This article focuses on two aspects of the real or imagined conflict between welfarism and consumerism; whether the experience of being a welfare user is somehow changed by living in a society in which people may see themselves less as workers and more as consumers; and whether the providers of welfare services and benefits can or should treat their users more like consumers than beneficiaries or even citizens with welfare rights.
This paper questions the intuitive assumption that twentieth‐century public welfare states have reflected the wider culture in which they operate. It is argued that the postwar welfare state was a "modernist" project designed to change mass culture. As a result, social policy analysis has tended to ignore the wider culture as both a source and context for welfare. At the beginning of the twenty‐first century new patterns of risk and postmodern cultural formations are supporting eclectic policy‐making which is more in tune with cultural majorities. This signals the end of the systematic welfare state.
There is currently a debate about the future funding of long‐term care for old people. Welcome as it is, there is a risk that the focus on finance will obscure equally important questions about who should provide the care and what models of care should be chosen. Many years of research and innovation in the care of the elderly have shown that the effective and efficient provision of simple care services is very difficult to achieve. Social care is at once everyday and peculiarly complex. Some essential characteristics of social care are described which make it unlikely that a solution to the funding problem will improve either the allocation or the outcomes of long‐term care.
It is almost universally agreed that the prison population in this country has grown too large, continues to grow and ought to be reduced. This article attempts an analysis of the manner in which this growth has taken place over the last 25 years. It is argued that many explanations have placed too much emphasis on sentencing policies and particularly the impact of long sentences. Consequently, too much of the hope for an improvement currently rests on reformed sentencing policies and shorter sentences. There is evidence that the courts, rather than tending to hand down proportionately more long sentences, have in fact behaved in a remarkably consistent way over time.
AbstractThis paper argues that research, analysis and policy innovations focused on how households combine paid work with care responsibilities are driven to too great a degree by preconceptions of "the problem" that do not take sufficient account of how families themselves understand their work and care roles and the choices they are making. The evidence of 246 SOCCARE interviews across five European countries (Finland, France, Italy, Portugal and the UK) is that the variables that are conventionally accepted as having fundamental significance (family‐friendly policies and generous care services, flexible working hours, women's work–life preferences, family type, national labour markets, cultural differences) are less important than is often suggested. More important are time pressures and the idiosyncratic factors that constrain the work and care timetables that families are able to construct. We characterize these as "scheduling problems". They occupied a large part of the accounts of their lives provided by our respondents and are a primary dimension within which their combinations of paid work and care responsibilities need to be understood. The difficulties our respondents faced in coordinating the work and care activities of their families bear a striking similarity to the problems described in the operations research literature on small businesses. Within the context of these scheduling problems a second important factor emerged: the preferences and behaviour of men who played a critical, though often passive, part in the construction of work and care timetables of the families. We characterize this effect as the "the male veto".
