REVIEWS

Pamela Meadows, The Integration of Taxes and Benefits for Working Familieswith Children: Issues Raised to Date, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York,1997, 21 pp., £7.00 pbk.Jeffrey Liebman, Lessons About Tax-benefit Integration from the US EarnedIncome Tax Credit Experience, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York, 1997, 26 pp., £7.00 pbk.Michael Mendelson, The WIS That Was: Replacing the Canadian WorkingIncome Supplement, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York, 1998, 29 pp.,£7.00 pbk.Jane Millar and David Hole, Integrated Family Benefits in Australia and Optionsfor the UK Tax Return System, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York, 1998, 52 pp., £7.00 pbk.

A steadily increasing proportion of low-paid working families – especially thosewith children – pay tax on their earnings to the Inland Revenue, and also receiveincome-tested benefits from the Department of Social Security. There has been along history of plans to devise a single system which would calculate each fam-ily’s net obligation or entitlement. Outside government, such schemes werestrongly mooted by the Meade Committee in 1978, and by the Institute for FiscalStudies in 1984. None has been proposed by a British government before now,although Child Benefit, Family Income Supplement and Family Credit all owesome of their parenthood to such ideas. But a means-tested social security bene-fit specifically for workers is peculiar to the UK, and a number of other countrieshave schemes based far more clearly in the tax system.

Gordon Brown started to express an interest in the integration of taxes andbenefits very soon after the new Labour government was elected. The JosephRowntree Foundation urgently commissioned a series of research reviews, toanalyse the pros and cons of such a scheme, and to identify the issues that wouldhave to be addressed. The publications reviewed here are the results. In a sensethey could be viewed as an edited collection of five chapters. (The Millar/Holevolume confusingly contains two quite separate papers.)

Pamela Meadows’ contribution is based on some seminars and consultationsorganised by JRF as soon as they realised what the chancellor had in mind. Itprovides a clear explanation and balanced assessment of the key issues. It was nodoubt rushed out to influence the debate as early as possible in the government’sthinking. It now suffers (viewed from after the event) from the fact that it waspublished before, rather than after, the other four. It duplicates quite a lot of thematerial that was later incorporated into the Liebman paper, and does not takeaccount of the conclusion of the later projects.

Jeffrey Liebman, Michael Mendelson and Jane Millar review schemes in theUS, Canada and Australia respectively. The differences between the schemesillustrate the fact that tax-benefit integration is not a proposal but a type of pro-posal, and that the actual design of the scheme is as important as its administra-tive location. The three papers illustrate comparative social policy studies at

Jnl Soc. Pol., 28, 1, 139–173 Printed in the United Kingdom 139© 1999 Cambridge University Press

their best: we are not simply told the design of the various countries’ systems;lessons are directly drawn for the current British debate. Leibman andMendelson write from a ‘foreign’ starting point, Millar from a British one, but allthree have interwoven the two perspectives with equal success. I was not muchconvinced by Millar’s attempt to resolve the underlying policy conflicts affectingwomen’s choice between employment and full-time motherhood – but at leastshe tried.

David Hole’s paper analyses some of the complex practical and legal issuesthat would need to be addressed if a means-tested credit had to be built into theincome tax return. This is a second-order (though none the less important) con-sideration. I found the paper less useful than the others, perhaps because itseemed to be addressed to an audience of tax lawyers rather than the broaderpolicy-making community.

There are five main issues facing any scheme for delivering means-tested sup-port to working families: how much should they get? How should it be tapered inrelation to income? Whose income should be taken into account? Who shouldreceive the money? And over what period should the payment be calculated andpaid? The first two are arguably the most important, and are independent of thedelivery mechanism – that is, a tax credit is neither better nor worse than asocial security benefit. As these reports show, a tax credit creates potentially hor-rendous complications for the remaining three questions. They all need to besolved before it is possible to introduce a new scheme. A new Working Families’Tax Credit was announced in March 1998. The formula by which it will providemore money and a shallower taper is known. But at the time of writing (July1998) the crucial details about the administration of the credit have not beenprovided. Gordon Brown is selling us a ‘pig in a poke’: we (and perhaps he) donot know enough about the proposal to decide whether it is better or worse thanits predecessor.

So, full marks to the Rowntree Foundation for commissioning the research assoon as the issue has been identified. No other social policy research trust isgeared to interact with the political agenda so effectively. We do not yet knowwhether the findings have had an appropriate influence on the government’sthinking.

It is characteristic of research aimed immediately at a live policy issue that theoutputs have a short shelf life. They have to be published at once; they are of lit-tle value once the policy urgency has passed. By the time this review appears thematerial will seem out of date. It would be helpful, though, if the RowntreeFoundation could now commission a more reflective analysis of the policy and ofthe politics, taking account of both this research and of subsequent policy deci-sion. The work would then retain its relevance for several years – perhaps untilthe next urgently required revision of the scheme.

R I C H A R D B E R T H O U DInstitute for Social and Economic Research,University of Essex

Pete Alcock, Angus Erskine and Margaret May (eds.), The Student’sCompanion to Social Policy, Blackwell/Social Policy Association, Oxford,1998, xiv + 417 pp., £14.99 pbk.

140 Reviews

Writing a review for the Journal of Social Policy of a book which includes contri-butions from a sizeable minority of the membership of the Social PolicyAssociation is a daunting task for a reviewer. It is, therefore, a relief to be able towelcome this book, publication of which is a significant development for socialpolicy studies in Britain.

It is structured into six different sections, containing fifty short chapters byfifty-one authors, all well known figures in social policy studies, plus a glossaryof key terms. Part I contains three chapters looking at the definition of social pol-icy and the role of comparative study. The second part has sixteen chapters onkey concepts, critical perspectives and the context of social policy. Part III haseleven chapters examining the production, organisation and consumption ofwelfare. The eleven chapters in Part IV look at issues, in relation to both groupsand services. There are seven chapters in the printed and on-line resources avail-able in Part V. Finally, the two chapters in Part VI discuss employment opportu-nities for graduates in social policy, and a guide to postgraduate training. Eachchapter ends with a reference to further reading. This structure is dictated by theobjectives of the book. It is not intended primarily as a text, though it might beused as such, but as a ‘resource book that will be of practical use to students ofsocial policy throughout their undergraduate study’. The layout of the bookensures that each chapter can be used independently.

Arguably, given the intended role as a reference book for students, the contenthas to reflect the syllabuses of the majority of social policy degrees in the UK.Some of the more arcane areas of interest are thus excluded. The editorial guide-lines have ensured general consistency of presentation, and a consistent lengthfor each chapter of between six to ten pages each. The styles and approaches ofthe authors vary, but they have all tried to convey the essence of their subjects inthe limited space allotted to them. Some authors are being asked to summarisemore than others, however, and this may affect the use students make of eachindividual piece. Reference to the chapters on political perspectives may thus bemore frequent than for that on, say, housing policy, where the necessary reduc-tion of a century’s change into seven pages leaves the reader looking more at thebibliography than the text itself. A further effect of the limitation on space is toemphasise the focus on UK (especially English) social policy. Discussion of com-parative perspectives tends to be restricted in chapters other than the limitednumber addressing specialised comparative issues.

In a book of this nature, most readers will have at least marginal differenceswith the editors on the overall content. For this reviewer, one or two sectionswould have benefited from an integrative chapter, with one looking at the mixedeconomy included in the discussion on the production of welfare, rather thanrelegating this to parts of the various chapters on state, private, voluntary andinformal welfare. Similarly, a discussion on demographic issues in social policymight alert students to comparative issues relating to provision for children,young people, lone parents and the elderly. Given its intended role as a continu-ing source of reference, the glossary, which (for example) currently includespoverty but not social exclusion, could be expanded. As students sometimeshave difficulty differentiating statistics relating to the ‘UK’ or ‘Great Britain’,those revising the next edition should note that in some chapters ‘UK’ and‘British’ seem to be used interchangeably.

Reviews 141

This is certainly a book I hope my students will buy, and benefit from, duringthe next two or three years. Its continued usefulness will depend both on the fre-quency of revision and the feedback from the readership. Both the content ofsocial policy studies and the context in which policies are applied change, and themarch of time can already be detected by careful reading, with some chaptersapparently drafted before May 1997 (‘Michael Forsyth … than his predecessors’ p.194) and some after (‘the former Conservative government’ p. 35). Future edi-tions may reflect the continued development of European and international com-parisons. Richard Parry, on his chapter on ‘Social Policy within the UnitedKingdom’ refers to ‘the problem of English dominance’. This reviewer, working inan area where this has a real political dimension, looks to subsequent editionsalso to take account of evolving patterns of regional devolution within the UK.

D A V I D H I R S TUniversity of Wales, Bangor

Helen Jones (ed)., Towards a Classless Society, Routledge, London, 1997, 235 pp., $45, £14.99 pbk.

This collection of essays examines the relationship between class and social pol-icy with reference to young people. Two introductory chapters contextualise thematerial, followed by sections on specific policy areas including health, educa-tion, training, crime, homelessness, single motherhood and social work followedby a concluding chapter.

The inspiration, as outlined in Helen Jones’s introduction, comes from theJohns, Major and Prescott, who have in their unique ways provided inadequatevisions for achieving social equality. Major’s project in government was to createa classless society out of the embers of his predecessor’s administration, whichwas not exactly fired by a commitment to a classless society. Prescott, on theother hand, announced on radio ‘I’m pretty middle class now’, looking back onhis humble beginnings as a ship’s steward and affirming with some relief that hehad finally made it. Novak reviews the social policies that have impacted uponyouth over the last eighteen years concerning employment, social security andthe consequences of growing up poor. He questions the categorisation of youngpeople (those unemployed, black or single mothers) into an underclass, chal-lenging the assumptions which lead to an increasing intolerance to those sodefined. Helen Jones’ second contribution addresses the importance of the earlyyears in the formation of inequality, particularly the impact of poverty and illhealth. She argues for the expansion of nursery education as an effective way toprovide the greatest benefits for the poorest children.

Furlong’s chapter on education utilises much empirical data to confirm theclass divisions inherent within the education system. He suggests that the powerof class, though significant, is weakening for females as a result of changes in thelabour market and gender socialisation. Roberts’ analysis of youth training rein-forces the argument that making young people better qualified for work does notnecessarily generate a demand for their labour; training works best in conditionsof full employment. Labour’s proposals, in particular the New Deal, are not cov-ered, which is unusual, given the implications for the education and training ofyoung people. Hutson and Liddiard’s chapter on youth homelessness applies

142 Reviews

familiar arguments around benefit changes, the inadequacies of homelessnesslegislation and the sell-off of council housing, to investigate the exclusion ofyoung people from affordable rented accommodation. Pitt’s contribution wasimpressive in comparing British and French responses to youth crime and disor-der in similar working-class neighbourhoods. He speaks favourably of theFrench approach in developing employment opportunities and inclusive housingprogrammes, providing a foundation to keep families and social networks intactwhich in turn ameliorated the exclusion of young people. The British approachwas less encouraging, with the separation of crime prevention initiatives fromlocal authority regeneration programmes and the youth justice service. Localauthority professionals felt hamstrung in involving the population through poorco-ordination at a higher level, resulting in short-term and reactive response.This highlighted for Pitt the creative way in which the French used the state tocombat exclusion, against the limited British approach, which saw the state asantagonistic to the interests of individuals.

Page’s essay sheds historical light on the treatment of single mothers,analysing this as uneven, from partial inclusion in the 1970s to the presentwhen the social climate is more hostile in promoting a pro-nuclear familyagenda. Chris Jones’s essay rightly criticises the failure of social work to engagewith poverty and inequality. His chapter is less specific than others in relatingthis failure directly to the young. This could have been achieved, for example, bydealing with the limiting of social work support around the concept of ‘childrenin need’ by local authorities. Devine’s concluding chapter emphasises the con-sensus by the major political parties to promote mobility through the class struc-ture. She assesses the importance of economic restructuring upon employ-ment/unemployment and the implications these changes have for joblessgrowth and the furthering of class divisions.

