Workers with a vulnerable position on the labour market face difficulties finding and maintaining decent work. An increasing body of research on the demand-side of the labour market investigates the involvement of employers in active labour market policies, often referred to as employer engagement. However, the concept of employer engagement varies, causing ambiguity in its definition and use in research. This scoping review investigated sixty-three documents (e.g., peer reviewed scientific papers and grey literature) on employer engagement and outlines the current conceptualisations of employer engagement. By combining the conceptualisations taking a stakeholder-oriented approach, a four stakeholder group perspective on employer engagement was developed. With the organisation as an entity, HRM, line managers, and institutional stakeholders. This review deepens the understanding of employer engagement and contributes to the literature by taking an interdisciplinary approach and offers suggestions for future research.

In the UK, parents receiving working-age social security benefits have been the target of intensifying labour market activation policies, particularly following the introduction of Universal Credit (UC). Concurrently, state support for parents has reduced, and help with childcare is complex and limited. Under UC, parents, and increasingly mothers, are meeting more often with street-level agents, Work Coaches, who are responsible for ‘activating’ parents into work. Work Coaches operate at the interface between the state and citizens, but we know little about street-level implementation of UC. Through analysing interviews with ten Work Coaches and sixty-seven parents, this article draws on a gendered street-level approach to explore how policy limits choices for Work Coaches (by restricting spaces for personalisation) and parents (by rules determining how to manage work and care responsibilities). Within this rigid context, moral assumptions of low-income parents emerge, with increased expectations placed on mothers and outdated assumptions about fathers.

This paper draws upon the theoretical literature on migration policy and health, and empirical data on three European states with differing welfare models – Sweden (social democrat), France (conservative), and the United Kingdom (liberal) – during Covid-19, to highlight the often hidden and contradictory politics through which refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants were forced to navigate during the most uncertain period of the pandemic. Although migrants’ treatment during Covid-19 was generally better in Sweden with a social democrat welfare tradition, we see migration management priorities greatly undermining the extent to which welfare systems function overall for the benefit of population health. Furthermore, Sweden’s recent political shift to the right exacerbates those negative tendencies. As the paper shows, there was considerable effort by civil society and local government to fill the gap where national governments failed to protect this group, stepping in to provide health information, and support.

France has one of the most unequal levels of access to childcare in Europe, despite high public investment. Existing literature explains this inequality through factors such as the availability of childcare slots, social stratification, stigmatisation, attitudes, cultural biases, and parental logistical constraints. However, the role of administrative barriers in exacerbating access problems remains understudied. We provide fresh insight by examining these barriers in France’s poorest county. Seine-Saint-Denis offers a revealing case study, as its inadequate childcare coverage persists despite heavy public investment – highlighting challenges within France’s multi-layered administrative system. Drawing on interviews with families and childcare managers, as well as participant observation in the local early childcare system, we identify administrative barriers at three levels: ‘organisational’, ‘procedural’, and ‘individual’. Our findings suggest that difficulties in accessing childcare stem from: (1) the failed logic of integration between different administrative layers and the financing modality of the Single Service Provision (PSU), (2) the opaque criteria employed by childcare admission committees (CAMAs), and (3) the lack of adaptation of the multi-layer administrative system to family needs. The article investigates administrative barriers to welfare state access, approaching for the first time the domain of childcare.

Employer attitudes towards maternity leave are often framed as a tension between opposition based on costs or ideal worker norms, versus normative or ethical support. How do employers combine and prioritise these justifications in practice? Drawing on interviews with thirty-seven British managers, this article develops a typology of employers – risk-averse, business-first, and value-driven – distinguishing the nature of support and underlying blends of economic, normative, and moral justifications. It shows how moral reasoning – often assumed to align only with a supportive stance – is also mobilised to justify exclusionary attitudes and even overt discrimination against maternity leave-takers. Further, against assumptions that shifting cultural norms and expanding rights foster greater employer support, discomfort with these changes can reinforce resistance. Relational dynamics also shape attitudes, with positive affective–personal ties between managers and staff prompting greater support. These findings offer a new lens on how family leave rights are interpreted in everyday managerial practice.

This paper contends that the intractability of food insecurity as a social policy issue may have arisen in part because food access has become central to the interpretation of what is required to be food secure. We revisit key features of the evolution of the right to food and examine developments in the instruments used to monitor right to food progress. We articulate how the materiality of food access has come to the forefront of food systems policy, within which food insecurity is embedded but its structural underpinnings are lost. In turn, civil society food-based responses to growing food insecurity prevalence prevail. The pre-eminence of objectified food access as a socio-political orientation to food insecurity has refabricated the social problem of food need. A conscious uncoupling of food access from how we study and respond to food insecurity is needed to re-design food insecurity policy that is grounded in poverty alleviation.

