Most states in the world make some provision for the welfare of their citizens. Every state engages with health care provision, almost all provide education services, and, after an explosion of interest in recent years, a substantial majority now have national schemes in place for cash assistance.Welfare states matter for people’s lives – but there is little agreement about what one is. What are these states trying to do, and why? The book discusses the institutions and methods tha...

Social Policy: Theory and practice is a fully revised, updated and extended edition of a bestselling social policy textbook, extensively reworked and adapted to meet the needs of its international readership. The book lays out the architecture of social policy as a field of study, binding the discussion of theory to the understanding of social policy in practice. It aims to provide students and practitioners with a sense of the scope, range and purpose of the subject while developing criti...

Most governments in the world – including many that are autocratic or authoritarian – have taken responsibility for social policy and elected to develop services in health, education and social security. This book explores the role of government and the state in the contemporary world and, considering a range of theories and evidence, discusses views about government responsibility for social welfare services.Applying political theory to social policy, this book seeks to address a ...

The British welfare state is traditionally understood to be comprised of five main services: health, housing, social security, education and the ‘personal social services’, such as social care and child protection.In this book, Paul Spicker offers an original take on the role of the state in relation to these services, along with three other areas where institutional services have been developed: employment services, equalities and public services, such as roads, parks, libraries a...

This second edition of this highly-successful glossary provides an exhaustive and authoritative guide to over 200 technical terms used in contemporary scholarly research on poverty. It seeks to make researchers, students and policy makers aware of the multi-dimensional and complex nature of this social condition. This revised edition includes a range of new entries to keep pace with an expanding field of discourse, an extended set of references, and further perspectives from developing cou...

In this persuasive study, social welfare and policy expert Paul Spicker makes a case for a relational view of poverty.Poverty is much more than a lack of resources. It involves a complex set of social relationships, such as economic disadvantage, insecurity or a lack of rights. These relational elements tell us what poverty is – what it consists of, what poor people are experiencing, and what problems need to be addressed.This book examines poverty in the context of the eco...

What does collectivism mean in social policy? What does thinking collectively imply for policy?In this book, well-respected author Paul Spicker lends a complementary voice to his Reclaiming Individualism, reviewing collectivism as a dimension of political discourse. Breaking down his analysis to examine collectivism through substantive, moral and methodological lenses, he reviews a series of arguments for cooperative effort, solidarity and collective responsibility. Taking a dispas...

This book makes the case for the welfare state. Nearly every government in the developed world offers some form of social protection, and measures to improve the social and economic well-being of its citizens. However, the provision of welfare is under attack. The critics argue that welfare states are illegitimate, that things are best left to the market, and that welfare has bad effects on the people who receive it. If we need to be reminded why we ought to have welfare, it is because so ...

In this thought-provoking book, Paul Spicker challenges readers to rethink social security benefits in Britain. Putting a case for reform of the system, Spicker argues that most of the criticisms made of social security benefits – that spending is out of control, that it has led to mushrooming dependency, that it fails to get people into work, and that the system is riddled with fraud – are misconceived.Addressing those misconceptions, Spicker assesses the real problems with the sy...

This volume inaugurates a series concerning philosophy and medicine. There are few, if any, areas of social concern so pervasive as medicine and yet as underexamined by philosophy. But the claim to precedence of the Proceedings of the First Trans-Disciplinary Symposium on Philos ophy and Medicine must be qualified. Claims to be "first" are notorious in the history of scientific as well as humanistic investigation and the claim that the First Trans-Disciplinary Symposium on Philosophy and M...

In this age of Big Data and analytics, knowledge gained through experiential learning and intuition may be taking a back seat to analytics. However, the use of intuition should not be underestimated and should play an important role in the decision process.How Well Do Executives Trust Their Intuition covers the Fulbright research study conducted by this international team of editors. The main question of their investigation is: How well do executives trust their intuition? In other...

This volume looks at concepts and processes of social exclusion and social inclusion. It traces a number of discourses, all of them routed in a relational power analysis, examining them in the context of the UN Agenda for Sustainable Development 2030 with its commitment to “leave no one behind.” The book combines analysis that is fundamentally critical of the rhetoric of social inclusion in academic and UN discourse with narratives of social exclusion processes and social inclusion contest...