This article examines how the discursive logic of quasi-markets in Swedish university real-estate management enables depoliticisation while consolidating state control. Sweden is a distinctive case where universities are public agencies, yet most campus property is owned by Akademiska Hus AB, a profit-seeking corporation wholly owned by the state. Using interpretive policy and frame analysis of legislation, government decisions, and public debate, we trace how market rents were introduced and justified. We show that depoliticising narratives portraying academics as fiscally unaccountable and university space as wasteful legitimise New Public Management reforms. Extending the ‘ghost in the machine’ metaphor, we demonstrate how political logics permeate welfare governance but are rendered less visible. The quasi-market sustains centralised control and fuels distrust between universities and government, risking a cycle of expanding quasi-market instruments and reduced institutional autonomy. Diminished autonomy may in turn have implications for academic freedom.

Increasing meritocracy has intensified negative perceptions of individuals in lower socioeconomic positions, especially welfare recipients, who are often viewed as incapable, lazy, or unmotivated. We conducted twenty-nine in-depth interviews with long-term social assistance recipients (SARs) in the Netherlands to explore their experiences with welfare stigmatisation. We used García-Lorenzo and colleagues’ (2022) typology to analyse SARs’ responses to stigmatisation. Surrounded by negative stereotypes, most participants internalised welfare stigma. Initially, many withdrew socially and engaged in harmful behaviours, but over time, their responses became less destructive. We identified four groups: individuals who are managing health, reorienting life, rebuilding life, or blaming the system. Overall, our findings suggest that social interventions should help SARs develop new, non-stigmatised identities to enhance their self-image and overall well-being. Given the widespread and negative consequences of welfare stigma, public, political, and media discourses should focus on addressing underlying societal issues rather than solely attributing problems to individuals.

This article examines the policy effects of Hong Kong’s Statutory Minimum Wage (SMW) on underemployment, working hours, and wages. Using a Difference-in-Differences methodology on General Household Survey data (2011–2019), we assess five SMW adjustment cycles. We define a ‘most disadvantaged’ treatment group and a ‘less disadvantaged’ group based on the concentration of minimum wage earners in their industry-occupation cell, relative to an unaffected control group. Our findings show no significant increase in underemployment or reduction in working hours for either group. Wage effects were also contained, with inconsistent direct gains for the most disadvantaged group and no evidence of significant wage spillovers for the ‘less disadvantaged’ group. These findings indicate that the SMW and its adjustments in Hong Kong did not lead to the feared wage-job trade-off constraints; instead, they highlight the need to explore policy options for appropriate SMW increases to reduce economic inequality.

This study examines the interplay between welfare stigma and need in the decision to claim social welfare benefits in Hong Kong, a liberal welfare city where self-reliance and family obligations are highly valued. Our interviews with seventeen low-income parents, suggest that first, their availability and ability to work influence their self-perceived ‘deservingness’ of aid. This, in turn, affects their anticipated self-stigma and their assessment of needs. Second, having children influences parents’ decisions to claim social welfare benefits through both anticipated stigma and childcare needs. Finally, low-income parents are trapped in an impossible triangle of being a ‘good’ parent, caught between fulfilling parental responsibilities, providing for their children financially, and modeling self-reliance to protect them from welfare stigma. Claiming benefits fulfills the first two but sacrifices self-reliance, while choosing not to claim fulfills the latter two but sacrifices parental responsibilities. Both choices carry emotional consequences that can undermine parent-child relationships.

Cash transfer programmes have achieved widespread adoption across developing countries, yet evidence on their effectiveness in the Middle East and North Africa remains comparatively limited. This systematic review examines four central questions: whether transfer effectiveness shows threshold effects whereby modest amounts alter behaviour while substantial poverty reduction requires larger transfers; how supply-side service capacity constraints mediate the effectiveness of demand-side incentives; how conflict and displacement influence programme sustainability; and how programme design features interact with patriarchal structures to shape women’s empowerment. Database searches spanning 2000–2024 identified 270 experimental or quasi-experimental studies with quantitative outcomes. Narrative synthesis examined heterogeneity across transfer amounts, programme design, and contexts. Results indicate non-linear threshold effects: modest transfers (5–10 per cent of household income) alter behaviour through framing mechanisms, whereas meaningful poverty reduction requires transfers of 15–20 per cent or more. Demand-side incentives produce counterproductive outcomes when supply-side capacity binds. Humanitarian assistance improves consumption temporarily but effects dissipate within —four to ten months absent sustainable livelihood pathways. Financial resources alone do not guarantee women’s empowerment; complementary interventions addressing social norms and legal frameworks appear necessary. These findings suggest the imperative of calibrating transfer magnitudes to programme objectives while recognising empowerment requires interventions transcending monetary provision.