This book is welcome in affirming the importance of class alongside othersocial divisions in analysing the experience of young people and their welfare. Itincludes a wealth of material from diverse policy areas on the underclass thesis,highlighting the deficiencies both theoretical and empirical. Much of the mater-ial is familiar and, as such, does not break new ground but will provide a usefulreference on the exclusion of the young.

Of greater interest, now 18 months into Labour’s administration, were theoptions discussed by various authors on the way forward in tackling classinequality. For example, Devine recognised that the Labour Party was reticent indescribing how tax and benefits would be used as a lever of equality. We nowknow that Labour’s policy is to use tax and benefits to promote work flexibilityrather than social equality. As these initiatives unfold, their success dependsupon a consistent expansion of the economy, which can provide permanentemployment at wages significantly above benefit levels. The dilemma, as Pagenotes, for women (and young people generally) is that their relatively poor paymakes work unviable, unless, of course, they are threatened with reductions inbenefit. Evidence from the USA, with comparatively buoyant figures for jobgrowth, is bleak; median earnings even of male no-graduates fell by 23 per centbetween 1979 and 1997 (House of Commons Select Committee, 1998).

If that experience is repeated, assuming no economic downturn, young peoplemay well swap benefit poverty for wage poverty. In so doing, the prospects for a

Reviews 143

Labour government even ameliorating the worst excesses of inequality perpe-trated over the past eighteen years will remain remote indeed.

House of Commons Select Committee on Social Security (1998), Social Security Reforms: Lessons fromAmerica, Stationery Office, London.

L E S T E R P A R R O T TNorth East Wales Institute of Higher Education

Ruth Lister, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives, London, Macmillan, 1997,284 pp., £42.50, £13.99 pbk.

Ulster’s historic ‘Yes’ vote to the Good Friday Agreement on 22 May 1998 waswidely heralded as marking the advent of peace after nearly thirty years of war.It was also a triumph for a feminist conception of citizenship, as advanced by theWomen’s Coalition, an umbrella group of state-funded community organisa-tions, which was rewarded with two seats at the negotiating table, despite win-ning only 1 per cent of the vote in the 1996 elections.

Supported by a perhaps surprising alliance of Sinn Féin and the minority loy-alist parties most closely linked to the paramilitaries, and with the approval oftalks chair US senator George Mitchell and British minister Mo Mowlam, coali-tion leaders Monica McWilliams and Pearl Sagar won inclusion in the GoodFriday Agreement of much of the feminist agenda of human rights and equalityissues. In the intensive negotiations that culminated in the early hours of GoodFriday, they secured clauses on the rights of ethnic minorities, people with dis-abilities, victims of violence and harassment, recognition of linguistic diversityand on the representation of women in the new assembly.

As a member of the Opsahl Commission, which in many respects paved theway for the advance of the Northern Ireland peace process, Ruth Lister no doubtshared the elation of the Ulster feminists at the popular endorsement of whatBeatrix Campbell described as ‘a plan for open, accountable and egalitarian gov-ernance, bolstered not only by new institutions … but by principles of economicand social justice, principles related to work and wages, health and housing andthe ethics of everyday existence’ (The Guardian, 20 May 1998). The success ofthe Good Friday Agreement is also, in many ways, a vindication of Lister’s femi-nist perspectives on citizenship.

The central theme of Lister’s book (one with obvious resonances in Ireland) isthe need to transcend old dichotomies in the process of forging a new synthesis offeminist theory and praxis with the goal of achieving a ‘woman-friendly citizen-ship’. In place of the long-running contestation between the camps of liberal indi-vidualism and civic republicanism, demands for rights versus insistence on obliga-tions, claims of status against emphasis on process, Lister proposes a critical syn-thesis, one which is both dynamic and inclusive. Looking beyond the sterile coun-terposition between an abstract universalism which merely disguises malesupremacism and a particularism that risks further female exclusion, she proposesa ‘differentiated universalism’ which seeks to achieve reconciliation through the‘politics of solidarity in difference’ and a pluralistic politics of community.

The theoretical crux of Lister’s citizenship is her endorsement of Bart Kosko’snotion of ‘fuzzy logic’ and the feminist critique of ‘binary thinking’. Instead ofthinking in terms of either/or, in the familiar polarities of equality/difference,

144 Reviews

justice/care, independence/interdependence, she proposes a critical synthesis ofdichotomies, a subversion of rigid categories and a transcendence of counter-poised alternatives.

From this perspective, for example, she reconsiders the private/public distinc-tion, historically crucial to women’s exclusion from citizenship. Here she recom-mends a rearticulation of the distinction, by de-gendering it, acknowledging theway the two poles interact to the advantage of men, yet also recognising the flu-idity of the boundary and how it can be shifted. In a similar spirit she proposesan approach to political citizenship which recognises women’s contribution atthe informal, local level, while fighting to achieve greater representations forwomen in national (and international) arenas – and also trying to improve linksbetween the informal level and, thus, to promote women’s equal citizenship.

It is 200 years since the United Irishmen [sic], inspired by the abstract univer-salism of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, promised to unite‘Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter’ in the struggle against British rule inIreland. Today, a new assembly, inspired by the principles of feminist citizenship,seeks to achieve a new reconciliation among the still divided communities of adivided island within a rejuvenated framework of British rule. Transcending thegulf between academic analyst and political activist as effortlessly as thedichotomies in feminist theory, Ruth Lister has made an important contributionto the praxis of citizenship.

M A R Y L A N G A NThe Open University

Robin Fleming, with Julia Taiapa, Anna Pasikale and Susan Kell Easting,The Common Purse, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1997, xxx + 170 pp., $34.95.Supriya Singh, Marriage Money: the Social Shaping of Money in Marriage andBanking, Allen and Unwin, Sussex, 1997, x + 198 pp., £14.99 pbk.

Each of these books makes a significant contribution to the growing literature onthe control and allocation of money within marriage. The fact that the first isfrom New Zealand and the second from Australia adds to their interest, since itenables us to make comparisons with recent research elsewhere, and to drawout differences and similarities.

In The Common Purse, Robin Fleming reports on research which she carriedout jointly with Julia Taiapa, Anna Pasikale and Susan Kell Easting. Theresearch involved three separate but linked studies, concerned respectively withPakeha (white) couples, Maori couples, and families drawn from the PacificIslands, but living in New Zealand. The methodological aim was ‘to minimise theimposition of Pakeha social science or social policy assumptions on the under-standing of money-related issues in non-Pakeha families’ (p. xii). The three stud-ies were managed by research teams drawn from the different groups involved,but each team addressed the same question: ‘Can family income be used as anaccurate measure of individual family members’ access to the economicresources available to the household?’ Each study used the same basic researchdesign, with interviews, case studies and short self-completion questionnaires,but modifications reflected the cultural diversity of the three groups. The Maori

Reviews 145

couples, for example, found it unthinkable to discuss money without involvingthe whanau, the wider kin group within which Maori values and practices arepreserved and passed on to the younger generation.

The result is an absorbing and wide-ranging book, which maintains a sensi-tive balance between the diverse complexities of the three studies. Different chap-ters deal with how couples organise their money, money management systems,the control of family money, children and money, celebrations and rituals, thebreakdown of relationships and the meanings of money for different individualsand cultures. Pakeha households were, by and large, self-sufficient economicunits, within which gender, age and income structured access to money. By con-trast, Maori and Pacific Islands households were more permeable with regard tomoney, so that the needs of the whanau, and the financial obligations of whanaumembership, could take precedence over the day-to-day expenses of the cou-ple/household. The research highlighted the extra expense involved in belong-ing to an ethnic minority group, since additional, culturally specific expenseswere incurred, in addition to the normal costs of living, often while earning lessthan the majority population. The conclusion was that ‘access to money withina family is affected not only by social and economic influences, but also bynotions of family structure and obligations which vary according to the culturaltraditions of the people concerned’ (p. 124).

The meaning of money is also a focus in Marriage Money, though SupriyaSingh came to her topic from a very different direction. Her book began as astudy of de-regulation in banking and of the changing relations between banksand their customers. However, when she asked married couples about changesin banking they spoke to her about how they managed and controlled moneyand about what money meant to the relationship.

This book is important because it, too, documents the intertwining of marketand non-market values in the intra-household economy. Singh develops twomain theoretical conclusions. First, there is the idea of multiple monies, both inthe market and outside it. So ‘banking money’ differs from ‘marriage money’, inthat it is public rather than domestic, and contractual rather than co-operative.But ‘banking money’ also differs from the ‘market money’ beloved of classicaleconomic theory. Singh suggests that it is only when the marital or bankingrelationship dissolves that money is treated by the law, and by the different par-ties to the relationship, as if they were dealing with the ideal type of marketmoney. Second, she argues that there is an intimate relationship between eco-nomic and non-economic aspects of household finances. Definitions of marriagemoney are being altered by the changes that are taking place in ideologies aboutmarriage, in women’s employment and in banking practices. In particular, shesuggests that the use of electronic banking technology is changing the accesswhich individuals have to the financial resources of the couple.

Singh concludes that the challenge is to find a language which can connectthe sociological study of meaning, access, use and trust to the economic modelsof supply and demand, cost and price, purchase and security (p. 168). Both thesebooks extend the language available for describing the intra-household econ-omy, and both offer ideas and concepts that will surely stimulate further workon a topic which is relevant to many areas of social policy.

J A N P A H LUniversity of Kent at Canterbury

146 Reviews

Sandy Cook and Judith Bessant (eds.), Women’s Encounters with Violence,Sage, London, 1997, 268 pp., £18.95 pbk.

This book encompasses a much wider range of experiences and approaches thanmost publications on violence against women. It places itself firmly in the tradi-tion of exploring issues and debating theoretical concepts in the ‘optimisticbelief’ that this ‘will play a part in widening and broadening an awareness of vio-lence against women with the potential of shaping and informing policy andprofessional practices’. It is particularly strong in placing violence againstwomen in the context of colonial and post-colonial experience in Australia.Analysis is focused on the particularities of the Australian experience but atten-tion is also drawn to its resonances with other ‘settler societies’ such as SouthAfrica, Canada, New Zealand and the United States of America, as well as to sim-ilar issues relating to gender, crime and violence in the United Kingdom, notleast because of the common nature of their legal system.

The introduction draws attention to themes such as Jocelyn Coutt’s analysis ofjudicial bias, which is relevant to countries with legal systems based on Britishlaw and those founded on the Roman legal tradition; and similarly with the vio-lence faced by homeless young women, with domestic violence and even withproblems of representation and justice for Aboriginal defendants (especiallywomen) in partner homicide cases. This last chapter has resonances withBritain, both in relation to recent cases and to more general problems of repre-sentation of those whose first language is not English or who come from societieswith cultural mores which might make it even more difficult to disclose violencethan for women from the majority community. (In addition, this chapter drawsattention to the contradictions and difficulties presented in the use of certaindefences, such as the ‘battered woman syndrome’, in ways that are both cultur-ally specific to Aboriginal women and more widely relevant.)

The book is perhaps at its strongest when confronting the issues of intra-com-munity gendered violence within oppressed indigenous communities. In aclearly argued and moving chapter, Melissa Lucaschenko, herself an indigenouswoman, discusses the widespread denial of the domestic violence, rape and childabuse which she sees as endemic, even epidemic, within contemporaryAboriginal communities. She explores the difficulty Aboriginal women have ineven conceptualising what they experience within communities in which it is‘safer to focus on relatively anonymous state violence’ and racism, both of whichare pervasive, and in which traditional sanctions, often physical, have beencalled in to justify contemporary random violence. The picture she draws is of acourageous beginning which includes a new willingness to explore the commonground Aboriginal women share with often privileged, uncomprehending orracist white feminists, particularly in the context of a growing international fem-inist focus on class issues, on poverty and on violence against women. Thischapter’s emphasis on the need to face up to issues of violence and power in alltheir complexities is an encapsulation of the project of the whole book, which isconcerned to link violence against women to wider political violence, not leastagainst women, in wars and other international conflicts, and to the part thatboth colonialism and militarism have played in developing a concept of mas-culinity based on physical violence and male bonding especially, though notexclusively, in Australia.

