Both the British government and the Labour leadership (through the Commission on Social Justice) have instigated radical reviews of the welfare state. This article criticises the British social scientific research available to these enquiries. It draws on Bill Jordan's recent (as yet...

The concept of ‘well‐being’ is entering into the policy debate on the back of recent research on ‘happiness’ ‐ self‐assessed evaluations of quality of life. It stands for a reassertion of relationships and feelings as central to positive evaluations and against the competitive and...

Both the collapse of the financial system and the recent child protection scandals in the UK illustrate the limitations of the contract model for regulating social interactions. This article argues that the economic orthodoxy that has dominated recent public policy in the affluent Anglophone...

This article addresses some of the issues raised for the Basic Income (BI) principle by global economic integration; especially the argument that a new model of reciprocity between affluent and developing economies does not require, and might be undermined by, this approach. In that view,...

This article argues that theories about the spatial distribution of poverty since World War II have always combined analyses of the impact of the built environment, of culture and of mobility of populations. However, the form taken by these combinations has varied with the logic of the...