The Short Guide to Social Policy
Along with York colleagues Stefan Kühner and Stuart Lowe, I have been working on a new introductory social policy text book called ‘The Short Guide to Social Policy‘ that (if all goes to plan) is due to be published by The Policy Press next year. Having just finished the draft manuscript we are keenly awaiting the referees’ comments at the moment!
The project is something of a risky venture for us as there are already a lot of excellent social policy texts on the market. However, we hope to make a distinct contribution in three key areas…
Firstly, as the name of the book implies(!) by providing a short introduction. Many of the texts available now are approaching encyclopedia length. While this is a largely sensible response to the growing scope of the subject of Social Policy, for those only studying, say, a single module in the subject or merely looking for an accessible text to get them up-and-running, a 700 page introduction isn’t always welcome. To cut the book down to size, we have gone ‘back to basics’ so to speak, focusing only on the five giants of welfare identified by Beveridge: health, housing, social security, employment and education.
Secondly, by adopting an international approach. The most popular Social Policy texts remain very much focused on the British case. Yet, our experience as teachers of Social Policy is that the student body is becoming much more diverse in the UK and so the British case is not always a logical starting point for our students. Intellectually, too, there is no compelling reason why the British case needs to form the basis of an introduction to the subject; indeed, a comparative perspective is hugely beneficial. We have, therefore, tried hard to divorce our discussion from any national case. Though our knowledge is still biased towards the countries we are most familiar with, we have included examples and evidence from more than 70 countries in the draft of the book.
Finally, by adopting a common set of conceptually rooted headings for each chapter. In most Social Policy introductions, each chapter is allowed to follow its own logic and/or the content is allowed to be driven by the author’s own concerns. We have adopted a common structure for each chapter that broadly draws on Esping-Andersen’s view that welfare regimes have (varying) social rights, (varying) mechanisms of delivery (state, market, family etc) and produce (varying) degrees of social stratification.
In short, the book is informed by our interests in the comparative political economy of welfare; indeed, while the main chapters, for the most part, offer a description of policy mechanisms and an exploration of empirical evidence, we round the book off with a guide to some of the big picture theories about the development (past and future) of welfare states.
