Social Welfare and Social Insurance

This is the first English-language book to take a comparative look at the Italian welfare state as a whole since the 2008 economic crisis and will be a valuable resource for academics and researchers as well as students.

This book provides a systematic comparative and longitudinal analysis of minimum income protection systems in 17 EU-countries based on a newly developed dataset.

Addressing the rapidly shifting politics of the minimum wage in six English-speaking countries, Shaun Wilson analyses minimum wage policies within a political-economy narrative. Topical and poignant, this book identifies the success of living wage campaigns as central to both welfare state change and alternatives to the Basic Income.

This book presents a psychosocial examination of changing relationships between service users, professionals and managers in the post-war welfare state. It challenges current emphasis on consumer rights by linking social responsibility to its psychosocial roots and theorises the links between experiences of care and development of social policy.

Focusing on a range of welfare issues this book examines the views, values and perceptions of a number of theorists from ancient times to the 19th century, including Plato, St Aquinas, Hobbes, Wollstonecraft and Marx.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and the author’s own experience, this book explores how diverse welfare users navigate the personal and practical hurdles of Australia’s social security system.

This book addresses the development of increasingly individualised public social services in the EU. It focuses particularly on activation services that have become crucial in the 'modernisation' of welfare states, comparing their introduction in the UK, Germany, Italy, Finland and the Czech Republic.

Over the last three decades Britain has witnessed an unprecedented rise in the number of people receiving welfare benefits that has provoked fears of a growing underclass and mass welfare dependency. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of the reasons for this growth and subjects notions of welfare dependency to empirical test.

East Asian societies and welfare systems are rapidly changing. This original volume considers welfare attitudes in East Asia, including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Macao, Singapore and Taiwan. It proposes new methods and approaches to analysing cross-national variations in welfare attitudes.

With unparalleled access to some of the world’s most reflective and thoughtful philanthropists, this book explores the philanthropic journey of 48 high net worth individuals (HNWIs) and ultra-high net worth individuals (UHNWIs) to uncover the person behind the giving.

This inter-disciplinary study considers the past, present and future of mental health services and community care. From the origins of provision as we know it in the 1960s, it sets out the political, economic and bureaucratic factors behind recent crises and considers what the founding principles of community care tell us about the way forward.

Providing innovative insights, this book moves the debate on migration and integration policies in the enlarged European Union and its member states onto new terrain.