Reviews 147

The book has three sections: Sexual violence, Law and criminal justice, andCultural and Social Issues, and has much more to offer than the themes I havedrawn out. The first section examines three subjects which are most often mar-ginalised or absent from works on violence against women: violence faced bywomen with disabilities; mother/daughter rape; and hostility and violencetowards lesbians. Lesley Chenowith’s chapter places violence against womenwith disabilities within the context of the extreme invisibility of disabled womenuntil recently and the violence faced by disabled people generally in institutionsand in the community. A particular issue for women with disabilities has beenthe attempt to ‘deal with’ their sexuality by sterilisation or the use of Depo-Provera. This has left them subject to sexual assault, rape and sexual exploita-tion both in an institutional context and with moves to ‘normalisation’ withinthe community, at least partly because they have been ‘protected’ from contactwith the real world. The chapter gives a glimpse into efforts to develop strategiesagainst such vulnerability and to give disabled women a voice from within themovement for disabled rights.

The chapter on mother/daughter rape by Lee Fitzroy raises very uncomfort-able issues and is strongest in discussing the need to incorporate sexual violenceagainst girls by their mothers within a feminist analysis of women’s experiencesin contemporary society. However, the account of the experiences of survivors ofmother/daughter rape, partly in their own words, suffers from situating theaccount too firmly within what seems to be a particular theoretical/therapeuticmodel for working with women survivors, as one of ‘blurring’ of bodily bound-aries, without placing this sufficiently within a methodological context. Theresult is rather to short-circuit methodological and theoretical issues than to illu-minate them. By contrast, the chapter by Gail Mason on violence and hostilitytowards lesbians at work, at home and in public places, situates it within a dis-cussion of mediations between subjectivity, ‘visibility’, ‘invisibility’ and spatialconcepts; in the process both illuminating the concepts and presenting anaccount of violent homophobia (or (hetero) sexism as Gail Mason prefers for con-ceptual reasons), in an Australian urban setting.

The collection has both range and an underlying coherence. Other chaptersrange from Julie Stubbs’ critical analysis of organised direct contact betweenoffender and ‘victim’, especially in the context of domestic violence; ThereseMcCarthy’s ‘Rethinking Theories of Victimology’; Susanne Davies on ‘Women,War and the Violence of History’; Adrian Howe’s media study ‘Men’s Violence inthe News’; Susanne Hatty’s ‘Problematics of Survival for Homeless YoungWomen’ (which like Lee Fitzroy’s on mother/daughter rape seems more frag-mentary than the other); and finally, Kerry Carrington’s ‘Governing SexualViolence’, situated within theoretical work on citizenship, governance and legalsystems, which seeks the development of a new approach to ‘policing’ sexualviolence through intervention into the male socialisation process and influenc-ing the nature of ‘masculinity’ and citizenship. In all, the book raises theoreticaland policy issues of great importance while giving attention to the specifics oftime, place and individual experience.

E L L E N M A L O SUniversity of Bristol

148 Reviews

Hans-Joachim Shulze and Wolfgang Wirth (eds.), Who Cares? Social ServicesOrganizations and their Users, London, Cassell, 1996, 246 pp., £16.99 pbk.

Communication, co-operation and responsiveness are the key themes throughwhich Shulze and Wirth address their central question ‘Who cares?’ Noting thediversity throughout Western societies, both of social services organisations andtheir users, they attempt to demonstrate the benefits of co-operative relation-ships and effective communication. This publication brings together contribu-tions from academics and practitioners with a range of disciplinary backgroundsfrom the Netherlands, Germany, France, Britain and Norway. The book itselfmight, therefore, be seen as an example of cross-boundary communication andco-operation. It does demonstrate some of the difficulties associated with suchcommunication (for example, definitions of ‘social services’ vary from country tocountry). However, there are some very interesting aspects to this collection andShulze and Wirth are enthusiastic in their attempt to explore the communica-tion, co-operation and responsiveness themes in different national, organisa-tional and professional contexts.

The book is divided into four sections. Parts 1 and 4 provide the introductionand integrative conclusions in which Shulze and Wirth draw together thestrands discussed in the other diverse contributions. Section 2 focuses on institu-tional and organisational perspectives, whilst section 3 looks at interactionswith service users and offers evaluative discussions of these.

The social and political contexts of social service organisations are examinedfor their influence on opportunities for successful communication with serviceusers. Hegner’s discussion of German unification on the development of welfareis very interesting and informative. Deakin examines the role of contractual rela-tionships in the British system and suggests that there is a danger of relation-ships between government purchasing agencies and voluntary organisationsbecoming too rigid and specific. He makes the important point that any analysisof market reforms in social services needs to include an analysis of accountabil-ity, which demonstrates the complex and multidimensional character of socialservices relationships.

There are some important questions which are not adequately covered in thiscollection. For example, the roles and functions of social services organisationsare frequently assumed to be unproblematic and ‘success’ in communication isperceived to be measurable in terms of goal attainment and individual problem-solving as defined by the organisations’ own managerialist agendas. An exampleof this can be seen in Vogelvang’s discussion of work with ‘multi-problem fami-lies’ in the Netherlands. ‘Home training’ is the term given to intensive psychoso-cial training with members of these families with the aim of improving communi-cation, co-operation and responsiveness within the families and between them andthe social services. However, we might question the use of the same measure ofimprovement in both contexts, since configurations of power are so different.

The most stimulating chapter, for me, was Gilles Jeannot’s discussion of non-social services organisations in providing ‘social’ services. In particular, he looksat the contribution of the Post Office in combating social exclusion. He identifiesthe tensions that can exist between social services organisations and their usersand the public in general and argues that ‘non-social’ agencies will have animportant role to play in producing social responsiveness. Such an integrated

Reviews 149

approach to services dispenses with the zero-sum game approach to resourceallocation in traditional social service planning. Developing non-social agenciesto play a part in an integrated approach to social services will have costs andmore refined tools are necessary to analyse both costs and benefits adequately.

Wirth and Schulze’s concluding remarks refer to interactive co-production andinter-organisational networking as key themes and relate these to internationalnetworking, especially in the context of European integration. They note theimportance of shared information, the eagerness that exists for opportunities tolearn from each other about success and failure in service delivery. They identifyEuropean initiatives on setting operational guidelines and opportunities for shar-ing information, which provide concrete examples of networking. Their sugges-tion that we can obtain ‘generalized’ knowledge’ by applying quasi-experimentalresearch design to international variables is intriguing, although hard to imag-ine in practice, given the amount and type of variables involved. We might alsoquestion the need for such an attempt. The ‘broad sweep’ approach, commonlyassociated with comparative research, provides a useful backdrop to the kinds ofnetworking and exploration that researchers and practitioners in social servicesparticipate in. An additional question is how does their analysis of citizen partici-pation and co-production of welfare apply to the research agenda? This is notfully explored.

Nevertheless, this collection is challenging and provides an interesting insightinto the functioning of social services in other parts of Europe. Wirth andSchulze do not entirely achieve what they set out to achieve but the focus onorganisation and practice means that this book is a refreshing addition to thecomparative literature on social services.

L I Z L L O Y DUniversity of the West of England

John Doling, Comparative Housing Policy: Government and Housing inAdvanced Industrialized Countries, London, Macmillan, New York, St.Martins Press, 1997, 228 pp., £13.99 pbk.

There has been a proliferation of publications on comparative social policy inrecent years, and housing has not been neglected in this rush to compare andcontrast. It might therefore be asked whether we really need another book oncomparative housing policy, or, at least, so I wondered before reading ProfessorDoling’s new book. Having read Comparative Housing Policy I came away con-vinced that it is an important and worthwhile addition to the literature.

The aim of the book is to help students gain a better analytical understandingof cross-national comparison of housing policy and provision – why we mightwant to undertake such comparisons, what the pitfalls are of doing so, how wemight go about doing them, what we might learn from them, and what lightprevious comparative work has shed either on policy issues or on theoreticaldebates. The emphasis throughout the book is on categorisation – of authors,approaches to comparative study, of housing policy instruments and of reasonsfor intervention – with the aim of helping students to make sense of informationon housing policy. There is also an emphasis on explanation rather than simplyon description.

150 Reviews

The first chapter briefly reviews the origins of housing policy in different coun-tries and shows how different countries responded differently to a range of prob-lems. The second chapter provides a very useful summary of the advantages ofcomparative research and highlights some of the pitfalls of undertaking it. This isfollowed by a chapter that looks at the possible types of government interventionand the institutional arrangements that might be adopted. This is convenientlyfollowed by a chapter on why governments intervene in housing provision.Doling structures the discussion in this chapter by grouping approaches intothose (the majority) that have propounded convergence in housing systems andthose (the minority) that have taken a divergence perspective. He also looks atstudies that have focused on welfare state retrenchment. The difference betweenconvergence and divergence approaches and the welfare state retrenchment isthen carried over in chapter 5 to examine analyses of housing systems as awhole. Doling suggest that many comparative studies, whether based on con-vergence or divergence perspectives, adopt one of two devices. They attempteither to classify countries into models or ideal types (such as Esping-Andersen’sthree worlds of welfare capitalism), or they seek to identify stages or trends indevelopment over time. He concludes, however, that there is more agreementabout models than there is about the processes generating change over time ascountries move from one stage of development to another.

Chapters 6 to 11 focus on particular aspects of housing, looking at construc-tion, finance, subsidies, home ownership, social housing and private rentingrespectively. In examining these issues, Doling avoids a descriptive approach bydrawing on the analytical material set out in the first four chapters of the book.Like the literature on which it draws, the coverage of these topics (as the authorreadily admits) is inevitably somewhat uneven. However, I was disappointedthat while the book discusses the social meanings of social housing and homeownership, it does not discuss the social meaning of private renting. This is sur-prising, not only because the social meaning of private renting is by no meansuniform across the advanced industrial nations; but also because the socialmeanings of housing tenures are, to some extent, relational. In other words,what it means to be a private tenant in a country is partly conditioned by what itmeans to be a social housing tenant or a home owner.

The reader will not come away from this book with an overall picture of thehousing system in any one country – there are plenty of other books that providethat – but with a much better understanding of why and how comparativeresearch is undertaken, an appreciation of how and why governments intervenein housing provision, and an insight into the comparative housing literature. Afurther welcome aspect of the book is that Doling sees housing as a sub-field ofsocial policy to the wider features of the advanced welfare states.

The material is drawn mainly from literature on OECD countries, with rela-tively little coverage on East and Central Europe and none at all on the develop-ing world. While the omission of the developing world is understandable, thelack of discussion about housing policy in the transition economies of East andCentral Europe is disappointing. There is a rapidly growing literature on thetopic, on which the author could have drawn. In reconstructing their welfarestates, the nations of East and Central Europe are in the process of making aseries of choices about the aims and instruments of housing and social policy. A

Reviews 151

discussion of the dilemmas they are facing and the decisions they have madewould have been illuminating.

Minor quibbles apart, this is an excellent book that can be highly recom-mended for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in housing policy – andnot merely for courses that have a comparative focus.

P E T E R K E M PUniversity of Glasgow

Kathleen Marshall, Children’s Rights in the Balance, The Stationery Office,Edinburgh, 1997, 120 pp., £12.99 pbk.

