Alan Deacon

Agency, Modernity and Social Policy

The focus of this article is upon the recent revival of interest in human agency within both sociological and social policy debates. There is a striking resonance between the increasing attention paid to individual behaviour within normative debates about welfare and the concern of some sociologists with the moral and ethical dilemmas that confront the individual in contemporary society. These two sets of arguments are not compatible. Indeed the analyses they present are contradictory. Moralists such as Etzioni, Field and Mead share a belief in the need to restructure welfare in ways that encourage and reward responsible behaviour. In contrast, sociologists such as Bauman, Beck and Giddens suggest that such endeavours could prove to be both futile and dangerous. Attempts to address issues of agency face formidable obstacles and arouse genuine fears that they will serve to endorse a punitive and atavistic individualism. It is these fears, however, which have constrained and confined the debate about welfare in the post-war years. The revival of agency creates opportunities for a social science which is more sensitive to the activities of poor people whilst reflecting more fully the difference and diversity which characterises contemporary British society.

Justifying conditionality: the case of anti‐social tenants

The measures that New Labour have introduced to punish and prevent anti‐social behaviour need to be discussed in the context of the broader debate about conditionality in welfare. This paper outlines briefly three arguments that have been put forward to justify conditionality in welfare, the contractualist, the paternalist and the mutualist justifications. It then considers the force of these arguments in respect of New Labours approach to anti‐social tenants. The paper concludes that it is possible to formulate a powerful case for the kinds of measures that New Labour is currently taking by integrating elements of the three justifications. It is argued that it is a mistake to view such measures as necessarily disciplinary in intent or in effect. Measures to enforce the obligations that people owe to each other are not incompatible with policies to widen opportunities for self‐fulfilment and to reduce social exclusion. On the contrary, they can be seen as two sides of the same coin.

Different Interpretations of Agency within Welfare Debates

J. Le Grand (2003), Motivation, Agency, and Public Policy: Of Knights and Knaves, Pawns and Queens , Oxford University Press, Oxford. R. Lister (2004), Poverty , Polity Books, Cambridge. L. Mead (2004), Government Matters: Welfare Reform in Wisconsin , Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford.

Civic Labour or Doulia? Care, Reciprocity and Welfare

This article discusses the grounds on which those who provide informal social care for dependent adults and children can be held to warrant public support, and what obligations they should accept in return. It outlines two interpretations of the rights and responsibilities of such care workers: Stuart Whites notion of care as civic labour and Eva Feder Kittays principle of doulia. It shows that these interpretations reflect different understandings of the self and of reciprocity. The conclusion is that Kittays writings better reflect the relationality of care, but that it is still possible to justify some forms of welfare conditionality.

Whose choice, hostels or homes? Policies for single homeless people

Abstract A marked increase in the prevalence of homelessness among single people has coincided with a renewed debate concerning the nature of the problem and the most appropriate policy response. The paper provides a brief discussion of these developments before presenting the key findings of a study of the closure of Alvaston Resettlement Unit, near Derby. These findings relate primarily to white men, but the paper considers what they indicate about the experiences, wants and needs of single homeless people in general. In particular, the study revealed an enormous diversity in lifestyles and aspirations which suggests that the ‘good‐housekeeping’ model of resettlement may often be inappropriate. The paper calls for a pluralistic approach which recognises an important role for direct access hostels.

Introduction: Themed Section on Care, Values and the Future of Welfare

The papers in the themed section emerge from the work of the ESRC Research Group on Care, Values and the Future of Welfare (CAVA), based at the University of Leeds. CAVA was funded from 1999 to undertake a five-year programme of research into changes in parenting and partnering in Britain and their implications for future social policies. At the heart of CAVAs research is an investigation into the values that people attach to their parenting and partnering activities. We are interested in ‘what matters’ to people in their family lives and personal relationships, especially as they undergo change. This question lay at the centre of our core empirical projects, all of which were based on in-depth qualitative research. (An account of our methodology may be found in the Appendix to this Introduction). The projects focused on different aspects of change: motherhood, care and employment; kin relationships after divorce; care and commitments in transnational families; practices of care and intimacy amongst those who live without a co-resident partner; and collective values of care and support in self-help groups, voluntary organisations and trade unions. Each of these projects is represented in the following collection.

An End to the Means Test? Social Security and the Attlee Government

The post-war Labour Government has often been criticized for its failure to remove the means test from social security. Labour ministers, however, had no reason to anticipate the problems which were later to arise in the administration of means tested social assistance. The experience of the supplementary pension scheme during the war had indicated that there would be few problems of take-up or stigma if old people were required to claim assistance as a supplement to their pensions. Furthermore, the abolition of the household means test in 1941 was believed to have removed the cause of much of the bitterness surrounding the means test in the 1930s. A further, crucial, point is that the assistance scale was not seen as a poverty line, but was believed to provide more than a bare subsistence income. Indeed, the recent opening of the official records of the period has revealed that the 1948 scale was not based upon the subsistence diets calculated by Beveridge, and the comparisons which have often been made between the benefits rates proposed by Beveridge and those introduced in 1948 are of little value, whatever price index is used to express the Beveridge figures in 1948 prices.