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The purpose of this paper is to explore the recently increased use of the word “investment” in the public management discourse. In particular, it examines the implications of this for accounting and public governance. It asks, is that discourse simply concerned to account for “investment” in the efficient provision of public goods and services? Or does it also seek to hold governments, and government agencies, to account for the results they achieve and, more broadly, for their investment in, and stewardship of, the capacity to do so in the future?

The paper draws on a range of literature as well as speeches made by both New Zealand politicians and officials to track the emergence and evolution of a discourse in respect of “an investment approach”. As such, the analysis represents a diachronic approach for, as Jäger and Meyer (2009) note: “To identify the knowledge of a society on a topic, the analyst has to reconstruct the genesis of this topic” (p. 46).

The initial adoption of “an investment approach” occurred in the context of attempts to gain a clearer focus on, and accountability for, the results of government interventions. Subsequently, a broader, and arguably more classic, conception of public investment has involved a developing focus on changes to the nation’s economic, social and environmental capitals. Both approaches provide significant practical challenges for accounting and the continued relevance of the accounting profession.

The paper points to an urgent need to engage the accounting profession in debates that extend beyond the adoption of accrual accounting for the control of inputs and the provision of outputs. It is suggested that a future research agenda should focus on how models of well-being, and the public capitals that enable well-being, might be better accounted for and monitored.

This paper provides an insight into the emergence, spread and ultimate fading of the use of the word “investment” in the public policy discourse in New Zealand. However, it also places that process in a wider development that is focusing on citizens’ well-being. In so doing, it also highlights the challenges for the accounting profession created by the investment turn – whether relating to investment in operational activities or in public capitals.

The “welfare reform” narrative of successive Conservative-led UK Government emphasises public spending reductions, individual responsibility and strengthening of benefit conditionality. The purpose of this paper is to cast light on how this narrative is challenged and disrupted by the Scottish Government through their articulation of a social democratic welfare state imaginary.

The study draws together a decentred governance perspective that emphasises ideational tradition for understanding (re)construction of governance (Bevir, 2013, p. 27) with critical discourse analysis to examine how welfare interpretations/representations are carried into the policy and public arena. The Scottish Government documents are deconstructed to interrogate the ideas and form of their emergent discourse and its relation to the independence referendum and welfare governance reform.

Responding to changing socio-economic contexts and welfare governance, the Scottish Government has developed a discourse of modernisation rooted in British and Scandinavian social democratic traditions. Fusing (civic) nationalism with social wage and social investment concepts, they conjure up imaginaries of a prosperous, solidaristic, egalitarian welfare state as a feasible future reality, recuperating “welfare” as a collective endeavour and positioning a maldistribution of power/resources between groups and constituent countries of the UK as the “problem”.

The paper is of value to those interested in how changes to centralised-hierarchical welfare governance can open new spaces for actors at different levels of government to articulate counter-hegemonic discourses and practices. Its originality lies in the analysis of how the Scottish Government has reworked social democratic traditions to weave together a welfare imaginary that directly contests the problem-solution narrative of successive Conservative-led UK Governments.

Childhood often represents a central arena through which we construct our fantasies about the future and a battleground through which we struggle to express competing ideological agendas. (Timimi, 2006, p. 35)One critical part of the future is our children. The way we bring them up is an indication of how we feel about the future; and of course our attitudes to the young and ideas on how they should be educated reveal much about the present …. Without a strong sense of how we want the future to be, the government tends to revert to a default position, thinking mainly about how children will fit into the economy. (Davison, 2005, p. 7)

The purpose of this paper is to examine the discursive rationalities shaping Irish child policy, with a particular focus on the rationality of “better with less” and its association with an intensified focus on the early years. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis there was a shift towards universal provision of early years services as part of the better with less agenda – the paper critically examines the assumptions which shaped this policy reform.

The paper is based on analysis of the texts of the two national child policy plans produced to date in Ireland – The Children, Their Lives 2000–2010 and Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures 2014–2020.

Ireland adopted its first national children’s strategy The Children, Their Lives in 2000, associated with an initial shift to a more technocratic, investment-oriented approach to policy making. The emphasis on economic returns is more strongly evident in the successor adopted in 2014. Informed by the “better with less” agenda Better Outcomes, Brighter Futures has a strong focus on early years provision as offering the most significant potential for returns, particularly in relation to “disadvantaged” children. This position not only objectifies children but is associated with a set of assumptions about the nature of “disadvantage” and those affected by it which ignores the wider context of unequal social, political and economic relations.

National children’s strategies have not been explicitly looked at previously as a form of governmentalization of government and there has been limited analysis to date in Ireland or elsewhere of the better with less agenda in the context of child policy, gaps which this paper seeks to address.

With the UK Conservative-Liberal Democrat Government reaching its mid-term point, this paper examines its austerity measures and public expenditure reductions in family support and children's services, and its revisions of family support, family intervention, child poverty, child well-being and children's services reform policies in contrast to the former Labour governments.

The paper is informed by policy analysis and research reviews.

The analysis focuses on three dimensions of policy change: first, reductions in income support for children and families and central government funding for children's services; second, refocusing child poverty, child well-being and family policies around the Conservative's “Broken Britain” campaign and the Liberal Democrats targeted social mobility initiatives; and finally, broader children's services reforms. The paper recognises some progressive developments but charts the social welfare implications of reduced welfare entitlements for families and the pressures on support services for families from children's services reforms.

The paper combines reflections on the aims, achievements and limitations of Labour reforms to family support and children's services with a broader analysis of welfare state retrenchment and restructuring under the Coalition. It places current changes in family support and children's services within the context of the ideological influences on the Coalition's social policies and the primacy of its austerity programme and welfare state reform agendas.