This study examines public-private partnerships (PPPs) in home- and community-based services (HCBS) for older adults in Guangzhou, China, amid growing efforts to increase non-state actor participation and market mechanisms in welfare provision. Based on semi-structured interviews with non-state actors, this research examines both contractual and relational dimensions of PPPs and why achieving their full potential remains challenging. Findings reveal that state actors maintain a leading role in PPPs, with non-state actors primarily positioned as implementers of predefined welfare objectives. The power imbalance embedded in China’s sociopolitical context blurs the boundaries among the Party, state, and society, shaping coordination challenges in PPPs. These structural constraints hinder integrated service delivery and limit the extent to which PPPs can meaningfully leverage the expertise of various actors. This study enhances understanding of PPPs in China’s authoritarian, state-led market context and offers insights into the evolving landscape of welfare socialisation reforms.

The COVID-19 pandemic sent shockwaves throughout the world. Even though the Czech Republic has less stable state structures and a less consolidated party system than its West European counterparts, during the first wave, the country actually performed better than most West European countries in terms of infection rates, death rates, and economic growth. During the second wave, however, the country’s position radically dropped. Despite its increasing health problems, its social policies still performed rather well and managed to keep unemployment at comparatively low levels. How can we explain these differences between erratic performance on the health side and comparatively solid performance on the social policy side? Our study explains why traditional social policies basically remained path dependent, while epidemiological policies dealing directly with fighting the spread of COVID-19 did not. Our explanation combines sociological and rational choice institutionalism and links them with the concepts of repeated games and bounded rationality.

This study provides quantitative evidence on UK public attitudes towards stateless people, comparing them with attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers. A cross-sectional UK survey (n = 385) was conducted. Network analysis modelled associations between social policy attitudes and prejudice towards stateless people, refugees, and asylum seekers, alongside other variables, including political orientation and perceived threat. Social policy attitudes were more restrictive towards stateless people than refugees, but less restrictive than towards asylum seekers. Prejudice towards stateless people was not significantly different to that towards refugees or asylum seekers. Prejudice and social policy attitudes were highly interrelated between all three groups, with political orientation and perceived threat the strongest predictors. Findings demonstrate similarities in UK public attitudes towards stateless people, refugees, and asylum seekers. Awareness-raising interventions and interventions addressing political and threat-based narratives may be most effective in reducing discrimination and fostering inclusion of stateless people.

Taiwan is regarded as the vanguard of LGBT+ rights in Asia. We conducted a scoping review to map research on LGBT+ inclusion in Taiwan, identify knowledge gaps and propose future directions for research and policy. Results indicate a predominant focus on health, with the over-representation of gay men and exclusion of lesbian and bisexual women and transgender/gender diverse people. Despite being the first Asian jurisdiction to legalise same-sex marriage, insufficient policy protections were evidenced concerning family formation, adoption, and parenting, with family systems that largely exclude LGBT+ people. Findings reveal pervasive discrimination and exclusion in education, an economic system that restricts LGBT+ people’s employment opportunities and advancement, and a healthcare system that lacks competencies in serving LGBT+ people. Future research on LGBT+ inclusion in Taiwan should address understudied populations, provide disaggregated data on LGBT+ individuals, and advance evidence to support policy protections in education, economic, family, health, and political domains.

Using ethnographic material of new parents’ encounters with welfare workers during the process of claiming and receipt of universal family entitlements in Denmark and Romania, this article proposes the concept of bureaucratic translation. Drawing on Latourian conceptual foundations, we show that the communication of bureaucratic information is not only symbolically loaded, but invariably in need of ‘translation’. We highlight five interrelated processes of meaning-making parents have to engage in. Despite the universalism of entitlements, parents experience information offered by welfare workers as specialised knowledge that they should not legitimately be expected to have good command of. Their contestation stems from the tension between the helping ethos of universalist programmes and the inadequacies and insufficiencies of bureaucratic information offered. Bureaucratic translation illuminates the complexities of ‘learning costs’ underpinning administrative burden from citizens’ perspective, flagging difficulties even for the bureaucratically least challenging social programmes.

This article reports on a scoping review of legislation, policy, and guidance for England on care-planning co-production within dementia care. Systematic searching of online repositories uncovered nineteen documents, and synthesis revealed seven key categories representing practice requirements and recommendations: ‘person-centred care plan’, ‘accessibility and support’, ‘involvement of person with dementia’, ‘involvement of partners-in-care’, ‘decision-making’, ‘treatment goals and outcomes’, and ‘care plan review’. Findings validate the premise that care-planning should always be co-produced with people affected by dementia as experts-by-experience, and support practice principles previously identified by this group within the empirical literature. Health and social care professionals can use this learning to improve care-planning practice. However, a disconnect persists between national expectations for service providers to co-produce care-planning and users’ reported experiences, with many expressing dissatisfaction at being treated as passive recipients. Consequently care-planning co-production stills needs a stronger evidence base and more practical support to achieve statutory guidance ambitions.

