social inclusion and lifelong learning

Social exclusion and inclusion have emerged as strong policy-leading concepts at both the national and international level in recent years. Policies on lifelong learning are themselves in part premised on the contribution education and training can make to promoting an inclusive society. It is argued that social exclusion offends against human dignity, denies people their fundamental human rights and leads, in conjunction with social and economic instability, to marginalization and deepening inequalities, which threaten the stability of democracy. Social inclusion therefore appears to be an unconditional good. The argument in this paper suggests that this is not the case. Drawing on critical social policy studies and post-structuralist philosophy, we argue that the notion of inclusion relies on exclusions, some of which may be chosen and even desirable. We suggest that those interested in lifelong learning should take a more critical stance towards the social inclusion agenda to which it is being harnessed.

Connecting children: care and family life in later childhood

Connecting Children focuses on children's understandings of care and their views of different family lives. It portrays the lives of children aged 11-12 and shows how families connect children in different ways both in the household but also in their wider kinship networks. The children studied reflect upon family life and especially upon situations where their own family lives change dramatically, such as when parents divorce or are unable to care for them. This book will be of interest to those working in education, social work, child care, counselling, social policy and childhood studies.

Rethinking Social Policy

Introduction - Gail Lewis Expanding the Social Policy Imaginary Gender and the Analysis of Social Policy - Ruth Lister Gender and Welfare Regimes - Jane Lewis The Social Relations of Care - Tom Shakespeare Foucault and the Study of Social Policy - Sophie Watson Constituting Welfare Subjects through Poverty and Sexuality - Jean Carabine Constructing Gendered and Racialized Identities - Ann Phoenix Young Men, Masculinities and Educational Policy Children as Welfare Subjects in Restructured Social Policy - Sharon Pinkney Social Policy and the Body - Julia Twigg Social Policy and the Emotions - Paul Hoggett Class and Social Policy - Gerry Mooney From the KWNS to the SWPR - Bob Jessop New Approaches to Comparative Social Policy - Lynne Poole The Changing Face of Central and Eastern European Welfare A World of Difference? Globalization and the Study of Social Policy - John Clarke Decriminalizing Criminology - John Muncie Crime Control, Social Policy and Liberalism - Kevin Stenson Rethinking Violence, Rethinking Social Policy - Elizabeth Stanko Discursive Histories, the Pursuit of Multiculturalism and Social Policy - Gail Lewis The Demise of Professional Self-Regulation - Celia Davies A Moment to Mourn Exchange and the Metaphor of Exchange - Maureen Mackintosh Economic Cultures in Social Care Social Justice, New Labour and School Reform - Sharon Gewirtz Redefining Work and Welfare in Europe - Jane Pillinger New Perspectives on Work, Welfare and Time Principals of Recognition and Respect in Welfare - Fiona Williams

Social Quality as a Tool for Policy Analysis

This paper will consider the use of social quality as an analytical tool for the study of social policy, with special emphasis on the social quality of children placed within the framework of family policy. The paper's main focus is on the relationship between parents and children as expressed through family policy. Two central themes are addressed. The first con cerns the expectations from the relationship of parents and children as expressed through family policy, and how these policies enhance the social quality of children. The second theme asks the question whether social quality is a useful tool for policy analysis, and is based on a case study analysing a European family policy document.

Said Nursi's Teachings on the People of the Book: A case study of Islamic social policy in the early twentieth century

Presented in this paper is a concise biography of Said Nursi (1876-1960) with regard to the People of the Book and Muslim-Christian relations, aimed at giving the reader background into the scholar whose works are subsequently presented and analyzed. Nursi's discussion of the People of the Book and the concept of dhimm I (individual and regional religious protectorate) as developed from qur' # nic references and prophetic traditions (Had I th) is then analyzed. Significantly, through this paper, these key concepts as covered by a scholar as important to the field as Nursi, are made available to English-speaking people for the first time as the author references Nursi's book Munazarat, which has yet to be translated into English.

Russia's workers in transition: labor, management, and the state under Gorbachev and Yeltsin

A historical and empirical study of Russian economic and social policy, tracing long-term evolutions across the Soviet and Russian periods. Circumstances explain the failure of transition policies that worked elsewhere, leading Christensen to re-examine accepted post-communist transition theory.