This paper draws together the connections between the concepts of critical human security and state capacity and explores their relevance as a novel analytical framework for exploring the global pandemic and its aftermath, with a particular focus on Europe and East Asia. The paper highlights the relevance of integrating a ‘state capacity for human security’ analytical lens and policy philosophy to inform an understanding of human (in)security as well as its relevance for concerns around social protection, sustainability, and inequality. We argue that the long-held and taken-for-granted assumption that larger, high-spending welfare states produce greater well-being security can no longer be an automatic supposition given the nature and sources of risk and insecurity in the contemporary world. We argue that that widening the parameters and focus of social policy analysis towards state capacity for critical human security might better highlight the multi-dimensional challenges that welfare states should seek to address.

We apply a synthesis review to revisit the concept, measurement, and operationalisation of social inclusion and exclusion in the context of comparative social policy, integrating the vast literature on the concepts, with the aim of elucidating a clearer understanding of the concepts for use by scholars and policymakers around the planet. In turn, we outline the conceptual development of the concepts, how they have been operationalised through social policy, and how they have been measured at the national and individual levels. Through our review, we identify limitations in extant conceptualisation and measurement approaches and suggest directions for refining conceptual and measurement frameworks to enhance their utility in social inclusion policy, emphasising the concepts’ multidimensional, multilevel, dynamic, and relational essence and highlighting their connection to related concepts such as social capital, social integration, and social citizenship.

The article examines the relationship between perceived distributive justice and trust in the welfare system within complex and self-contradictory policy setting. Based on thirty-three in-depth interviews with social assistance users in Poland and Czechia, we find that policy assemblages in those countries are experienced as confusing ‘institutional enigmas’. We identify four patterns linking perceptions of welfare system’s distributive justice and trust in this context: perceived rationality of the system combined with trust; perceived lack of system’s empathy combined with distrust; concerns about ‘undeserving claimants’ overusing the system linked to distrust in welfare system; and unexpected (non)receiving of benefits causing surprise and shaping (dis)trust. We argue that in contradictory institutional embedding, achieving users’ trust is challenging due to complex distributive justice principles they adhere to and numerous instances of those principles being violated. Trust can still be fostered when users are well informed or experience receiving meaningful support.

Citizen trust in public institutions has become a major concern for policy makers, but how institutional design affects institutional trust is not entirely clear. Existing research has mainly focused on the macro-level of welfare regimes or on the micro-level of citizens’ or frontline workers’ attributes. Our knowledge about interrelations between organisational aspects of welfare delivery and (dis)trust-formation at the meso-level of institutional design remains scarce. In the article, we investigate how users experience institutional fragmentation and how this impacts their trust in the welfare system. Based on forty-three interviews with social assistance users in Germany and Poland, we demonstrate that fragmentation is indeed relevant as an experiential context for (dis)trust-formation. However, we found that low institutional fragmentation is not, per se, trust-promoting and that higher fragmentation can be a driver for developing trust in individual caseworkers. Citizens’ perceptions of procedural justice and experienced administrative burdens are discussed as possible mediators.

Focusing on the metropolitan cities of Seoul, Korea and London, England, this paper seeks to provide a better understanding of the role of cities and local social policy in addressing responses to and impacts of the pandemic, as well as in governing a place-based approach to pandemic recovery, human security, and inclusive and sustainable growth. It draws on a critical human security perspective and the application of a multi-scalar governance and territorial matrix for local social policy and social infrastructure to highlight the complex and multisectoral social and public policy challenges facing both Seoul and London in the aftermath of the pandemic as well as the overlapping, intersectional, and multi-layered insecurities, how they have evolved and strategies to address them. The study draws on secondary data sources, workshops, and qualitative interviews with key city stakeholders in both cities conducted between February 2022 and July 2023.

Decisions about how to draw one’s pension are complex. Individuals with poor pension literacy may risk making suboptimal decisions, especially in the absence of financial advice. This study found actual and perceived pension literacy to have opposite effects on advice seeking. Where high actual pension literacy increased the propensity to seek advice, high perceived pension literacy decreased it. After participants completed a test of pension literacy, they became aware of their pension knowledge, and some changed their minds about seeking advice. The study highlights the importance of pension education and has implications for regulators and industry professionals wanting to increase the uptake of financial advice.

Discussions about economic equality have, in recent years, extended beyond considerations of income distribution to encompass the distribution of wealth and its intergenerational transfer. Driven by new and more frequent data, a better understanding is emerging of the concentration of wealth within society and the dynamics of its transfer between generations.