The debate about how much society must balance the rights of children to par-ticipate in decisions affecting them with considerations of their welfare hasreceived much attention in literature. Kathleen Marshall provides a sound con-tribution to the participation–protection debate in Children’s Rights in theBalance, examining the meanings and implications of the relevant articles of the1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, introducing a welcome Scottishperspective by assessing attitudes of Scottish professionals, and outlining aframework for participation which seeks to achieve an appropriate balance withthe right to protection.

Following an introductory chapter, Marshall focuses first on internationalaspects of the debate. Chapter 2 provides an interesting look behind theConvention to discover what was intended by giving children the right to partic-ipate, drafters’ considerations of potential tensions and the balance with theright to promotion of best interests. Marshall concludes that the child’s right toparticipate under the Convention is absolute and not qualified by protective con-siderations, and that drafters had avoided making participatory rights subject toa welfare test although interests were an issue when determining the mode inwhich the right is to be exercised. A lack of general consistency in the way inwhich states approach participation by children is discussed in the followingchapter, which examines the practical attempts by some states to facilitate par-ticipation. Most appeared to be struggling to develop appropriate mechanisms toreflect and balance children’s right to participate and their right to protection.Chapter 4 assesses the role played by European Convention on the Exercise ofChildren’s Rights in attempting to aid member states fulfil obligations under theUN Convention. The author reaches the potentially worrying conclusion thatrather than helping states to comply with the Convention, the lower standardsof the European Convention mean that adherence to it may in fact underminethe UN Convention.

Focus turns to Scotland in Chapter 5, which reports the findings of a smallsurvey and interview study of attitudes of Scottish senior professionals in variousfields (and the views of four young people) to children’s participation, assessingthese in the light of the Convention. As Marshall comments, awareness of atti-tudes to the Convention is important – if attitudes are negative, its principlesmay be undermined. A variety of issues are covered; particularly interestingwere attitudes to whether concern for a child’s welfare may ever justify exclu-sion from participation. Although respondents were split on the issue, therequest for an element of flexibility by some would seem at odds with the notion

152 Reviews

of participation as an absolute right. Attempts to dilute rights with reference tothe overriding need to protect interests were seen by drafters of the Conventionas paternalistic – a charge that has been levelled at the English legal system post-1989 Children Act, with criticisms that judicial decisions are more likely to beinformed by notions of welfare, avoiding proper recognition of children’s partici-patory rights (Smith, 1997).

In the concluding chapter, Marshall sets out a framework for the participationof children, taking into account conclusions of the earlier chapters of the book.Beginning with the premise that the right to participation should not be qualifiedby considerations of interests, and that participation cannot be denied ongrounds that existing procedures may be damaging to a child, she sees the taskof adults as devising a system of representation that will facilitate appropriate par-ticipation of children, rather than accommodating them to adult-centredprocesses. The system should acknowledge the right of children to be involved ina way which is consistent with their welfare. She concludes that a truly seriouscommitment to the principle of participation would involve a radical re-think ofthe decision-making systems in relation to children, not only in terms of proce-dure but culture and expectations.

Marshall has produced an excellent contribution to the on-going debate.Whether serious commitments in Marshall’s terms is likely is uncertain. AsUNICEF’s Director of Public Affairs points out, ‘The law on children’s rights hasthree main parts: provision … protection … and participation … Few govern-ments have any philosophic problems with the first two. It’s the third part thatworries them’ (Jessica Kinglsey, p. 5).

R. Reid (1996), quoted in M. John (ed.) ‘Children in charge: the child’s rights to a fair hearing’.C. Smith (1997), ‘Children’s Rights: Judicial Ambivalence and Social Resistance’, International

Journal of Law, Policy, and the Family, 11, 103–39.D E B B I E H E A D R I C K

Edinburgh University

Anne Rogers and David Pilgrim, Mental Health in Britain, London,Macmillan, 1996, £42.50, £13.50 pbk.Simon Goodwin, Comparative Mental Health Policy, London, Sage, 1997,192 pp., £37.50, £13.99 pbk.

‘Care in the Community’ constitutes one of the most problematic and controver-sial initiatives in post-war social policy. The crusade to transplant services andaccommodation for the mentally ill out of long-stay mental hospitals holds thedubious distinction of being universally supported in principle and universallycondemned in practice. And there is much to condemn. Chronic underfundingfrom governments, poor co-ordination of service providers at the local level,rivalry amongst professional bodies, lack of continuity of care, and a generalmisunderstanding and resistance by the public are just some of the most recog-nisable problems inherent in this contested programme of social engineering.What’s more, since community care has never been properly defined, there is nostandard measure to evaluate its success and to remedy its shortcomings.

In Mental Health Policy in Britain, Anne Rogers and David Pilgrim bring theirextensive knowledge to bear on this intractable problem. Intended as a primer for

Reviews 153

undergraduate social science students and trainee mental health professionals,this book summarises the dominant debates surrounding the implementation ofmental health policy. Accordingly, their first chapters provide an overview of‘stakeholders’ in the mental health system, before examining, in a more theoreti-cal manner, competing economic, sociological, epidemiological and political sci-ence approaches to policy formation. Within these definitional and methodologi-cal chapters, the authors rightly underline the importance of understanding theindependent dimensions of the formulation and implementation of services.

For Pilgrim and Rogers, the present policy dilemmas cannot be understoodwithout a thorough summary of the ‘all-embracing legacy of the Victorian asy-lum system’ (p. xii). Thus, the central three chapters trace the evolution of themental health services, from the establishment of the county asylum system inmid nineteenth-century Britain, through the therapeutic innovations of treatingshell-shock during the Great War, the impact of psychoanalysis, to the post-warcampaign for community care. These chapters identify a common theme of thebook: the transition from a unified to a balkanised regime of service delivery. Goneare the days when one profession performed one set of treatments within oneidentifiable location. In place of this system has arisen a multiplicity of environ-ments for treatment, care and control. Further, recent reforms of the NationalHealth Service, in particular the invention of the ‘internal market’, have createdanomalous situations where consumers often do not want to consume, andwhere health care spending on the mentally ill, though supposedly devoted tocommunity care, is still overwhelmingly allocated to institutional treatment.

Mental Health in Britain represents an excellent student’s textbook, which lectur-ers will value immensely for its clear presentation and thoughtful analysis. Theauthors’ classification of first, second and third generation attempts at communityprevention of mental illness is particularly incisive. One criticism, however, is that,since this book was written in the dying days of the last British government, it can-not resist scapegoating the former Conservative administration. It would be interest-ing to hear what Pilgrim and Rogers would have to say now about what appears tobe a continuation of the former government’s agenda under a ‘New’ Labour gov-ernment. It might lead them to explore, in a wider context, the evolution of welfarestates for an explanation of the apparent failure of care in the community.

This comparative dimension is the challenging subject of Simon Goodwin’snew book. In Comparative Mental Health Policy he traces the trajectory of deinsti-tutionalism, and the implementation of community care, in several WesternEuropean and North American countries. Between 1800 and 1945, each juris-diction developed a comprehensive system of segregating the mentally ill intopurpose-built institutions under medical authority and state supervision. Afterthe Second World War, and particularly since the 1960s, all countries sub-scribed, at least officially, to the policy of care in the community, transferringpatients to extramural loci of care: hostels, day centres, group homes, psychi-atric wards of general hospitals and, of course, simply to the family. Thesechanges, the author continues, have been accompanied, almost always, by‘multidisciplinarity’ (where teams of psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatricsocial workers and advocates work together on case management), often by ‘sec-torisation’ (where countries/regions are divided into sectors for comprehensivemental health care), and in fewer cases by ‘subsidiarity’ patients and on mental

154 Reviews

health care ‘systems’ has been immense, resulting in near universal decline inthe length of a stay in mental hospitals, an increase in voluntary admissions, arise in the number of mentally ill patients who are treated in general hospitals(and by general practitioners), and a bifurcation of ‘treatment’ and ‘care’.

Goodwin demonstrates that the ‘crisis’ afflicting mental health services is nota national phenomenon, but one which is rooted in broader changes to WesternEuropean and North American states and society. Integrating an immense num-ber of secondary papers, the author conscientiously surveys the various con-straints placed on community care, and minutely assesses which aspects eitherpromoted or inhibited the relocation of patients from long-stay institutions.Showing the advantages of cross-national comparison, he highlights suchdiverse variables as constitutional structures (federal or centralised), fundingsystems (private or public insurance), and types of capitalist countries (conserva-tive, liberal or social democratic) in order to show that the execution of commu-nity care was diverse and uneven both within and between states. Although theprecise mix of motives in the near universal acceptance by governments of carein the community have been debated repeatedly, what is clear is that the twogroups most affected – patients and their predominantly female carers – havevery little to do with the decision-making process.

‘The overall intention of the book’, Goodwin declares, ‘is to offer an analyticalreview of the transition for [sic] institutional to community care for people withmental health problems: to identify the process of change, to offer explanationfor why it has occurred, and to reach an assessment of its value’ (p. 2). This rep-resents a tall order for a book seeking to survey ten countries, and, perhapsinevitably, the result is somewhat mixed. The book is replete with rich referencesto other secondary research, but such is the nature of a ten nation study thatcomparative ‘analysis’ itself becomes submersed in a more general, albeit useful,literature review of Western European and North American mental health poli-cies. Thus, Comparative Mental Health Policy will be most useful to those alreadyinvestigating mental health policy in different national contexts. It will be lessaccessible to a wider audience.

Despite the sad procession of policy failures, Rogers and Pilgrim remain san-guine about the future, predicting that ‘we are now going through a transitionalphase to a post-institutional world’ (p. 182) where more sophisticated methodsof risk assessment and community management and improved medication, willensure the public’s confidence in, and acceptance of, community care. Goodwin,by contrast, fears the return of a new wave of (re-)institutionalisation from whathe suspects is a hardening of the public’s attitude towards the socially undesir-able, fed inevitably by the sensationalism of the press. For him, the window ofopportunity has been closed and he sees the ‘serious, long-term failure’ of com-munity care set to continue in most countries. Whose prognostication is moreaccurate remains to be seen, but it is clear that the lack of a unifying agenda forcommunity care does not bode well for a policy already foundering in a sea ofdisagreement and disillusionment.

D A V I D W R I G H TWellcome Lecturer in the History of Medicine,University of Nottingham

Reviews 155

Patricia Thornton and Neil Lunt, Employment Policies for Disabled People inEighteen Countries: A Review, York, SPRU, 1997, 313 pp., free of charge.

I agreed to review this study because I thought it would have some interestingand exciting things to say about the inclusion of disabled people. My reasonswere threefold: first, work is still the most important mechanism not just for theallocation of economic resources but for defining who we are in the world; sec-ond, there is an urgent and unmet need for comparative studies of disability pol-icy; and third, the authors had in a previous monograph (Thornton and Lunt,1995), used the social model of disability to analyse government policy inrespect of the employment of disabled people.

A comparative analysis of work using the social model is too important toignore, I thought. Unfortunately this is, as the authors themselves admit, awholly descriptive account of employment policies in eighteen different coun-tries and, what’s more, based almost exclusively on the perspectives of govern-ments themselves. Admittedly there is a brief concluding section which high-lights some important general issues: notably, that rights based legislation ismaking significant inroads, particularly in those countries which had previouslyrelied upon employment-specific legislation; that changes brought about by newtechnology and flexible working arrangements are beginning to benefit disabledworkers and potential workers; and that private and voluntary initiatives arebecoming increasingly important.

These are important findings, should they be true. The problem, of course, iswhy should we simply take the word of governments for them? If the indepen-dence of researchers in universities is important, as some have asserted(Hammersley, 1995; Bury, 1996), then surely they should subject these findingsto critical analysis before merely reproducing them. The reality, however, is that,while the research was based at the Social Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at theUniversity of York, it was funded by the European Commission through theHELIOS II programme (see Oliver, 1995 for a critical review of the HELIOS pro-gramme), the International Labour Office and SPRU itself.