The concepts and theories of modern democracyThe concepts and theories of modern democracy Anthony H Birch (Ed) Routledge260pp,£15.990 415 09108 X041509108X

A quick glance at the title may not immediately suggest the usefulness of this book for nursing and nurses. However, the increasing interest in broadening nursing education for pre- and post-registration students to include the study of social policy, politics and policy-making makes it a useful resource.

Powers of freedom: reframing political thought

Powers of Freedom, first published in 1999, offers a compelling approach to the analysis of political power which extends Foucault's hypotheses on governmentality in challenging ways. Nikolas Rose sets out the key characteristics of this approach to political power and analyses the government of conduct. He analyses the role of expertise, the politics of numbers, technologies of economic management and the political uses of space. He illuminates the relation of this approach to contemporary theories of 'risk society' and 'the sociology of governance'. He argues that freedom is not the opposite of government but one of its key inventions and most significant resources. He also seeks some rapprochement between analyses of government and the concerns of critical sociology, cultural studies and Marxism, to establish a basis for the critique of power and its exercise. The book will be of interest to students and scholars in political theory, sociology, social policy and cultural studies.

Idealist thought, social policy and the rediscovery of informal care

Recent work in the history of welfare has suggested a need to reconsider the status of some conceptual frameworks within sociology and social policy studies regarding the meaning of 'social welfare' and the 'welfare state'. In this context, the present article argues in particular that the marked upswing of interest in informal care in the UK beginning in the 1970s reflected, at least in part, a reaction, itself not so far adequately understood, to some features of the work of Richard Titmuss and 'traditional social administration', work which, on examination, reveals a distinctive 'idealist' core, unsympathetic to research into familial patterns of caring. Similarities with 'classic' British idealism, broadly defined, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries are reviewed. This idealist thought emerges too as unresponsive to informal care, even though contemporary non-idealist thought had discussed it. The article concludes that the (unacknowledged) persistence and influence of idealist modes of social thought diverted attention away from informal care; informal care was in fact not 'discovered' in the 1970s, it was rediscovered as idealist preconceptions about the nature of 'real' welfare were discarded. The sense of 'discovery' reflected prevailing and dubious historigraphical interpretations of the meaning of 'social welfare' and the status of the ('classic') 'welfare state'.

Book Reviews

Book Reviews Get access Learning from America: Policy Transfer and the Development of the British Workfare State, David Dolowitz, Brighton, Sussex Academic Press, 1998, pp. vi+212, ISBN 1 8987 2373 7, £45.00. JANE KENNEDY JANE KENNEDY Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work Studies University of Liverpool Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Social Work, Volume 28, Issue 5, October 1998, Pages 801–802, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.bjsw.a011393 Published: 01 October 1998

Book Reviews

Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Women's Encounters with Violence: Australian Experiences, Sandy Cook and Judith Bessant (eds.), Thousand Oaks, California, Sage, 1997, pp. xi + 265, ISBN 0 7619 0432 8, £18.99. TERRI WHITTAKER TERRI WHITTAKER Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work Studies, University of Liverpool Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Social Work, Volume 28, Issue 4, August 1998, Pages 638–639, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.bjsw.a011374 Published: 01 August 1998

Rationality, Allocation, and Reproduction.

When the term `rational' is used in formal economic theory, a strict definition is implicit. This strict definition cannot accommodate the complexities of our everyday ideas of what is rational. The concept of rationality that is embedded in our language is not a morally neutral one. It has always been believed possible to argue rationally about the worthiness of goals, the legitimacy of claim to rights, the existence of obligations or duties. Outside the discussions of the social sciences, argument concerning the rationality of a choice or action is never a purely technical, value-free discourse. This book is devoted to an examination of the limitations of the various formulations and interpretations of the concept of rationality which has been developed by economic theorists. It presents a series of challenges to the formal (axiomatic) concept of rationality. This conecept has spread from economics and decision theory through the social sciences and policy studies. It forms the implicit foundation for the pronouncement of policy-makers, whose recommendations can seriously affect the society and environment in which we live. The book begins with the claim of neoclassical economics that a rational agent maximizes utility. Next it considers the later, more austere construction of rationality where a rational agent was simply one whose choices or actions were consistent. The discussion then turns to who, dissatisfied with this bare notion of consistency, claimed that a rational agent was one whose choices or actions were directed towards maximization of the agent's self-interested aims - a view they attributed (misleadingly?) to Adam Smith. Once the character of the individual agent has been established, neoclassical theory has always regarded the analysis of allocation among these agents as its supreme task. This is the subject of chapters 6 and 7. Vivian Walsh examines the philosophical implications of the replacement of the ordinary concept of rationality by the formal concepts constructed to fit the requirements of general equilibrium theory, decision theory, and game theory. He argues that the current intellectual climate, which has moved away from formalism, necessitates the reexamination of the concepts of rationality which scholars and policy-makers, many of whom were not economists, were ready to adopt directly or indirectly from economic theory in the recent past. The final two chapters are intended to contrast sharply with the rest of the book. They offer a readable and minimally technical account of the much smaller role played by the concept of rational choice in the work of a present-day school which derives from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classical economists.

