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Social Policy, 3rd Edition

ISBN: 978-1-509-52406-8

January 2019

Polity

176 pages

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Description

How do human societies provide for the wellbeing of their members? How far can we organize the ways in which we care for and about each other? And who should take responsibility for providing the support we need? These are some of the fundamental questions addressed by social policy today.

In this introduction, Hartley Dean explains the extraordinary scope and importance of social policy. He explores its foundations and contemporary significance; the principal issues it addresses and their diverse economic, political and sociological dimensions, and concludes by looking anew at fundamental challenges facing social policy in a dramatically changing world.

Introducing social policy as a broadly conceived study of human wellbeing, this revised and extensively updated third edition examines ways in which governments and peoples throughout the world attend to, promote, neglect or even undermine the things that make life worth living. These include essential services like healthcare and education; the means of livelihood – jobs and money – and sometimes intangible things such as physical and emotional security. Trying to understand these elements, which together constitute human wellbeing, is the stuff of social policy.

About the Author

Hartley Dean is Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

New to Edition
This third edition has been thoroughly revised and updated, including: (a) The author’s own thinking linking human needs and social rights, which has lately crystallised around a 'post-Marshallian concept of social rights'; a concept which - if practically and accessibly explained - would help to centre and further clarify the approach to Social Policy that previous editions have already taken. (b) New (or resurgent) debates concerning, for example, welfare austerity, precarité and contested notions of 'social investment'. (c) Added focus on the global context and its relevance for Social Policy, especially the ever intensifying significance of migration trends, but also the shifting balance between supra-national and devolved forms of governance. (d) The concluding chapter (on 'The Future of Social Policy') presents a starker view of future options, bringing a slightly different (and perhaps less abstract) emphasis.