All this has a ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ quality about it.SPRU is heavily dependent upon government and quasi-government agenciessuch as these for its funding and so is unlikely to rock the boat or overturn anygovernment apple-carts. Governments feel safe with this and award SPRU, andcountless other university-based research organisations like them, yet moreresearch contracts to provide gentle commentary on fundamentally disablistpolicies.

Despite these criticisms, there is some useful information in the study but itneeds to be properly analysed by committed researchers working from withinthe social model of disability. Unfortunately, there are few such researchersaround, and those that do exist are unlikely to get funding from government tocarry out such work. And as we now know from bitter experience, we cannotrely on independent researchers to undertake such work. Small wonder, thenthat there is a crisis in the relationship between social researchers and disabledpeople (Oliver 1992, 1995). It is very unfortunate for disabled people that thereport did not highlight the appalling fact that the majority of disabled people ofworking age all over the world continue to be excluded from the world of work,or the indignation that they feel about this. It is precisely because state-funded

156 Reviews

research by non-disabled researchers continues implicitly to focus on the politi-cal concerns of governments and the careers of researchers that disabled peopleand their allies in the research community are calling for disabled people to havecontrol over all aspects of research about their lives (Barnes, 1996).

C. Barnes (1996), ‘Disability and the myth of the independent researcher’, Disability and Society, 11:1.

M. Bury (1996), ‘Disability and the myth of the independent researchers: a reply’, Disability andSociety, 11: 1.

M. Hammersley (1995), The Politics of Social Research, London, Sage.M. Oliver (1992), ‘Changing the social relations of research production’, Disability, Handicap &

Society, 7: 2.M. Oliver (1995), ‘Disability, Britain in Europe: a review’, Social Policy and Administration, 29: 4.P. Thornton and N. Lunt (1995), Employment for Disabled People: Social Obligation or Individual

Responsibility?, York, SPRU.M I K E O L I V E R

University of Greenwich

Axel van den Berg, Bergt Furåker and Leif Johansson, Labour MarketRegimes and Patterns of Flexibility, Arkiv, Lund, 1997, 264 pp.Philip de Jong and Theodore Marmour (eds.), Social Policy and LabourMarket, Ashgate, Aldershot, 1997, 412 pp., £45.00.

Labour Market Regimes and Patterns of Flexibility is an impressive example ofcross-national comparative research. It compares two countries, Sweden andCanada, with very different labour market regimes in terms of the degree of secu-rity over employment and living standards they offer to workers. Sweden hasmuch greater union membership than Canada, much more extensive labourmarket policies and greater employment protection. The issue is the effect ofsecurity on flexibility, defined here as the workers’ acceptance of industrialchange. Two theories with opposite conclusions are compared: the neo-classicaleconomic theory predicting that secure workers resist change, and the institu-tionalist theory, including that underpinning the ‘Swedish Model’, predictingthat secure workers are more favourably inclined to change. Flexibility is consid-ered crucial for economic efficiency. The authors accept that there is no obviousdifference in the efficiency of the two countries, suggesting they would not findbig differences in flexibility, and such is the case. They conclude that their evi-dence supports a neo-corporatist version of the institutionalist theory, emphasis-ing the role of unions and centralised bargaining in winning over Swedish work-ers to their co-operative stance on change. Each country has its own labourmarket regime, but they produce roughly similar outcomes in terms of labourflexibility.

The evidence they review is derived from three types of data. First, official sta-tistics for the two countries are compared on job turnover, unemployment andvacancies, and labour mobility. Unfortunately this data is scarce. Second, plant-level interviews were conducted with management and union representatives inthree industries in the two countries about resistance to change. Differences herewere greater between the industries than between the countries. And third, sur-veys were conducted among blue-collar workers in manufacturing about will-

Reviews 157

ingness to move, attitudes to protectionism etc. Of particular interest here is thatthe Swedish survey was done twice, in 1991, when unemployment levels werelow, and in 1993 when unemployment levels were much higher. This revealedthat attitudes to industrial change there were not much affected by the rise ininsecurity, suggesting they are part of the national political culture.

The report is very well written. The discussion of theories, of policies, and ofthe empirical results is readable and well informed. It is of considerable value forthe debate about labour market flexibility, showing that the Swedish Model canbe seen as a route to flexibility (as its authors envisaged) as much as the ‘freemarket’ North American route. Even though much of the emphasis on labourmarket flexibility in the original Swedish Model was abandoned – in favour ofemployment protection – in the 1970s under public protest against pressure tomove to where jobs were, attitudes and behaviour in Sweden still show anacceptance of change. Not that the neo-classical arguments about‘Eurosclerosis’ can be silenced by this research, for example, because the neo-classicals are pointing to other inefficiencies such as distortions arising fromhigh taxes (and also because other countries stand accused).

Social Policy and Labour Market brings together papers presented at threeInternational Research Seminars in 1994–6 on ‘Issues in Social Security’ organ-ised by the Foundation for International Studies in Social Security. The seminarswere in Sweden, so Scandinavia is well represented, but it is a truly internationalvolume with contributors from many different countries, and several papersreporting international comparative work. However, the title is a bit of a mis-nomer in that many papers have rather little to say about labour markets. Thereis not much coherence to the collection. I was also unhappy to find some defi-ciencies in presentation, for example three papers were without their list of refer-ences.

One substantial section (five papers) which does deal with labour markets ison ‘Disability and Rehabilitation’. The problem addressed, in relation to TheNetherlands by de Jong and Emanuel and Sweden by Eriksen and Palmer, is theuse of disability benefits for early exit from the labour market, rather than alter-natives such as rehabilitation or training for post-industrial economy jobs. Thisis not the flexibility the Swedish Model sought, but a response which can beanalysed with neo-classical tools, given the incentives created. Another paperwith a rather different picture of exits from labour markets is ‘The Role of BridgeJobs in the Retirement Patterns of Older Americans in the 1990s’ by Joseph F.Quinn, which is based on a national Health and Retirement Survey. The extentof change to bridge jobs, often part-time and/or self-employed, surprised me. It isencouraged by the relaxing of earnings tests in Social Security. How far this istrue with disability benefits is, however, not made clear.

In the section entitled ‘Welfare’, Jonathan Bradshaw has two papers based oncomparative research projects, one on social assistance in twenty-five countriesand the other on lone mothers’ labour supply in twenty countries. Betweenthem they report a lot of valuable data and begin what are difficult tasks ofanalysis. A further section, ‘Social Welfare Systems in Transition’, is notable forthe range of countries discussed: Poland, the Czech Republic, South Africa,China and Korea (this last considering the problems of social welfare were Koreato be unified).

158 Reviews

Finally, I would like to pick out a stimulating paper, ‘The Nordic WelfareModel and the European Union’ by Rune Ervik and Stein Kuhnle, This arguesthat the Nordic welfare model is faced with internal challenges which are moreor less independent of international pressures, such as membership of the EU.These internal challenges are identified from data about rising tax expenditures,or tax-subsidised private welfare, pointing to growing segmentation of the welfare society, weakening the solidaristic political base of their welfare model.

N E I L F R A S E RUniversity of Edinburgh

Christopher Howard, The Hidden Welfare State, Princeton University Press,Princeton, MJ, 1997, xiii + 250 pp, $30.00.

‘This study throws new light on the American welfare state by examining apowerful but poorly understood tool of social policy – tax expenditures’ (p. 3). Inexamining the origin and development of major ways in which the Americantax system provides tax relief to encourage certain activities in pursuit of socialpolicy goals, Christopher Howard provides a fascinating and richly detailedanalysis of ‘the politics of creating, expanding, and retrenching social programs’(p. 4) with much wider relevance than he claims.

The first chapter examines the overall dimensions of the hidden welfare state,comparing the scale and growth of its main social policy related programmeswith their equivalents in the visible welfare state. The main part of the study isbased on four tax expenditures. The first two are what Howard calls ‘inclusive’ –tax relief on mortgage interest and on occupational pensions. The other two hedescribes as ‘means-tested’ – earned income tax credit (EITC) and targeted jobstax credit (TJTC). In Part II their origin is examined, and in Part III their subse-quent development. This splits each case study into two parts which seems tobreak up the sequence and place a burden on the reader, perhaps particularlythe foreign one who is less familiar with the schemes. I was less convinced by thejustification that ‘scholars have increasingly found that these two processes [oforigin and development] require different kinds of explanations’ (p. 13). AsHoward notes, the choice of EITC and TJTC gives disproportionate attention totax benefits directed to lower-income groups since the general impact of such taxbenefits is upwards, with the top income quintile receiving almost six times theamount going to the bottom quintile (p. 32). But there is more informationavailable about these two more recent schemes; and the discussion of EITC is ofparticular interest to us, given the Budget announcement of the WorkingFamilies Tax Credit which is acknowledged to be a modification of the Americanscheme.

The final chapter is particularly valuable in pulling together the basic themesfrom the four case studies and relating them more broadly. Howard draws asharp contrast between the origins and development of the visible welfare stateand hidden tax benefits (Table 9.1). The more-or-less steady establishment ofsocial welfare tax expenditures from the very start of the Federal income tax in1913 is quite different from ‘the prevailing “big bang” pattern of welfare stateformation in the United States’ (p. 175) during the two bursts of legislation inthe 1930s and the 1960s. ‘The United States has been as receptive to new tax

Reviews 159

expenditures as it has been hostile to new direct expenditures for social welfare’(p. 177). In consequence, he argues, none of the explanations for welfare devel-opment in the literature on social policy help us to understand the formation ofthe hidden welfare state. The introduction of most tax expenditures has not onlyescaped public debate and conflict, it has generally escaped notice at all outside avery small group of interested parties.

EITC provides a particularly good illustration. ‘What started in 1975 as aminor amendment to a forgettable tax bill has now become one of the most pop-ular programs in Washington’ (p. 139), ‘hailed in recent years as the policyequivalent of penicillin’ (p. 64): Clinton believed that ‘tax credit had been one ofhis best applause lines’ in the 1992 presidential campaign (p. 157). No separatehearings were held or votes taken to introduce the original measure. Yet,‘assuming for the moment that no changes are made, by 1998 the EITC will …become the single largest income transfer program for low-income citizens in theUnited States’, helping some ‘sixteen million poor and near poor households’ (p.139). This is greater than total federal and state expenditure on AFDC, the mainform of state means-tested income support for poor families within the conven-tionally defined social security system.

The low attention given to social policy goals in designing these welfare-increasing measures is another major theme: the introduction of the largest sin-gle tax benefit, tax relief on employer pensions, was ‘one of several measuresdesigned to lower the tax burdens on business’ well ahead of the state’s move toprovide basic pensions in the 1935 New Deal (p. 57).

The US hidden welfare is often explained in terms of its laggard public welfareprovision, with the implication that tax benefits are a small part of total welfarein other countries. But Greve estimated that at the beginning of this decadeFinland, Denmark, the United Kingdom and Ireland all had larger tax expendi-tures than the United States as a percentage of GDP, and related to both publicspending and income tax revenue (Greve, 1994, Table 2). Howard’s studydeserves to be treated as a challenge to social policy analysts in Europe.

B. Greve (1994), ‘The hidden welfare state, tax expenditure and social policy’, Scandinavian Journal ofSocial Welfare, 3: 4, 203–11.

A D R I A N S I N F I E L DUniversity of Edinburgh

Margaret Allott and Martin Robb (eds.), Understanding Health and SocialCare: An Introductory Reader, Sage, in association with the Open University,London, 1998, ix + 318 pp., £39.95, £13.99pbk.