Rationality, Allocation, and Reproduction

When the term 'rational' is used in formal economic theory, a strict definition is implicit. This strict definition cannot accommodate the complexities of our everyday ideas of what is rational. The concept of rationality that is embedded in our language is not a morally neutral one. It has always been believed possible to argue rationally about the worthiness of goals, the legitimacy of claim to rights, the existence of obligations or duties. Outside the discussions of the social sciences, argument concerning the rationality of a choice or action is never a purely technical, value-free discourse. This book is devoted to an examination of the limitations of the various formulations and interpretations of the concept of rationality which has been developed by economic theorists. It presents a series of challenges to the formal (axiomatic) concept of rationality. This conecept has spread from economics and decision theory through the social sciences and policy studies. It forms the implicit foundation for the pronouncement of policy-makers, whose recommendations can seriously affect the society and environment in which we live. The book begins with the claim of neoclassical economics that a rational agent maximizes utility. Next it considers the later, more austere construction of rationality where a rational agent was simply one whose choices or actions were consistent. The discussion then turns to who, dissatisfied with this bare notion of consistency, claimed that a rational agent was one whose choices or actions were directed towards maximization of the agent's self-interested aims - a view they attributed (misleadingly?) to Adam Smith. Once the character of the individual agent has been established, neoclassical theory has always regarded the analysis of allocation among these agents as its supreme task. This is the subject of chapters 6 and 7. Vivian Walsh examines the philosophical implications of the replacement of the ordinary concept of rationality by the formal concepts constructed to fit the requirements of general equilibrium theory, decision theory, and game theory. He argues that the current intellectual climate, which has moved away from formalism, necessitates the reexamination of the concepts of rationality which scholars and policy-makers, many of whom were not economists, were ready to adopt directly or indirectly from economic theory in the recent past. The final two chapters are intended to contrast sharply with the rest of the book. They offer a readable and minimally technical account of the much smaller role played by the concept of rational choice in the work of a present-day school which derives from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classical economists.

IV The Study of Social Policy in Transition

IV The Study of Social Policy in Transition

Evacuation and Social Policy During the Second World War: Myth and Reality

Richard Titmuss's classic study of social policy during the Second World War, Problems of Social Policy, published in 1950, has exercised an enormous influence on historical accounts of the period. However, recently his interpretation has fallen out of favour with revisionist historians who have argued that he exaggerated the extent to which the artifical conditions of war provided a permanent basis for the creation of the welfare state in the postwar period, and the degree to which evacuation changed official attitudes to poverty. This article examines to what extent the evacuation of September 1939 led to a reassessment of the earlier achievements of the School Medical Service, and how far it illustrated opinion on the reform of welfare services. After briefly tracing planning and the arrival of the evacuees in the reception areas, it considers what the evacuation revealed about the School Medical service and the wider problems of child health in four areas head lice and skin disease, footwear and clothing, nutrition, and child psychology. It concludes that while there was not unanimity on the need for reform, the evacuation did lead to a major reassessment of the effectiveness of health services for schoolchildren and to significant policy changes.

XI One Century of the Study of Social Policy and Half Century of the Theory of Wage-Labour

XI One Century of the Study of Social Policy and Half Century of the Theory of Wage-Labour

Degrees of Involvement: The Interaction of Focus and Commitment in Area Child Protection Committees

Robert Sanders is Lecturer in the Department of Social Policy and Applied Social Studies at the University of Wales Swansea. He has a B.Sc. (Psychology) and an MA (Psychology) from New York, and obtained his CQSW and M.Sc. (Applied Social Studies) at the LSE. He has practised in local authority child and family work, specializing in under 5's services, child protection and children in substitute family care before entering the training and education field in 1989.