Recent intensification of the “politicisation of childhood” has been observed by analysts in numerous social science disciplines, and in a variety of public policy domains. Sociologists of childhood, for example, often attribute this greater politicisation both to shifts in the social construction of “social problems” and visions of children's agency (for example Mayall, 1994; Oakley, 1994, p. 17; Qvortrup, 1994; Livingstone, 2002, p. 13). Others observe this politicisation in changing patterns of defamilialisation and refamilialisation of social care and their implications for patterns of social solidarity (Leira & Saraceno, 2002 or Wincott, 2006, for example). Indeed, the politicisation of childhood – defined as the move from childhood being understood as primarily a family or parental responsibility to it being also a matter of public importance and concern – has emerged as a major theme in debates about “modernising” social policy paradigms (for example, Leira, 2002; Jenson, 2004; Esping-Andersen, Gallie, Hemerijck, & Myles, 2002).

This paper aims to develop an interpretative framework of the evolution of social impact investment (SII) in different countries. SII is a strategy of asset allocation, which combines financial profitability with a measurable social and environmental impact.

Through a thematic analysis of 75 documents, i.e. reports, experts’ considerations, reflections on practitioners’ experience, meetings’ minutes, written by the SII Taskforce of the Group of Eight and the relative National Advisory Boards, the authors identify the main themes connected to the topic of SII development and recognize four main elements useful to segment the market, namely, information asymmetry, financial instruments, source of capital and market intermediation.

They map the ongoing practices in the Group of Eight’s members and distinguish two speeds in the evolution of SII: on one hand, there is a group of roadrunners, which pave the way to SII and in which SII activities have being institutionalized; on the other hand, there is a wider group of chasers, where the SII infrastructures lack any systematization.

Although some authors provide preliminary interpretations of the SII evolution, they mainly focus on the national level and do not provide any cross-countries analysis. The findings of the present work contribute to overcome the lack of evidence characterizing the SII field and the absence of comparable and consistent data at the global level by filling the academic literature about SII, through a structured interpretative framework.

This paper aims to explore how neo‐liberalism shapes income support policy and lone mothers' experiences in Canada and the USA.

A critical comparative analysis is undertaken of how Canadian and US governments take up sociological concepts of risk, market citizenship, and individualization, whether explicitly or implicitly, in the design and administration of neo‐liberal income support policies directed at lone mothers. Specifically, the contradictory life circumstances that Canadian and American lone mothers experience when they access income supports that are designed ostensibly to construct/reconstruct them as citizens capable of risk taking in their search for employment and self‐sufficiency are compared.

The paper finds that the realities for poor lone mothers are remarkably similar in the two countries and therefore argue that income support policies, particularly welfare‐to‐work initiatives, underpinned by neo‐liberal tenets, can act in a counter‐intuitive manner exposing lone mothers to greater rather than lesser economic and social insecurity/inequality, and constructing them as risk aversive and dependent.

The economic and social implications/contradictions of neo‐liberal restructuring of income support policies for lone mothers is revealed.

This paper contributes to broader scholarship on the gendered dimensions of neo‐liberal restructuring of welfare states in late modernity.

The starting point of the paper is the meteoric rise of care and care work upon the societal and sociological agenda. Referring to Polanyi, the authors argue that this is the manifestation of a new phase of capitalist societalisation (Vergesellschaftung) of social reproduction in the form of an economic shift. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the societal organisation of care and care work and questions of inequality and justice.

The first part of the paper illustrates some facets of the economic shift in the field of care and care work. The second part reconstructs the societal organisation of care and care work in the private sector, state, third sector and private households from the mid-twentieth century in the context of questions of inequality and justice. The third part draws on the institutional logics perspective and French pragmatic sociology and the own case studies on home care agencies (HCA), residential care communities (RCC) and early child care (ECC) in Austria and Germany and shows how conflicting demands give rise to new questions of justice. The paper ends with a short conclusion.

The paper shows how the commodification and de-commodification of care and care work have changed over time and how the economic shift – illustrated in the case of HCA, RCC and ECC – is accompanied by conflicting demands and questions of justice.

A Polanyian perspective on the relation between market and society is combined with the neo-institutionalist and pragmatic idea that orientations rooted in the “logics” of the market, the state, the family and the profession influence how conflicting demands in elder and child care are dealt with and how questions of inequality and justice arise.

The purpose of this paper is to find out if there is any convergence between the Third Way in Europe and the Conservative Democracy in Turkey in their politico‐economic strategies for dealing with the social question with the thought that both the political identities have come into existence as a consequence of a similar initiative to reformulate their egalitarian cores according to the realpolitik of contemporary capitalism, and uncover the consequences of the so‐called strategies specifically in the realm of welfare and labour policies.

This inquiry has been contextualised into the evolutionary cycles of the socialism → social democracy → the Third Way in Europe and the Just Order → Conservative Democracy in the Ottoman‐Turkish territory. Initially focusing on the first cycle, the paper then turns to examine the second cycle in a comparative and synchorised perspective with the first.

It is concluded that the Conservative Democracy and the Third way have an unmistakable convergence in terms not only of their evolution but also of their strategic policy options to deal with the social question. Their convergence originates in the initiative to find a middle ground between the contemporary capitalism and their egalitarian cores. Such a reconciliative attempt by the both models ends up in a stalemate that triggers recurring conciliative initiatives rather than yield to stable and sustainable policy options which enable their practitioners to deal with the social question in an efficient way.

The paper touches on the general points of convergence between the Conservative Democracy and the Third Way in the political economy of social question. The next step should, hence, be to further this argument by means of specifically dealing with the welfare and labour policies in separate in‐depth research.

This paper is the first in its inquiry as stated above in the purpose and its comparative methodology to deal with this inquiry.