As recent developments in policy and practice focus attention ever more explic-itly on common ground, boundary issues and inter-professional workingbetween ‘health’ and ‘social’ care, it is encouraging that an increasing body ofliterature bridges this manufactured distinction. This volume is a welcome addi-tion. It comprises a large number of short extracts in five sections dealing respec-tively with accounts of care and caring, locations of caring, models of care,abuse in care settings and policy issues. Each section includes contributions fromboth sides of the health/welfare divide, after an introduction to guide the reader

160 Reviews

through that section. The book forms part of the Open University course of thesame name. As it is designed to be used in conjunction with other learning mate-rials, it does not attempt to provide a systematic account of health and socialcare. Its strength is in enabling the reader to glimpse many facets of care across awide range of care situations. It brings together material from many sources,including classic social policy works alongside publications more likely to beobscure to the social policy reader. It is written and presented in an accessiblestyle. This and the intrinsic interest of many of the extracts should encouragefurther reading.

The editorial team anticipates the readership dipping into this book or study-ing one or more selected sections, rather than reading from cover to cover. I willconsider the book first as a whole and then section by section.

Overall, Understanding Health and Social Care achieves balance between a num-ber of different perspectives on caring; recipient, informal carer, front lineprovider and institutional positions are all well represented. It includes materialon a wide range of care experiences/circumstances. These include people withphysical or sensory impairments, learning disabilities and mental health prob-lems; older people; children; adolescents and women in childbirth. In my view,the book is least successful in relation to the last three, all groups for whom dis-ability is not necessarily a factor. Children and young people feature mainly intwo sections, those on models of care and abuse, only fleetingly in that on loca-tions of care and not at all in the policy section. I comment below onchildren/young people in the ‘accounts of caring’ section. An extract from LesleyDoyal’s work on the medicalisation of childbirth is unusual in this collection infocusing on an essentially short-term caring situation. In both instances, whatappears as creating a lack of coherence reflects an increasing policy split(between, respectively, care services for adults and children and long-term ver-sus ‘acute’ care).

The book’s first section, ‘Accounts of Care and Caring’, demonstrates the pow-erlessness not only of the cared-for but also of front-line care workers. Most ofthe chapters are concerned with the care of adults. Several of the accounts in thehistorical anthology ‘Voices from the Institutions’ which forms Chapter 1 relatechildhood experiences, mainly of disabled children. It is unfortunate that there isno reference to these accounts in the index under either ‘children’ or ‘disabledpeople’. This section includes two of the three papers not previously published.One of these, Howard Mitchell’s ‘The Insider Researcher’ would seem moreappropriate to a collection on research methods, its justification for inclusionhere being that it goes beyond mere condemnation of the long stay hospital. Theother is a reflective account by Tom Heller of life as a GP. The highlight of thissection for me is Val Hollinghurst’s account of the ‘tangled web’ of emotionsexperienced as an informal carer.

Section II, ‘Where Care Takes Place’, focuses mainly on institutional care. Italso includes a thoughtful – if rather dated – piece by A. Norman on ‘LosingYour Home’ and a useful (though misplaced) paper on ‘The Shifting Concept ofCommunity’ by Majorie Mayo.

The long Section III, ‘Models of Care; Challenge and Change’, forms the cen-tre-piece of the collection in more ways than one. It ‘contains a deliberately largeand diverse set of readings … [united by] … struggle to find ways of giving care

Reviews 161

that do not always assume that the expert knows best and that respond moreeffectively to the different needs of service users’ (p. 111). The two chapters onreminiscence include a previously unpublished account by John Killick of hiswork as Writer in Residence in nursing homes for people with dementia, show-ing how their words can be used to inform (and, potentially, improve) their care.In my judgement, Marian Barnes and Alan Walker’s ‘Principles of Empowerment’is a particularly apposite inclusion.

Section IV is entitled ‘When Care Goes Wrong’. Julia Wardhough and PaulWilding’s contribution draws parallels – and lessons – from publicly investigatedabusive situations in different institutional settings. It is followed by two chap-ters on the most personal aspects of care (one of which describes not abuse butthe trauma for nursing students of giving their first bed bath), then by papers onchild protection and elder abuse.

A number of chapters in the sections discussed above highlighted for me thesignificance of time for any understanding of social policy. They did so in twoways. First, the period to which research evidence and personal accounts relateis unspecified in some instances, thus denying the reader the opportunity tolocate the item in its full context. Second, a few chapters might well prove con-fusing to newcomers to health and social care, since their authors make assump-tions or allude to policies that are now outdated. Possible misunderstandingscould have been avoided by editorial footnotes and cross referencing betweendifferent chapters. There are no such problems with the book’s final section,‘Contents of Care; Policies and Politics’, which comprises seven well-selected,recent papers, including one extract from this journal. Readers new to the areamight be well advised to go first to this section.

Understanding Health and Social Care should prove a valuable resource, first, forstudents at all levels as an introduction, alongside an appropriate textbook, tothe human (or in some instances inhuman(e)) face of caring, and second, by giv-ing plenty of food for thought to those working in occupations concerned withcaring.

L E S L E Y J O R D A NMiddlesex University

Brian Salter, The Politics of Change in the Health Service, Macmillan, London,1998, 257 pp., £45.00, £14.99 pbk.

In writing a text on the recent and contemporary history of the NHS, BrianSalter is entering a crowded field. However, both the content and the style of thisbook make it a welcome addition. Salter focuses particularly on the implementa-tion of the reforms following the 1990 NHS and Community Care Act. As well asdrawing on the conventional sources, he also makes extensive reference to theflood of ‘detailed managerial and professional guidance’ (p. 2) which emanatedover this period from the NHS Executive, using his links with the staff of a localTrust to help him ‘read between the lines’ and understand how this guidance isused in practice.

Given its time of writing, the book is inevitably about NHS policies underConservative governments. Salter makes brief reference to the new Labour gov-ernment in the introduction. He is right to assert the continuing relevance of his

162 Reviews

arguments – and thus this book – despite a change in political leadership.However, it remains to be seen whether some of the changes he dismisses as‘rhetoric’, e.g., the replacement of fund-holding for some GPs with a powerfulcommissioning role for all GPs – have as little as he suggests.

Salter describes and explores the substantial organisational changes of the late1980s and early 1990s in successive chapters, from the perspectives of purchas-ing, providing, primary health care, medicine, nursing, community care and theprivate sector. He uses these changes to illustrate and explain what he sees asthe long-standing political dilemma of the NHS: the mismatch between increas-ing demand and limited resources, combined with the reluctance of successivegovernments to publicly acknowledge the need for rationing. This, argues Salter,has put the medical profession in a uniquely powerful position, for it is doctorswho, under the guise of clinical judgement and using the device of waiting lists,have historically performed the rationing task by limiting patient demand.

So, for Salter, the key questions about changes in the health services are howfar they have altered the balance of power between the doctors and the other keyplayers – particularly the government, the managers and the nurses – and howfar they have found a new solution to the NHS’s dilemma. His conclusions areessentially negatively: he paints a gloomy, if sympathetic, picture of the growingaccountability, yet relative powerlessness of the lay manager; and an equallygloomy, but less sympathetic picture of the declining political fortunes of thenursing profession; combined with a continued belief in the ability of the medicalprofession to use its power to renegotiate the terms of its ‘concordat’ with thestate to preserve its clinical, political and economic autonomy.

In general, his arguments are persuasive. Maybe he underestimates thestrength of the challenge to medical dominance and autonomy, especially to thepower of the hospital consultants who are his main focus. The Labour govern-ment is putting a strong emphasis on Trust managerial responsibility for ‘clinicalgovernance’, which adds to the range of constraints which Salter describes andwhich he briefly acknowledges to have reduced the autonomy of the individualclinician. However, he maintains this autonomy will remain in the hands of theprofession as a whole. He leaves unexplored the question of whether recentdevelopments suggest a challenge to the centrality of medicine in health andhealth care policies. Maybe the move of more doctors into positions of manager-ial authority, such as clinical director posts, reflects a move to counter a declinein their professionally legitimated power?

The inescapability and adaptability of medical dominance in a changinghealth service is Salter’s central theme throughout much of the book and one towhich he returns in his conclusion. In this context, the chapters on communitycare and on the private sector of health care, although interesting in their ownright, fit rather uneasily with the flow of the argument. Especially in relation tocommunity care policies, doctors, while not entirely absent, are clearly not cen-tre stage.

Salter’s style is assertive and colourful. This makes for a lively read, butinevitably also for some contentious arguments. Nurses may be prepared to con-cede their ‘political incompetence’ (p. 139) but may want to challenge thewholesale condemnation of Project 2000 nurse education (pp. 140–4) and thecharge that they have alienated a medical profession on whose ‘protection’ they

Reviews 163

depend (p. 154). ‘Social policy theorists’ will be surprised to hear that they have‘studiously failed to confront’ the issue of ‘the changing position of the privatesector as an alternative source of welfare supply’ (p. 185). In general, those inthe social policy field are likely to dispute Salter’s assertion of a continuing wel-fare hegemony which ‘assumes that the expansion of social rights, and hence ofwelfare spending, is a good in its own right requiring little or no self-justification’(p. 14) as well as his assumption that as far as models of citizenship, social rightsand welfare are concerned, T. H. Marshall reigns unchallenged.

It is evident that I have reservations about some of Salter’s analyses and argu-ments. However, I enjoyed the book: it is interesting, provocative and discussessome of the issues central to the NHS. Students, particularly those who alreadyhave some acquaintance with the health service, should find it a good basis forreflection and debate.

J A N E K E I T H L E YUniversity of Durham

Charles Webster, The National Health Service, Oxford University Press,Oxford, 1998, 241 pp., £9.99 pbk.

Charles Webster’s magisterial and monumental two-volume history of theNational Health Service (1988, 1996), from its genesis up to 1979, is a feat ofscholarship that is unlikely to be repeated. His status as official historian, while itgave him access to the archives denied to others under the thirty-year rule, mayhave inhibited him in exploring certain areas, notably the relationship betweenministers and civil servants. Some of his interpretations will certainly be chal-lenged by other scholars, particularly as the more recent files become available.But, overall, the two volumes are likely to remain the definitive account of theevolution of the NHS for the foreseeable future. The trouble, however, is thattheir sheer bulk is a deterrent to use. They are a quarry for other scholars ratherthan a source for students.

This potted history is, therefore, all the more welcome since it will makeWebster’s work accessible to a much wider audience. Oxford University Press areto be congratulated on making it available at what is, by today’s inflationarystandards, a remarkably cheap price. It provides an incredibly comprehensiveaccount of the main developments in the NHS: successive reorganisations, fund-ing crises and pay disputes. It guides the reader through the various internaldebates within government on such issues as charging, as well as sketching inthe background of change in medical practice and technology. It looks at theway in which Wales and Scotland differed from England: an interesting pointerto the future, perhaps, with devolution in the wings. All in all, it is a feat of com-pression – challenging the reader’s capacity to digest so much informationcrammed into so short a space.

Why, then, do I hesitate to recommend it as a textbook for students? If thebook stopped at 1979, I would have no such hesitation. But it does not, andthere is a sharp break in both tone and quality. While the first two-thirds of thebook are the product of Webster the diligent scholar, the last third is of Websterthe polemicist. Implicit in all his work has been the view that the ideals of thecreators of the NHS have been betrayed by the timidity and parsimony of politi-

164 Reviews

cians, their failure either to fund the service adequately or to follow through theorganisational logic of the founding principles. The notion that some of the ten-sions and weaknesses of the NHS might be inherent in its original design – thatthe ideals have been betrayed because of some inherent contradiction or flaws –is alien to him. Accordingly, the last third of the book is a sustained attack on therecord of the Thatcher administration which, as he sees it, was intent on sub-verting rather than strengthening the NHS. For Webster, the post-1979 story isone of incompetence, at best, and deliberate sabotage, at worst: even NewLabour was rapped over the knuckles for its fiscal caution (the book was com-pleted before the appearance of the 1997 White Paper, so Webster’s interpreta-tion of the Labour government’s policies is speculative).