Book Reviews

Health & Social Care in the CommunityVolume 5, Issue 6 p. 421-429 Book Reviews First published: 08 June 2007 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2524.1997.tb00140.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Review article: The state of social world knowledge, by Rosamund Bryar, by Brian Corby BA DSA DASS CQSW Senior Lecturer in Applied Social Studies, Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work Studies, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZA, UK Competence in Social Work Practice: A Practical Guide for Professionals, by Kieran O'Hagan. Jessica Kingsley, London. 1996, £12.95, 232 pp. ISBN 1-85302-332-9 Social Work Competencies: Core Knowledge, Values and Skills, by Anthony Vass. SAGE Publications, London. 1996, £11.95, 226 pp. ISBN 0-8039-7800-6 Social Theory, Social Change and Social Work, by Nigel Parton. Routledge, London. 1996, £13.99, 238 pp. ISBN 0-415-12698-3 Sustainability the Environment and Urbanization, by C. Pugh., by Robin A. Kearns PhD Earthscan Publications, London. 1996, £14.95, 250 pp. ISBN 1-85383-357-6 Senior Lecturer The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand Social Policy for Nurses and the Caring Professions, by Louise Akers, by Pamela Abbott., by Jill Manthorpe MA Open University Press, Buckingham. 1996, £12.99, 254 pp. ISBN 0-33519359-5 Lecturer in Social Work, Department of Social Work, University of Hull, Hull Purchasing Services for People with Learning Disabilities, Challenging Behaviour and Mental Health Needs, by John Harris, by Mark Foord BA MA (Soc Pol) bild Seminar Papers no. 6. British Institute of Learning Disabilities, Kidderminster. 1996, £9.00, 64 pp. ISBN 1-873791-13-5. Part-time Lecturer, Manchester Metropolitan University and Independent Social Policy Researcher, Manchester Needs Assessment in Public Policy, by Janie Percy Smith. Open University Press, Buckingham. 1996, £12.99, 149 pp. ISBN 0-33519595-4. Rapid Appraisal and Health Policy, by Bie Nio Ong. Chapman, by Hall, by Jean Peters BTech, MPH, PhD London. 1996, £19.99, 140 pp. ISBN 0-412 62820-1 Research Fellow, Department of Public Health, School of Health and Related Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield Mental Health Matters. A Reader, by Tom Heller, by Jill Reynolds, by Roger Gomm, by Rosemary Muston, by Stephen Pattison Macmillan Press Ltd, Basingstoke. 1996, £11.99, 380 pp. ISBN 0-333-67848-6. Speaking Our Minds. An Anthology, by Jim Read, by Jill Reynolds, by Fraser Mitchell MSc MA CQSW Macmillan Press Ltd, Basingstoke. 1996, £8.99, 216 pp. ISBN 0333-67850-8. Senior Social Worker, Shawpark Resource Centre, Glasgow Ringing the changes: Developing, piloting and evaluating a telephone advice system in Accident and Emergency and General Practice settings, by Robert Crouch, by Jeremy Dale, by Anita Patel, by Susan Williams, by Helen Woodley., by Jane Sanderson RGN MA Department of General Practice and Primary Care, King's College School of Medicine, London. 1996, £10.00, 69 pp. ISBN 095-199-784-X Head of Profession for RGNs, Hull and Holderness Community Health NHS Trust, Hull Volume5, Issue6November 1997Pages 421-429 RelatedInformation

Linking Social Welfare Policy and Global Problems

This article is a case study of an advanced social welfare policy seminar that explored the interconnections between global threats such as violence and warfare, environmental degradation, poverty, and immigration, and the current and future endeavors of the social work profession. The author describes the theoretical underpinnings and format of the seminar, examines four propositions or lessons that emerged from the course, and analyzes the implications of these lessons for social work practice, research, and education.

Book Reviews

Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Social Work and Empowerment, Robert Adams, London, Macmillan, Practical Social Work BASW, 1996, vii + 221 pp. ISBN 0 333 65809, 4, £10.99. JANE KENNEDY JANE KENNEDY Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work Studies, University of Liverpool Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Social Work, Volume 27, Issue 1, February 1997, Pages 158–160, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.bjsw.a011188 Published: 01 February 1997