Introduction to the Handbook on Society and Social Policy

Putting together a volume on a subject area as vast as ‘society and social policy’ would be no easy matter at the best of times if only because difficult choices have to be made about the areas and issues to include and exclude. However, it is something of an understatement to say that the ‘times’ societies and people across the globe are currently living through are not the ‘best’ and that the extraordinary complexity both of ‘society’ and, by extension, ‘social policy’ in the contemporary world adds to the trickiness of the task. Complexity, of course, has always been with us and it is therefore perfectly legitimate to maintain that, for all the difficulties with which ‘we’ – for which read citizens of the globe in general – are faced, there has never been a period in which social divisions of, for example, class, ethnicity, gender, age and belief, alongside the intricacies of the various political, social and economic structures that (re)produce them have not been beset by a range of deeply contested debates. These areas of contestation focus on a range of matters including the appropriate forms and structures of governmental systems and institutions designed to deliver social policies in different countries and regions, the relative influence of a number of mediating factors such as prevailing distributions of power and resources, and the wider economic and political contexts within which patterns of distribution and debates about these patterns are constructed and defined. Nevertheless, certain factors conspire to make the current challenges that face national governments and their welfare systems across the globe unique. For example: the effects of globalization and, paradoxically, emergent nationalism; the impact of austerity in some parts of the world and specifically the impact of spending reductions on marginal and minority populations; the growing tensions between rich and poor as inequalities escalate; the increasingly fractured nature of needs claims as they become entwined with demands for the greater recognition of diversity and particularly emerging culturally framed identities; growing demands for global social justice, particularly in view of the growing impacts of human movement, including trafficking; the inegalitarian effects of global heating as governments attempt to wrestle (and in some cases not wrestle) with this potentially devastating issue; and now the global health and economic crises sparked by the dramatic spread of Covid-19.1 This volume cannot adequately address these matters in their entirety. However, by exploring key aspects of society and social policy ‘in the round’ the book aims to provide an extensive overview of the main issues with which contemporary social policy is faced. To this