Welfare & benefit systems

EPUB and EPDF available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Led by the disability movement’s concern with the employment choices faced by disabled people, this controversial book uses sociological and philosophical approaches, as well as international examples, to critically engage with possible alternatives to paid work for disabled people.

This book examines the policy approaches of Conservative governments since 2015 in key social policy areas including education, health, housing, employment, children and young people and more.

How to respond to the needs of working parents has become a pressing social policy issue in contemporary Western Europe. This book highlights the politicising of parenthood in the Scandinavian welfare states - focusing on the relationship between parents and the state, and the ongoing renegotiations between the public and the private. 

This book documents the early lives of almost 19,000 children born in the UK at the start of the 21st century.

It is the first time that analysis from the hugely important Millennium Cohort Study has been compiled in a single volume and is also the first in a series of publications reporting on the children's lives at different stages.

Teenage parenthood is recognised as a significant disadvantage in western industrialised nations. It has been found to increase the likelihood of poverty and reinforce inequalities. This book explores the links between welfare state provision and teenage reproductive behaviour across a range of countries with differing welfare regimes.

This book provides a rich background to the development of post-war social policy in Britain and Japan. Ageing, domestic violence, housing, homelessness, and health are chosen for analysis, each exploring its development process of policy and practices, current issues, and future directions.

An exploration the phenomena of contemporary fatherhood, this book presents the current state of knowledge on father involvement with young children in six countries: Finland, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, the UK and the USA.

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.

Drawing on a wealth of qualitative longitudinal evidence, this book casts light on women’s lived experiences of welfare and work. It uncovers the hidden gendered bias of conditional welfare reforms to challenge dominant political discourses, policy design and practice norms.

This book is a challenge to the concept of wellbeing as applied to children, suggesting that it should be understood at the level of the child, rather than a list of things that are needed in order to live well.

It is often argued that the regulated labour markets, relatively generous social protection and relative wage equality of European welfare states has become counter-productive in a globalised and knowledge-intensive economy. Using in-depth analysis of employment, welfare and citizenship in a range of European states, this book challenges this view.

This book challenges the underlying presupposition that regular employment is the royal road to inclusion. Drawing on original empirical research, it investigates the inclusionary and exclusionary potentials of different types of work, including activation programmes.