There is, of course, much to be said for making one’s biases explicit. Theappearance of scholarly objectivity may all too often lull the reader into lazyacquiescence with the arguments put forward. With Webster, at least, we knowwhere we are: he wears his prejudices on his sleeve. The trouble is that his com-mitment to a particular vision of what the NHS ought to be like leads him intoover-simplifying complex arguments and, at times, to use the evidence some-what cavalierly and even carelessly. In the former category is his assumptionthat the NHS is underfunded. It may well be so (particularly in terms of capitalinvestment), but the case is not self-evident: no-one has come up with a satisfac-tory formula for determining what the level of funding should be. Similarly, thebalance sheet of the 1991 NHS reforms is more complex than Webster concedes.In the latter category there is a supposed report by the Central Policy ReviewStaff examining the case for wide-ranging charges. Webster cites this as evidenceof the Thatcher government’s obsession with charges. In fact, the report was oneof a series of pastiche CPRS reports devised and run by The Economist (I know,because I wrote it). Oddly, too, Webster notes that the introduction of a limitedlist for drugs by Kenneth Clarke was opposed by the British Medical Associationand the pharmaceutical industry but fails to mention that it was also attacked bythe Labour Party.

For the future, Webster appears to be in two minds. On the one hand, heappears to want more devolution, on the Scottish and Welsh model. This wouldessentially be a political response to a fundamental problem inherent in the1948 design: central funding leading to political overload at the centre. On theother hand, he advises New Labour to set up an independent Commission – onthe model of the Audit Commission and the Law Commission – to ‘conduct arolling review of the policy issues faced by the health service’. This would be atechnocratic response, and a rather silly one at that, returning to the profes-sional paternalism that was so strong a feature of the original design of the NHS.The two solutions, clearly, pull in opposite directions. If Webster the historianwrites with authority for the period before 1979, Webster the policy advocate isan uncertain guide either for the following years, let alone the future. Which iswhy this book can only be recommended as an interesting polemic rather thanthe definitive text that it might have been.

C. Webster (1988 and 1996), The Health Service Since the War, Vol. 1, Problems of Health Care; TheNational Health Service Before 1957, Vol. 11, Government and Health Care: The British NationalHealth Service, 1958–1979, London, HMSO.

R U D O L P H K L E I N

Reviews 165

166 Reviews

D E P E N D E N C Y A N D I N E Q UA L I T Y: A FA L S E P O L A R I T Y I N T H E P O V E RT Y

D E B AT E ?

Saul Becker, Responding to Poverty, Longman, London, 1997, xii + 223 pp.,£12.99 pbk.Alissa Goodman, Paul Johnson and Steven Webb, Inequality in the UK,Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997, xvi + 297 pp., £35.00, £15.99 pbk.David Gordon and Christine Pantazis (eds.), Breadline Britain in the 1990s,Ashgate, Aldershot, 1997, xxiv + 309 pp., £42.00.David G. Green, Benefit Dependency, Institute of Economic Affairs, London,1998, xi + 49 pp., £7.00 pbk.John Hills, Income and Wealth, Joseph Rowntree Foundation, York, 1998,80 pp., £13.95 pbk.

The books under review highlight the striking paradox which characterises the con-temporary debate about poverty: that it has become increasingly concerned withdependency at the very time that inequalities have been growing. The gap betweenbetter-off and worse-off households has widened dramatically since the mid-1970s.This is the case whether the assessment is based upon the income or the expenditureof the households, whether incomes are measured before or after housing costs havebeen met, and whether the self-employed are included or excluded from the data.For many commentators, however, the central question is no longer that of how tochange the distribution of resources but of how to change the behaviour of individu-als. Policy debates are concerned less with the redistributive effects of taxes and benefits and more with their impact upon incentives to work and save.

These new studies have relatively little to say about the reasons for this shift inthinking. They have much to say, however, about the extent to which it hasbeen driven by ideology or reflects changes in the nature of poverty. Is it truethat poverty and deprivation are becoming more complex and multi-faceted? Ifthey are, then is it possible that a small-scale but highly visible problem of depen-dency could develop within an increasingly unequal society? Is it reasonable tospeak of the capacities and choices of poor people even though the structuralconstraints upon those choices have grown ever tighter? Are debates aboutdependency and inequality mutually exclusive or do they address differentdimensions of the same problem?

The authors discussed here give strikingly – and sometimes stridently – differ-ent answers to these questions. The first set of arguments, however, relate toissues of measurement.

T H E M E A S U R E M E N T O F I N E Q UA L I T YThe most recent data indicates that income inequality declined between 1993and 1995. That decline, however, was not sufficient to offset more than a smallproportion of the increase since 1979. As John Hills (1998) emphasises in hisnew study for the Rowntree Foundation, ‘income inequality in the mid-1990swas still greater than for forty years from the late 1940s’ (p. 17).

Nevertheless, the extent of the increase in inequality is fiercely disputed, andits conceptualisation and measurement remains both complex and contentious.David Green’s pamphlet, for example, strongly condemns Hills’ earlier work

for the Rowntree Inquiry into Income and Wealth (Hills 1995) for its use of an‘illegitimate’ measure of income and its ‘wholly indefensible’ neglect of trends inhousehold consumption in order to maximise the reported level of inequality. Indoing this, Green argues, the Rowntree Inquiry exemplifies the approach of mod-ern poverty studies which typically seek to ‘define as many people as possible aspoor in the hope of stimulating political action on their behalf ’ (p. 12).

The book by Alissa Goodman and her colleagues (1997) is not as up-to-dateas Hills’ new report but it provides an invaluable guide to this and similar dis-putes. Indeed, an outstanding feature of Inequality in the UK is the clarity andbalance with which it sets out the different ways in which income inequality canbe measured and explains how the eventual result is influenced by choice ofmeasurement tool. Inequality measured by household income, for example, isboth greater and has grown more rapidly than inequality measured by house-hold spending. Moreover, low income households in the Family ExpenditureSurvey do not necessarily report low expenditure: a significant proportion havespending patterns closer to those of middle income households. This does notmean, however, that one measure is right and the other wrong, but that theymeasure different things. ‘Taken together, a good deal more can be discoveredabout the nature of inequality and living standards than by using any singlemeasure on its own’ (p. 114).

Much the same can be said of the vexed question of housing costs. The BeforeHousing Costs (BHC) measure has the disadvantage that rises in housing beneiftcount as increases in household income, even though they may be paid to meethigher rents. The After Housing Costs (AHC) measure removes this distortionbut introduces others. It cannot take account of rising housing standards anddepresses the income of mortgagers in a period of high interest rates. It is forthese reasons that Green considers the AHC measure illegitimate, althoughGoodman et al. conclude that it is ‘probably’ the better measure of low incomes.

A further set of arguments concerns the treatment of the self-employed. The incomes of the self-employed are more widely dispersed than those of other groups, they are disproportionately represented in both the highest andlowest deciles and they are more likely to have high spending relative to theirincomes. All of this engenders considerable scepticism regarding the reliability ofthe data on the self-employed. Goodman et al. note that the relationship between their declared profits and spending is ‘obscure’, and other studies haveassumed a high level of under-reporting (Hills (ed) 1996, p. 231). The growingnumbers of self-employed – who now account for 12 per cent of the workforce –means that these are serious issues. The fact remains, however, that the trendtowards greater inequality remains even if they are excluded entirely from thepopulation.

The measured approach adopted by Goodman et al. reinforces the impact oftheir conclusions. Inequality has grown at a rate which is ‘historically highlyunusual, if not unprecedented’ (p. 275). There is no single explanation for thisincrease : sophisticated decomposition methodology indicates that each compo-nent of income has contributed to the growth in inequality. The key factors,however, have been the widening dispersal of hourly wage rates, the polarisa-tion of households between those with two earners and those with none, and thegrowing gulf between those in receipt of occupational and private pensions and

Reviews 167

those more dependent upon national insurance pensions, which, since 1980,have been uprated in line with prices rather than earnings.

Many of these points are echoed and elaborated by John Hills. He also providesa clear analysis of the measurement issues, together with a full and admirablyrestrained defence of the approach adopted in the 1995 Rowntree Report. In sodoing he draws upon a number of new studies which have examined the valueof the social wage, the relative costs of children and the reliability of the datarelating to ‘minimal income’ families. The recurring theme is that whilst thisnew evidence should ‘temper’ both ‘the weight put upon the lowest reportedincomes’ and ‘one’s interpretation of the gloomiest trends’ it does not alter thebroader picture (pp. 42, 44).

Nevertheless, the critical issue remains the mismatch between the incomesand the spending of households in the lowest decile. Goodman et al. believe thatthis is due in part to the greater volatility of incomes. Households temporarily inthe bottom decile may maintain their spending if they expect their fortunes toimprove in the near future. This, however, is not the whole story. It will be seenbelow that Hills reports new evidence which indicates that incomes have notbecome more volatile, and – as Green points out – the discrepancy betweenincome and expenditure was discussed by Abel-Smith and Townsend back in1965 (pp. 26–7). Indeed it is important to acknowledge at this point thatalthough Green’s attack on the first Rowntree Report is hopelessly overstated,his comments on the neglect of consumption within the broader literature onpoverty have considerably more force.

T H E M E A S U R E M E N T O F P O V E RT YThese measurement issues also arise in relation to the growth in poverty. Againthe general trend is clear: the numbers in poverty have risen sharply since themid-1970s whether the poverty line is fixed by reference to benefit levels, theLow Income Families (LIF) approach, or to some fraction of national averageincome, the Households Below Average Income (HBAI) approach. The pattern ofthe increase, however, does depend upon the yardstick being used. The nationalaverage income rose rapidly during the boom of the late 1980s, and this led to asimilarly rapid rise in the number of households with an income less than halfthat average. Conversely, the numbers of poor on the LIF measure increasedmost quickly during the recession of the early 1980s. Goodman et al. argue thatthis is a ‘serious weakness’ of the HBAI approach; ‘one would expect periods ofrecession, not periods of boom, to be associated with increased poverty’ (p. 240).

Green goes further and argues for the use of a constant poverty line whenmaking comparisons over ‘a relatively short period of 10–15 years’, in effect for areturn to an absolute measure of poverty (p. 15). This is why he is at such pains todiscredit Rowntree’s use of the HBAI approach in general and the AHC measureof income in particular: it is on this measure, but only on this measure, that therewas a marginal increase in absolute poverty between 1979 and 1991/92 (p. 22).

Of far greater significance for policy, however, is the evidence which is nowemerging regarding income mobility. The annual Family Expenditure Surveyupon which the HBAI estimates are based provides a snapshot, a cross section ofthe distribution of income each year. What it does not do is track the incomes ofthe same individuals from one year to another. Just such panel data is becoming

168 Reviews

available with the British Households Panel Study (BHPS) which began in 1991,and Hills provides an engrossing analysis of the results from the first four years ofthe BHPS.

As Hills notes, the significance of the findings on mobility is a matter of inter-pretation; what ‘represents “a lot” or “a little” depends to some extent on priorexpectations. The key issues, of course, are the proportion of those observed inpoverty in any one year who move to a higher decile in the following year, andwhether or not those who do escape from poverty fall back again in subsequentyears. Broadly speaking, Hills’ answer is that less than one fifth of observedpoverty is ‘non-problematic’ in that it represents either a brief ‘blip’ into povertyor a spell of poverty which is about to end. The ‘size of the “poverty problem” istherefore still 80 to 90 per cent of the amount observed at any one time’ (p. 59).

Perhaps the most striking point, however, is that only a minority of the poorare ‘continuously so’, but that the majority are ‘repeatedly poor’ (p. 56). Of thosehouseholds in the bottom fifth of the income distribution in year one, for ex-ample, around one third remain in the bottom third in each of the following threeyears, but over half were found in the bottom fifth in year four. This means thatpoverty is concentrated in a relatively small proportion of households: 9 per centof cases accounted for 43 per cent of poverty observations (p. 59).