This article contributes to that discussion by assessing the economic and social rationales for the taxation of intergenerational wealth transfers. It outlines the social policy case for inheritances taxes grounded in vertical equity principles. Then it presents comparative data on household wealth across high-income European countries before focusing on one of these, Ireland, to consider whether current inheritance taxation policies counter or perpetuate these inequalities. Focusing on that system, the article explores a range of inheritance taxation reforms intended to address wealth inequality while providing recurring funds for public services and redistribution.

This paper focuses on the discursive connection between the notion of autonomy and the ageing-in-place policy approach, in a context of population aging and budgetary restraint. We argue that these central elements of the policy discourse on ageing represent a governance strategy that defines ageing in place as the prevailing standard for ageing well. Through an analysis of ageing policy documents released by the Québécois government between 2012 and 2023, this paper shows a disconnect between national policy frameworks and the reality of ageing in place. The issue of ageing in place is strongly bound up with the idea of autonomy, which is mainly expressed in terms of responsibility and freedom of choice, while its implementation overlooks the social structural determinants of individual autonomy and their impact on older people’s opportunities and processes of ageing in place.

Market failure, around credit provision, typically centres on adverse selection and moral hazard. We utilise a Diverse Economies Framework to distinguish between different types of lender (mainstream, alternative, and non-market) and neoclassical economic theory as an analytic framework to introduce three additional forms of market failure – diseconomies of small scale, externalities, and excess demand and oversupply. This suggests market failure in the UK sub-prime consumer credit market is more comprehensive than previously recognised, increases the argument for government intervention and points to four policy responses – public subsidies, patient capital, regulation, and taxation – to complement and supplement market responses. Without support, not-for-profit sub-prime lenders, such as Community Development Finance Institutions, will continue in their struggle to survive, further exposing an already-vulnerable group of borrowers to even greater debt and associated worse health and wellbeing.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the critical need for inclusive risk governance to address systemic risks that extend beyond health crisis to encompass broader societal, economic, and political dimensions. This article examines the evolution of risk governance in the United Kingdom and South Korea, exploring the intersectionality between state capacity, risk governance, and critical human security. It investigates how different institutional and policy frameworks and political choices influence the evolution of risk governance in two countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. It found that both countries adaptively restructured their institutions and broadened the involvement of diverse stakeholders to address the systemic risk. However, significant challenges persisted in fully integrating diverse perspectives due to the limited capacity of coordination across different actors and scales of government within risk governance. This research calls for a rearticulation of risk governance frameworks that integrate human security and inclusive participation, particularly as risks become increasingly complex and intersect across multiple dimensions of daily life.

The underlying logics of how welfare states redistribute financial resources to their citizens have been studied intensively. Researchers have focussed on redistribution based on the principles of work, residency or taxpaying. However, family as a redistributive principle in its own right has never systematically been studied neither for a wide range of welfare regulations, nor for welfare benefits and obligations. Hence we do not know in how far the redistributive logics based on other redistributive principles are also found for the redistributive principle of the family. In this paper we address this question, using EUROMOD to analyse the degree of legally stipulated, family-related redistribution for forty-two hypothetical family forms. In our findings, all EU member-states show family-related redistribution in line with the ‘Robin Hood’ logic, with special redistribution to families with several children, single-earner families, and single parents.

Grandparent childcare is important to support parents’ work/care reconciliation. Research has begun to identify relationships between grandparent childcare patterns and policy settings. However, this work is disparate and focused on childcare policy, with little engagement with the broader range of policies that shape grandparent childcare. A holistic approach to understanding the relationship between policies and grandparent childcare is important to capture the intergenerational dynamics of family decisions about childcare and the complementarities (or not) of policies in different domains. This scoping review identifies policies that directly aim to shape grandparents’ involvement in childcare and that indirectly shape configurations of care. Most literature focuses on childcare and parental leave policies’ impact on parental demand for grandparent childcare. But a wider, intergenerational, policy lens reveals that policies (such as retirement income policies) affect parents’ demand for, and grandparents’ supply of childcare, and that policies in different domains are not always aligned.

Some leading UK politicians have claimed that a culture of welfare dependency exists and that a sizeable number of unemployed benefit claimants lack an appropriate commitment to employment. Such claims were used to justify the 2012 Welfare Reform Act’s new measures to steer unemployed claimants towards applying for and retaining jobs they might not want. The statistical analysis presented here is the first to explore possible connections between people’s attitudes towards disliked/unattractive jobs, their parents’ employment status, and the total time they have spent in unemployment. Logistic regression analysis used Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE)/Next Steps data on people born in 1989/90 to predict whether they spent an unusually long time unemployed between age eighteen and twenty-five; an attitude favouring joblessness over a disliked/unattractive job was a nonsignificant predictor in eleven of twelve multivariate models, and a weak predictor (OR = 1.32) in the other.