Welfare & benefit systems

Describing social assistance 'careers' in different national and urban contexts, this innovative book documents the strong interplay between personal biographies and policy patterns - a particularly useful perspective which complements the more structural, top-down approach of much international work in social policy.

It is widely assumed today that the 'welfare state' is contracting or retrenching as an effect of the close scrutiny to which entitlement to social security benefits is being subject in most developed countries. In this book, fifteen authorities from nine different countries investigate to what extent this assumption is warranted.

As citizens we need information to exercise our social rights and responsibilities. However, information provision about welfare services is patchy and the 'information poor' are often disadvantaged in access to those services. This book explores how government information policies directly influence which service users claim their entitlements.

This book explores the Chinese and South-East Asian welfare systems, providing an up-to-date assessment of their character and development. In particular it examines their underlying assumptions and the impact of the processes of globalisation. As well as specific case studies, there is a comparative analysis of Eastern and Western welfare states.

Focusing on a range of welfare issues this book examines the views, values and perceptions of a number of theorists from ancient times to the 19th century, including Plato, St Aquinas, Hobbes, Wollstonecraft and Marx.

A unique approach to understanding the changing face of youth transitions, addressing the question of how gender identities are constituted in late modern culture.

This reader brings together for the first time a collection of Peter Townsend's most distinctive work, allowing readers to review the changes that have taken place over the past six decades, and reflect on issues that have returned to the fore today.

This book documents the first five years of life of the children of the influential Millennium Cohort Study, looking at the children's lives and development as they begin formal education and the implications for family policy, and service planning in health and social services.

Around 210 million children are still in slavery today. This groundbreaking book shows why they remain locked in slavery, the ways in which they are exploited and how they can be emancipated. It also reminds us that all consumers are implicated in modern childhood slavery.

This topical book examines and debates a range of themes facing Gypsies and Travellers in British Society, including health, social policy, employment and education.

This book provides an understanding of what child welfare is, explores how it can be measured and sets out the implications for children's services in incorporating child well-being into their work.

Throughout Europe, standardised approaches to social policy and practice are being radically questioned and modified. Beginning from the narrative detail of individual lives, this book re-thinks welfare predicaments, emphasising gender, generation, ethnic and class implications of economic and social deregulation.