Breadline BritainA similar picture emerges from the very different methodology employed in theBreadline Britain surveys conducted in 1983 and 1990. Gordon and Pantazisstart from the assumption that poverty ‘can only be accurately measured bystudying the living standards of people and families’. Data on income and expen-diture, they argue, can ‘provide evidence about inequality but only limited evi-dence about poverty’ (p. 1).

The approach adopted in Breadline Britain was first developed by Mack andLansley, and will be familiar to many readers of the Journal. Respondents werepresented with a list of items and asked to say which they regarded as necessi-ties. The items which were identified as necessities by more than 50 per cent ofrespondents were deemed to be ‘socially perceived necessities’, and those respon-dents who said that they did ‘not have and could not afford’ three or more suchnecessities were defined as poor. Poverty, is thus conceptualised as ‘an enforcedlack of socially perceived necessities’.

Gordon and Pantazis present an extended and forceful defence of thisapproach. They harness an array of formidable-sounding statistical techniquesto demonstrate the reliability and robustness of their results, and to restate thecase for an ‘objective and scientific’ measure of poverty. Their central claim isthat the number of people who can ‘objectively’ be described as living in povertyrose from 7.5 million to 11 million between 1983 and 1990, and that the pro-portion of households in poverty rose from 14 per cent to one fifth over the sameperiod. This represents a large increase in relative poverty, which reflected a cor-respondingly ‘large shift in public attitudes’ (p. 72). Far more items were per-ceived as necessities in 1990 than in 1983, partly because some items moved upabove the 50 per cent threshold and partly because the researchers added newitems to the list. Goodman et al. argue that it was the addition of new itemswhich had the greater effect, and that it is ‘misleading’ to talk of a rise in poverty

Reviews 169

of 3.5 million. If the 1983 list had been replicated in 1990 the increase wouldhave been much smaller (p. 246).

This, of course, goes to the heart of the debate about the nature of poverty. Foras Gordon and Pantazis contend – and Goodman et al. acknowledge – the theoryof relative poverty would predict just a rise in expectations, and the fact thatsome of the new items were seen as necessities would appear to confirm its valid-ity. A more serious criticism of the Breadline Britain book is that it includes pas-sages which seem to suggest that poverty has risen in absolute terms. The edi-tors themselves, for example, point to a ‘massive increase’ in prosecutions underthe Wireless Telegraphy Act ‘at least some’ of which ‘probably results fromgreater numbers of households being unable to afford a TV licence’ (p. 20).

The greater part of the book, however, is devoted to a more detailed analysis ofthe survey data than was possible when it was first collected. There is some fasci-nating material on the relationship between poverty and crime. The poor are notmore likely to become the victims of crime but they are more likely to fear crimebecause of the greater impact it has upon them. Equally striking is the incidenceof poverty amongst different groups of benefit claimants. It is households inreceipt of family credit who experience the highest levels of poverty, whilst thatof non-pensioner households on housing benefit is marginally higher than thatof similar households in receipt of income support. It is also significant that justover 4 per cent of households were defined as long-term poor in 1990 – on thegrounds that they described themselves as having been poor ‘most of the time’ inthe past and as poor ‘all the time’ now (p. 34).

The most striking chapter in the book, however, is that by Hallerod, Bradshawand Holmes. This begins by hailing Mack and Lansley’s formulation of the con-sensual definition of poverty as ‘one of the most important contributions to mod-ern poverty research’. It is this conception of poverty which underpins the rest ofthe book, and Hallerod et al. state that their intention is to ‘develop’ it (p. 213). Infact they do two things. First, they refine the original approach through the devel-opment of a ‘proportional deprivation index’ (PDI). This differs from the ‘majoritynecessities index’ (MNI) used by Mack and Lansley, in that no distinction is madebetween necessities and non-necessities. Instead every item is given a weightingproportional to the number of people describing it as a necessity, while thoseweightings also reflect the diversity of responses from different groups within thepopulation. The use of PDI broadly confirms the original findings, in that when apoverty line is fixed at a level which gives the same numbers in poverty as theMNI then it is broadly the same people who fall under both lines (p. 222).

Intertwined with this refinement, however, is a discussion of the muchbroader question of ‘the need for a poverty line at all’ (p. 216). Hallerod et al.point to two central difficulties with Mack and Lansley’s concept of poverty. Thefirst is that it is based upon the notion of deviation from ordinary lifestyle. Thequestion is ‘how big should this deviation be before it is called poverty’? Hallerodet al. suggest that the enforced lack of socially perceived necessities must be con-centrated upon a ‘relatively small part of the population’.

It is hard to argue that poverty equals an exclusion from an ordinary lifestyleif this is not the case. Necessities are necessary because they are part of a nor-mal part of daily life for most people (p. 216).

170 Reviews

The second difficulty, identified by Hallerod et al., is that for a poverty line to beuseful it must be based upon an indirect definition of poverty, that is a lack ofeconomic resources rather than a lack of necessities. To abolish poverty basedupon Mack and Lansley’s definition would require governments to provide thepoor with the necessities they lack. In practice, of course, advocates of theBreadline Britain appoach do not suggest this. Both Mack and Lansley and nowGordon and Panazis argue instead for higher beneifts. This only compounds theproblem, however, because the ‘overlap between direct and indirect poverty issmall’. According to Hallerod et al., then, the guaranteed minimum incomeadvocated in Breadline Britain would ‘only help a part’ of the population it identi-fies as suffering the severest hardship (p. 217).

This is illustrated by the distribution of poverty across the income deciles.Remarkably 5 per cent of the highest decile and 10 per cent of the second decileare poor according to the MNI. Some of this discrepancy reflects idiosyncraticpreferences, and some represents poor respondents in non-poor households. (It issignificant that the chances of a household being counted as poor increase if therespondent is a woman). Even so, it is ‘hard to justify’ that such a high percent-age of the richest fifth of households are ‘poor’. Hallerod et al. argue that theproblem diminishes if ‘the poverty lines are given less importance’ and the lackof necessities seen as merely ‘indicators of poverty’ (p. 230). This, however, isless a case of developing the approach which underpins the rest of the book andmore a case of driving a coach and horses through it.

T H E R H E T O R I C O F P O L A R I S AT I O NThe focus of Saul Becker’s introductory text is less upon the causes or extent ofpoverty than upon its political construction. His thesis is that poverty and exclu-sion can only be understood

as the consequences of social reactions, social and individual attitudes, poli-cies practices and structures which act as barriers to independence and secu-rity to millions of citizens on a low income. Policy, organisation and changewithin cash and care have become part of the problem, rather than the solu-tion, of poverty and social exclusion (p. xii).

Becker argues that the response to poverty must be to confront those processes.It is to develop a social reaction model which – akin to the social model of disabil-ity – would challenge the individualising, pathologising perceptions of the poorand ‘break down the sense of stigma, failure and exclusion that characterise thecurrent process and outcomes of cash and care policy for poor people’ (p. 164).This can not be done without harnessing the energies of poor people themselvesand establishing new and more balanced relationships between them and welfare professionals.

The strength of Becker’s book is the consistency with which this analysis isapplied across the spectrum of social security and social services provision. It isespecially powerful on the increasing integration of cash and care and the trans-formation of social service departments into income maintenance as well associal care agencies. Becker also provides a cogent critique of the preoccupationof the social work profession with managerialism and with the issue of child

Reviews 171

abuse, and its consequent failure to respond to the growing poverty of many ofits clients.

These merits, however, are, offset by three serious defects. The first is the indis-criminate nature of Becker’s criticisms of the delivery of community care and thevehemence of the language in which it is expressed. None of those involved areexempt; all must share the blame;

Those who receive cash and care find that they are often regarded as failures,‘scroungers’ or cheats; they are controlled, degraded, and stigmatised by thevery systems which, insidiously, present themselves as caring and aiding (p. 161).

The second defect is the lack of any explanation of these exclusionary processes.In effect they are ascribed to a ‘profound lack of awareness’ on the part of policymakers and practitioners, and to something close to a conspiracy between gov-ernment and opposition parties who ‘foster and sustain public ambivalence andhostility towards certain welfare groups’ (pp. 162, 83). The third, and perhapsthe most serious defect, however, is Becker’s failure to set out any convincingalternative to the strategies and policies which he condemns in such forthrightterms. Again and again, for example, there are references to the need to givevoice to the poor, to see them as a resource not a problem. Nothing, however, issaid about how this might be done, beyond a reference to the publications ofATD Fourth World and the statement that it ‘is not the place here to rehearsethese debates’ (p. 164). If not here then where?

It is the failure to address the difficult but absolutely central question of how toharness the agency of the poor which so diminishes Becker’s case. It leaves abook which is long on rhetoric and criticism but short on evidence, explanation,or constructive proposals for action.

B A C K T O T H E DATA ?Neither David Green nor Saul Becker will have had an opportunity to read eachothers book when writing his own. There is a real sense, however, in which theirarguments need each other’s. From Green’s perspective, Becker is the exemplarof the egalitarian collectivist for whom everything is to be explained in terms ofstructures. Responding To Poverty views even crime and ‘wrong-doing’ as socialconstructs to be explained by poverty and injustice (p. 35). Becker says muchabout agency as collective action, nothing about agency as personal responsibil-ity or moral autonomy. From Becker’s perspective, Green is the stereotypicalneo-liberal who elevates the role of the ‘self-improving character’ to the exclu-sion of all else. He clings to an absolute conception of poverty and has no expla-nation for the growth in dependency upon means-tested benefits other than alitany of personal decline which could have come from the paintings of Hogarth.‘Having crossed the boundary between independent self-support’, individualslose their self respect and ‘often become more shameless in their determinationto live at the expense of others’ and ‘more prone to manipulation by politicans’(p. vii). (In fairness to Green it should be remembered that Benefit Dependency is apolemical pamphlet for a think-tank, whereas Responding to Poverty is intendedas a text book).

172 Reviews

What Becker and Green both neglect are the implications of the new evidencewhich Hills provides on the dynamics of poverty. The fact that a small propor-tion of the poor experience extreme and continuous poverty refutes the crudernotions of an underclass entrenched by a deviant culture. Beyond that, how-ever, the diversity of the poor means that a similar diversity of policy responsesmay be required. Robert Walker (1998), for example, has recently argued thatpoverty is too often ‘undifferentiated and treated as essentially static’. A moreconstructive approach, he suggests, would be to examine the ‘trajectories’ bywhich some households escape from poverty when others in like circumstancesdo not. Similarly, Hallerod et al. argue in Breadline Britain, that it is ‘important toacknowledge differences in the way households manage their income andexpenditure’ (p. 231).

It is in this sense that concerns with dependency and inequality may not bemutually exclusive. Much of the data reported in these books supports Walker’sclaim that ‘as currently conceived’, poverty is ‘a vital rallying cry’ but acts as an‘impediment to policy’. Such a shift in emphasis may well be regarded by Beckeras a further example of the ‘academic concern’ with ‘lifestyles, living standardsand consumption’ which has ‘unwittingly aided the individualisation of poverty’(p. 1). In reality, however, the insights and understandings which are a neces-sary – but not a sufficient – condition for an effective response to poverty are lesslikely to be gleaned through the rhetoric of polarisation than through the carefuland honest consideration of the evidence provided by Goodman et al., the newRowntree report, and some of the contributors to Breadline Britain.

J. Hills (1995), Income and Wealth Volume 2: A Summary of the Evidence, Joseph Rowntree Foundation,York.

J. Hills (ed.) (1996), New Inequalities: The Changing Distribution of Income and Wealth in the UnitedKingdom, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

R. Walker (1998), ‘Unpicking poverty’ in C. Oppenheim (ed.) An Inclusive Society: Strategies forTackling Poverty, Institute for Public Policy Research, London.

A L A N D E A C O NUniversity of Leeds

Reviews 173