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Service providers in Western welfare states have to engage with an increasingly differentiated citizenry. The arrival of new migrant communities triggers debates, negotiations and struggles over the needs of these communities and how service providers can engage with them. In this paper, we look at these processes of developing local social inclusion policies that target migrant communities through the perspective of Nancy Fraser's ‘politics of need interpretation’. More specifically, we analyse Roma engagement strategies in Manchester. We do so by reconstructing how the presence of Romanian Roma emerged as a public issue leading to various engagement strategies and how different actors competed over the interpretation of the needs of the Roma community and the best ways to respond to them. We use Fraser's notion of ‘parity of participation’ to draw attention to the position of the Roma community itself in the process of interpreting needs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Concern about the increasing use of payday lending led the UK's Financial Conduct Authority to introduce landmark reforms in 2014/15. While these reforms have generally been welcomed as a way of curbing 'extortionate' and 'predatory' lending, this paper presents a more nuanced picture based on a theoretically-informed analysis of the growth and nature of payday lending combined with original and rigorous qualitative interviews with customers. We argue that payday lending has grown as a result of three major and inter-related trends: growing income insecurity for people both in and out of work; cuts in state welfare provision; and increasing financialisation. Recent reforms of payday lending do nothing to tackle these root causes. Our research also makes a major contribution to debates about the 'everyday life' of financialisation by focusing on the 'lived experience' of borrowers. We show that, contrary to the rather simplistic picture presented by the media and many campaigners, various aspects of payday lending are actually welcomed by customers, given the situations they are in. Tighter regulation may therefore have negative consequences for some. More generally, we argue that the regul(aris)ation of payday lending reinforces the shift in the role of the state from provider/redistributor to regulator/enabler. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of reconciling ethnic diversity with the welfare state is a subject of long-standing theoretical debate. In particular, it remains unclear to what extent a shared national identity is necessary for endorsing claims to welfare at the individual and societal levels. Surveys show that migrants are seen as the least deserving category of welfare recipients. Yet migrants’ own views are rarely considered. Based on a qualitative study, this paper explores how Polish migrants residing in London conceptualised their deservingness to British welfare benefits and social housing. It finds a strong preference for conditionality of welfare predicated on contributions through work, payment of taxes and law abidance. Such conditionality applied to both in-group and out-group members thus transcending identity-based claims. These contributions were seen as both necessary and sufficient for laying claims to the British welfare system. Solely needs-based claims were seen as problematic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While the concept of migrant integration is a contested one, national, sub-national and local governments over the past forty to fifty years have professed support for integration in various forms. However, practical measures have been rare, with broad race-relations policies from the 1960s being the primary means of ‘inclusion’. Under New Labour, refugees were identified as a migrant population with particular challenges and they have been the only migrant group subject to specific integration programmes. Nevertheless, policy and rhetoric about asylum seekers and refugees more generally have tended to operate against integration and have made it increasingly difficult for refugees to rebuild their lives. This paper examines refugee integration from the perspectives of the refugees themselves, using both qualitative and quantitative methods. It also looks at the governance of integration in Scotland and highlights Scottish distinctiveness vis-à-vis the UK. The article suggests that the consequences of broader UK Government policy around asylum and refugee issues negates any positive support in the form of refugee integration programmes and actively inhibits integration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Through the lens of Institutional Entrepreneurship, this paper discusses how governments use the levers of power afforded through business and welfare systems to affect change in the organisational management of older workers. It does so using national stakeholder interviews in two contrasting economies: the United Kingdom and Japan. Both governments have taken a ‘light-touch’ approach to work and retirement. However, the highly institutionalised Japanese system affords the government greater leverage than that of the liberal UK system in changing employer practices at the workplace level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Intergroup conflict, whether manifest as the absence of community cohesion or as the presence of antisocial behaviour, is an issue of international concern. In the UK, confronting the reality or perceived threat of intergroup conflict is a core feature of community cohesion and antisocial behaviour policies. To varying degrees, the frameworks underpinning these policies see the absence or breakdown of community relations as a cause of social disharmony. A key challenge for policy is therefore improvement of the quality of community relations. In this paper, we consider how government has approached this challenge. We filter our analysis through the lens of civility, which proposes that the peaceful coexistence of diverse social groups rests on the existence and maintenance of intergroup empathy and mutual respect. This proposal is supported by international research evidence on the outcomes of meaningful interactions, where these are predicated on equal group status, leading to changes in group and intergroup perceptions and behaviours (the contact hypothesis). We consider the extent to which community cohesion and anti-social behaviour policies in the UK demonstrate a coherent conception of the problem of community relations, the quality of community relations to which these policies aspire and whether the strategies deployed to address community relations seek to support civility through meaningful interaction. We find that the policy debates start from different presumptions concerning the roots of social disharmony, and this is reflected in the nature of the interventions which the community cohesion and antisocial behaviour policy frameworks support. In particular, we find that the social interaction promoted through policies in the UK is not necessarily aimed at achieving social harmony through meaningful interaction based on recognition of equal group status. We also show that these policies are based on little in the way of evidence and prior knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]