1: What is Social Policy?

Question 1

What is the Traditional Conception of Social Policy?

T.H Marshall (1950)

Answer 1

Social policy is taken to refer to the policy of governments with regard to action having a direct relationship to the welfare of citizens, by providing them with services or income. The central core consists therefore of social insurance, public assistance the health and welfare services, housing policy, education and the treatment of crime

Question 2

What is the Sociological view on Social Policy?

Zygmunt Bauman

Answer 2

The social state has been the ultimate modern embodiment of the idea of community: that is, the institutional incarnation of an ‘imagined totality’ woven of reciprocal dependence, commitment and solidarity. Social rights tie that imagined totality to the daily realities of its members and the solid ground of life experience

Question 3

What is Britain’s perspective on Social Policy?

Richard Titmuss

Answer 3

Considered as a whole, all collective interventions to meet certain needs of the individual and/or to serve the wider interests of society

Question 4

What are some more optimal questions to ask other than “What is Social Policy”?

Answer 4

•	What does social policy do?
•	How does it do what it does?
•	Why does it do what it does?
•	Where does it do what it does?
•	To whom does it do what it does?
These policies will have a major difference on different groups of people

Question 5

What is Social Policy about?

Answer 5

Goods & services that promote ‘welfare’

Measures to enhance social rights in the name of community and social solidarity

The meeting of individual need…but in a way that enhances society generally

A mechanism for managing the distribution of resources, opportunities, etc, among social groups

Question 6

What is Social Policy?

Answer 6

Traditional conceptions of social policy (Collective action and human need)
Critical conceptions of social policy (Class, gender and ethnicity)
Changing the world

Question 7

What are the Critical Conceptions about Social Policy?

Answer 7

What then are the defining features of social policy or the welfare activities of the modern state? ….the use of state power to modify the reproduction of labour power and to maintain the non-working population in capitalist societies
Ian Gough (1979) 

	The welfare state then, may be seen as the public control of the private sphere
Gillian Pascall (1986)