The emergence of ‘compassionate cities’ and ‘compassionate communities’ (CCC) as social movements has become a pronounced development in public health approaches to the end-of-life. Drawing on the World Health Organisations’ Ottawa Charter, it contends that end-of-life care has become individualised and medicalised and promotes the ‘rediscovery’ of community approaches. Drawing on a range of sociological theory insights, it deploys a ‘critical interpretative’ analytic approach to literature identified in a narrative review. The paper aims to question the affirmative consensus that exists around CCC by building on the emergence of critical themes have recently emerged in various meta-reviews. This analysis identifies tensions and inconsistencies between the ideals of The Ottawa Charter, CCC practice and a relatively superficial and uncritical deployment of theory, particularly in relation to its status as a conservative or radical movement. The paper concludes by suggesting constructive ways forward.

This paper investigates the effects of the German national minimum wage introduction and its subsequent up-rating on job finding rates of unemployed welfare recipients. While the literature is inconclusive on the sign of overall employment effects of the minimum wage, the range of estimates suggests that if effects are negative, they are likely to be rather small. However, such overall effects may mask negative effects on employment prospects of unemployed welfare recipients, who tend to be only loosely attached to the labour market. For the analysis, this paper uses a sample of unemployed welfare recipients based on high-quality administrative data and employs a difference-in-differences strategy by exploiting regional variation in the bite of the minimum wage in order to estimate the effects of the minimum wage. While theoretically ambiguous, estimates show that minimum wages had a beneficial and rather homogeneous impact on job finding rates of unemployed welfare recipients. Sensitivity analyses highlight the robustness of these findings.

This study investigates how Ukrainian asylum seekers in Switzerland experience administrative burdens during their early integration under temporary protection status S. Drawing on the concepts of bureaucratic self-efficacy and social capital, it examines how individual and social resources shape perceived administrative burden. Data were collected through a survey distributed via a Zurich-based NGO’s Telegram channel, which also included open-ended responses providing additional context to participants’ experiences. Findings show that higher bureaucratic self-efficacy significantly reduces perceived burden, while support from third-sector organizations – representing linking social capital – also plays a critical role. In contrast, bonding capital (e.g., family and friends) and general social media use have limited impact. The study contributes to both public administration and migration research by refining the conceptual understanding of social capital, highlighting the value of intermediaries in public service delivery, and emphasizing the importance of designing accessible systems supported by institutional and civil society actors.

Studies focusing on how the migrant population understands and utilises family policies are scarce in Southern European countries. We focus on the use of paternity leave by American and European migrant fathers in Spain. This work is based on an online survey of parents (QUIDAN, 2021), which is nationally representative with a sample of 3100 respondents. We have conducted descriptive statistics and explanatory multivariate models. The main result shows that American-born (but not European) fathers take paid paternity leave less often than Spanish fathers. This outcome raises new questions about migrant parental roles and the shortcomings of public policies.

This study examines the ramifications engendered by the personalisation welfare initiative, denominated as ‘Individualised Budgeting’, upon the welfare service framework in Israel. Adopting a supply-side perspective, the study employed qualitative, in-depth interviews with service providers to scrutinise potential successes and failures in service systems. The study’s methodology employed a multi-criteria policy analysis based upon the analytical theoretical framework of Gilbert and Terrell’s welfare service delivery system analysis. Results revealed that while service integration and systematic function distribution align well with the programme, accessibility and accountability only partially fit, suggesting a need for improved regulatory frameworks. New criteria, including economic viability for private suppliers and investment in innovative services, also emerged. Addressing these market inadequacies requires State investment in technological innovations to ensure an effective service delivery system.

Informal care for older people living with chronic life-limiting illnesses is associated with difficulties. The informal care system built around generational values and cultural norms is steadily weakening in rural Ghana because of economic challenges, migration, urbanisation, and changing family structure. In responding to this knowledge gap, we aimed to ascertain how the immediate family, extended family and community support impact on mechanisms underlying provision of informal care for older people living with chronic life-limiting illnesses. Ethnographic interviews were conducted amongst fifteen older people; fifteen informal caregivers; ten health care professionals, after participatory observations during six months of fieldwork utilised to gather the needed data. This study is guided by altruism, empathy, responsibility, self-interest, and social values theories, which provide a very significant structure to understand care relations in rural Ghana. While we find that informal care is sustained by cultural values, it is experiencing financial and human resource challenges.

This article examines the political dynamics behind Portugal’s 2019 Informal Caregiver Statute (ICS), focusing on how social movements influenced the policy process through political mediation. The statute was prompted by caregiver mobilisation and advanced in parliament by partisan allies, despite initial government resistance. The movement’s influence relied on a favourable political opportunity structure, supportive media and public opinion, and the strategic securing of political allies. However, parties integrated the movement’s demands with their own, often conflicting, agendas. In the end, key demands, such as caregiver allowances, pension credits for care work, and expanded public services, were only partially fulfilled. The ICS represents a broad yet limited compromise that reinforces the family’s role as the main care provider. This shift from ‘familism by default’ to ‘supported familism’ may ultimately hinder a transition to ‘optional familism’, which would frame care as a choice and necessitate a significant expansion of formal public services.

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.