We are delighted to have been appointed to take responsibility for editing this journal for the next five years. We have taken over a long-established journal that has been well managed by Miriam David and Dulcie Groves since 1994. Our first months as editors are made easier by the fact that we have inherited a substantial backlog of accepted articles. However, we consider it very important that the time lag between acceptance of an article and publication should not be too long, particularly in a journal which contains assessments of and reactions to contemporary policies. Our publishers, Cambridge University Press, share our concern and have agreed that the size of the journal can be increased. However, more than that is required. This editorial has been written to inform readers of the other steps we are taking.

Contemporary theoretical debates point to a transformation of societies and social organisations away from universal forms of mass production and consumption, organised through mass institutions, towards smaller, diversified, entrepreneurial units linked together by new forms of market and network co-ordination. This greater diversity is also held to be a feature of service users who require individually fashioned solutions to non-standard problems and tailored products for their different tastes.

Applications of these accounts of social and economic transformation to the public sector propose similar patterns to those evident in private industry and in regional communities. The large, standardised bureaucracy is seen to give way to de-coupled, multiple agency models of service delivery within a new type of welfare state.

The study uses interviews and surveys (n = 365) with service delivery staff in the Australian employment assistance sector where transformations of this type have recently been sponsored by government. These data indicate that many of the key propositions of the post-Fordist account are valid. Smaller, non-unionised units dominate the new order and services are devolved to the local level. However a number of the expected patterns of flexible specialisation, diversity and networking are not found, suggesting marked differences and possible tensions between public and private sector forms of organisational development in the new order.

In the last two decades there have been a number of social, medical and legal initiatives in the UK and elsewhere to provide assistance to women who suffer violence from their partner. The most recent innovations focus on responding to the men who perpetrate this violence. In this article we present the initial results of the first British study of programmes for violent men. The three-year study used a longitudinal method to compare the effects of two court mandated programmes with other, more orthodox, forms of criminal justice intervention (fines, admonishment, traditional probation, prison). Here we describe the men's programmes, locate the current study in the context of existing evaluations of similar programmes operating in North America, outline the methods employed, present the results of the post-hoc matching used to assess the probable effects of selection bias and using subsequent prosecutions and the accounts of women, compare the impact of different criminal justice interventions. The results indicate that twelve months after the criminal justice intervention a significant proportion of the Programme men had not subsequently been violent to their partner. This was in contrast to men sanctioned in other ways (the Other CJ group) who were much less likely to have changed their violent behaviour.

Individual hospitals within the NHS are having to cope with a number of competing priorities and policies in the context of difficult financial circumstances. One such policy is Equal Opportunities (EO). It is within the devolved system of individual trusts that the implementation of (EO) policy takes place. This ‘localisation’ of EO issues also applies to the tackling of racial inequalities in the field of job recruitment, training and promotion. The present study is an examination of EO policies and their implementation at a single National Health Service (NHS) hospital in relation to the recruitment, career development, training and promotion of female ethnic minority employees. Interviews were conducted with fifty ethnic minority females drawn from administrative, domestic and nursing grades; and a further twenty-two with hospital managers with responsibility for recruitment, training and promotion. A number of important deficiencies in the hospital's EO policies were identified by the female ethnic minority interviewees, particularly in respect of the recruitment process, experiences of career development and perceptions of discrimination and harassment. The article details the managers' attitudes towards and knowledge of EO policies in general and their responses to these deficiencies in particular.

Any predictions that solicitors acting for divorcing parents might become redundant, as increasing use is made of mediation services, are unsubstantiated by the research on which this article is based. This study shows how solicitors, far from retreating from issues of arrangements over the future of children of divorcing parents, are busy adapting themselves to the new working environment. For some this process involves themselves qualifying as mediators. For these and others, it entails acquiring and presenting to their clients an understanding of ‘child psychology’ which enables them to advise their clients on how to sort out their differences in ways that will safeguard their children's welfare. By constructing children's welfare within a legal discourse of justice and protection of their clients' lawful interests, solicitors are able to convince themselves that justice, in cases involving children's welfare, is achieved by persuading their clients to ‘be sensible’ and sort out their differences, and that those parents who are openly hostile and/or pursue their own (selfish) interests have lost sight of justice and need to be brought back into line. The article demonstrates how solicitors claim to achieve these ends and raises questions about their practical and theoretical implications.

The expansion of ‘social duties’ has been a prominent feature in the development of social policy and the welfare state. Drawing on unique time-series data in the database of SCIP (Social Citizenship Indicators Project), this article describes and analyses the development of ‘social duties’, primarily in the form of taxes and social insurance contributions, in eighteen countries from 1930 to 1990. In focus are the institutional and longitudinal variation in the increase and change in these duties and how they have been distributed among employers, the insured and state authorities.

This article responds to the view that it is now time to move on from debates about post-Fordism and the new sociology of welfare. It argues that it is important to retain the traditional agenda of social welfare (redistributive state policies designed to promote social integration and challenge the outcomes of the market) at a time when an influential position in sociology is playing down the significance of structural factors as an obstacle to progress in welfare.

This paper examines the costs of unsustainable home ownership in Britain as manifested through mortgage arrears and possessions. It suggests that there are a widely drawn set of costs that have an impact on a range of different actors and institutions, and offers a simple conceptual framework for developing an analysis of such costs. Further, the paper suggests that an examination of these costs has the potential to contribute to some key debates within social policy, not least to a series of issues about the development and maintenance of social and economic inequality. This claim is illustrated via an analysis of the financial costs of arrears and possession. The paper concludes that the financial losses incurred cannot be regarded as marginal either in terms of the number of people affected, the sums of money involved or the continuing social disadvantages that follow possession. The article concludes with a discussion of whether these issues can be regarded as ‘yesterday's’ problem or whether they should be viewed as a continuing feature of the contemporary social and economic landscape.

Contents

1 Social security and income maintenance

2 Health care

3 Education

4 Housing and environment

5 Personal social services

6 Law and the treatment of the offender

7 Unemployment and the labour market

8 Race relations

9 The voluntary sector

10 Local government

11 Gender

12 Demography