Governments are encouraging later-life working and state pension ages are being raised. There is also a growing debate on intergenerational equity and on ageism/age discrimination. John Macnicol, one of Europe's leading academic analysts of old age and ageing, examines the effect of neoliberalism on the recent ageing and social policy agenda in the UK and the USA. He argues that the demographic and economic impulses behind recent policy changes are in fact less important than the effect of...

Age discrimination is a highly topical issue in all industrialised societies, against a background of concerns about shortening working lives and ageing populations in the future. Based upon detailed research, and adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this unique study traces the history of the age discrimination debate in Britain and the USA since the 1930s. It critically analyses the concepts of ageism in social relations and age discrimination in employment. Case-studies on generation...

Social Policy: Themes and approaches is a fully revised, updated and extended edition of a bestselling social policy textbook, extensively reworked and adapted to meet the needs of its international readership. The book lays out the architecture of social policy as a field of study, providing a sense of the scope, range and purpose of the subject while developing critical awareness of problems, issues and common fallacies.

The Third Edition of this widely adopted textbook has been thoroughly revised and offers an authoritative and up-to-date coverage of the key theories, concepts and issues in social policy. The lively and readable text has been designed to provide students with the essential tools to gain a clear understanding of the theoretical debates surrounding the discipline.The book is organized into three parts:• Part One offers a detailed but accessible critique of m...

This book provides an account of the international emergence of corporate manslaughter offences to criminalise deaths in the workplace during the last twenty years, identifying the limitations of health and safety regulation that have prompted this development.

This volume explores new directions of governance and public policy arising both from interpretive political science and those who engage with interpretive ideas. It conceives governance as the various policies and outcomes emerging from the increasing salience of neoclassical and institutional economics or, neoliberalism and new institutionalisms. In doing so, it suggests that that the British state consists of a vast array of meaningful actions that may coalesce into contingent, shifting...

Moving beyond the highly visual forms of poverty characteristic of the city, Rural Poverty explores the nature of poverty in rural spaces in Britain and America. Setting out key features, it highlights the important processes that hide key components of rural poverty. The book seeks to challenge dominant assumptions about the spatialities of poverty and the nature of rural spaces in Britain and America.Drawing on a broad range of new research material, the book challenges ...

The relationship between gender and welfare states is of key importance in understanding welfare states and gender equality and inequality. Western welfare states of the post-war era were built on assumptions about gender difference: they treated men as breadwinners and women as carers. Now governments are committed in principle to gender equality. But how far have they come from male breadwinner assumptions to gender equality assumptions? How much do gender differences continue in UK soci...

The politics of old age in the twenty first century is contentious, encompassing ideological debates about the rights and welfare entitlements of individuals in later life. An important aspect is the manner in which older people and their representative groups are given the opportunity to articulate their interests in the policy-making process. Drawing upon key literature in political science, social gerontology and cultural sociology, The politics of old age explores the relationship betw...

The examination of social questions is a relatively new development in goegraphy, but social geography has now blossomed into a fully fledged sub-discipline which has in fact influenced significantly all other areas of geography. This book, first published in 1987, presents an overview of recent developments in all the major branches of social geography. As such it provides a valuable introduction to te subject, a review of the latest state of the art and a pointer to future research direc...

Welfare states vary across nations and change over time. And the balance between markets and government; free enterprise and social protection is perennially in question. But all developed societies have welfare states of one kind or another - they are a fundamental dimension of modern government. And even after decades of free-market criticism and reform, their core institutions have proven resilient and popular. This Very Short Introduction describes the modern welfare state, ex...

Uneven distribution of life is a dominant feature of the city. Major social, economic and spatial divisions are apparent in terms of income and wealth, health, crime, housing, and employment. This text offers an introduction to current processes of urban restructuring, geographies of division and contemporary conditions within the city. The geography of Britain's cities is the outcome of interaction between a host of public and private economic, social and political forces operating at a v...