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When the first edition of Irish Social Policy was published in 2009, Ireland's enduring economic crisis was only beginning to emerge. In the time since, nearly all areas of Irish social policy have been significantly affected, as policy makers have sought to combat the numerous, multifaceted social challenges posed by Ireland's economic downfall. Retaining the first edition's original structure and the same highly accessible style, this second edition of Irish Social Policy is fully updated and revised to reflect these dramatic shifts. Needs and risks associated with recession and economic precarity have escalated, while social services have simultaneously been forced to cope with significant cutbacks and restructuring. Changes in the landscape of policy making processes and policy drivers are also occurring, as are shifts in the politics and ideas underpinning Ireland's social policy. Particularly timely in light of these ongoing changes, this imperative book offers a comprehensive and in-depth introduction to social policy in the evolving Ireland of today.
This Handbook will comprise of 29 original pieces from key contributors to the field of European social policy. It is intended to capture the ‘state of the art’ in European social policy and to generate and contribute to debates on the the future of European social policy in the 21st Century. It will be a comprehensive and authoritative resource for research and teaching covering themes and policy areas including social exclusion, pensions, education, children and family, as well as mobility and migration, multiculturalism, and climate change.
Leading Irish academics and policy practitioners present a comprehensive study of policy analysis in Ireland. Contributors investigate the roles of the EU, the public, science, the media and gender expertise in policy analysis. This text examines policy analysis at different levels of government and identifies future challenges for policy analysis.
This book provides a critical and theoretically-informed assessment of the nature and types of structural change occurring in the Irish welfare state in the context of the 2008 economic crisis. Its overarching framework for conceptualising and analysing welfare state change and its political, economic and social implications is based around four crucial questions, namely what welfare is for, who delivers welfare, who pays for welfare, and who benefits. Over the course of ten chapters, the authors examine the answers as they relate to social protection, labour market activation, pensions, finance, water, early child education and care, health, housing and corporate welfare. They also innovati...
With international human rights under challenge, this book represents a comprehensive critique that adds a social policy perspective to recent political and legalistic analysis. Expert contributors draw on local and global examples to review constructs of universal rights and their impact on social policy and human welfare. With thorough analysis of their strengths, weaknesses and enforcement, it sets out their role in domestic and geopolitical affairs. Including a forward by Albie Sachs, this book presents an honest appraisal of both the concepts of international human rights and their realities. It will engage those with an interest in social policy, ethics, politics, international relations, civil society organisations and human rights-based approaches to campaigning and policy development.
Inspired by ideas from economic theology, this provocative book uncovers deep-rooted religious concepts and shows how they continue to influence contemporary views of work and unemployment.
Who deserves to get what and what should they have to do in order to get it? These are questions that societies have grappled with since antiquity, and they continue to echo today. This book explores questions of social deservingness by tracking how it has been treated across the centuries, from ancient Greece to the present day, taking in many notable thinkers along the way. In doing so, it focuses, in particular, on what different thinkers have had to say on and about poor relief and social welfare. Modern welfare systems are also examined to show how particular logics of poverty, while they may be ancient in origin, continue to inform our notions of who deserves to get what today. This book will be of interest to those studying or working in the areas of social welfare, social policy and sociology.
This edited collection is the first to apply the theoretical lens of post-Foucauldian governmentality to an analysis of health problems, practices, and policy in Ireland. Drawing on empirical examples related to childhood, obesity, mental health, smoking, ageing and others, the collection explores how specific health issues have been constructed as problematic and in need of intervention in the Irish State, and considers the strategies, discourses and technologies involved in the art of governing health in advanced liberal democracies. Bringing together academics from social policy, sociology, political science and public health, the text seeks to develop a dialogue about both the nature of health and health policy in the Ireland, but also how governmentality, as a theoretical approach, can contribute to the development of critical health policy analysis.
The ‘Bedroom Tax’ has been one of the most contentious aspects of the UK government’s austerity politics. In this book, Kelly Bogue provides an authoritative assessment of its social impacts. The Divisive State of Social Policy traces the links between housing resources and societal tensions by looking closely at one housing estate. The book explores issues related to Housing Benefit reform, including housing precarity, poverty and damage to social networks. This is a vivid picture of the sharp end of austerity politics and welfare reform, and it gets to the heart of the meanings of home and community in the UK today.
Why have neo-liberal economic ideas been so resilient since the 1980s, despite major intellectual challenges, crippling financial and political crises, and failure to deliver on their promises? Why do they repeatedly return, not only to survive but to thrive? This groundbreaking book proposes five lines of analysis to explain the dynamics of both continuity and change in neo-liberal ideas: the flexibility of neo-liberalism's core principles; the gaps between neo-liberal rhetoric and reality; the strength of neo-liberal discourse in debates; the power of interests in the strategic use of ideas; and the force of institutions in the embedding of neo-liberal ideas. The book's highly distinguished group of authors shows how these possible explanations apply across the most important domains - fiscal policy, the role of the state, welfare and labour markets, regulation of competition and financial markets, management of the Euro, and corporate governance - in the European Union and across European countries.