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From 1782 to 1834, the English social legislation shifted from a safety net devised to deal with emergencies to a social security system implemented to cope with the threat of unemployment and poverty. In the attempt to explain this shift, this chapter concentrates on the changed attitudes toward poverty and power relationships in eighteenth-century British society. Especially, it looks at the role played by eighteenth-century British economic thinkers in elaborating arguments in favor of reducing the most evident asymmetries of power characterizing the period of transition from Mercantilism to the Classical era. To what extent did economic thinkers contribute to creating an environment within which a social legislation aimed at improving the living conditions of the poor as the one established in 1795 could be not only envisaged but also implemented? In doing so, this chapter deals with an aspect often undervalued and/or overlooked by historians of economic thought: namely, the relationship between economic theory and social legislation. If the latter is the institutional framework by which both individual and collective well-being can be achieved the former cannot but assume a fundamental role as a useful abstraction which sheds light on the multifaceted reality in which social policies are proposed, forged, and eventually implemented.

The Poor Law Report of 1834 occupies an important, perhaps pre‐eminent place in attempts to understand changes in the distribution of power, social relations, and social provision in the nineteenth century. Few other documents have set in progress such a multitide of far‐reaching changes. This is true even though the Poor Law Amendment Act of the same year, very closely related to the Report, diluted considerably its recommendations for policy ‐ as the Checklands say in the Introduction to their edition of the Report, “The Government, with the understandable intention of making things easier for itself and harder for its opponents, produced a Bill that was much less explicit than the Report” (1974, p. 42). The innovations flowing from the Report included: a specialist body at central level in London (the Poor Law Commissioners, given extensive powers to set in being general rules covering poor re‐lief); nationwide units of “local government”, the union, bringing into control as boards of guardians many new people, who gained their position through elections; more systematic construction of workhouses, which often dwarfed the other buildings in their towns or villages; and a circumscribing of the power in the hands of the Justices of the Peace, stalwarts of a less formal, more paternalistic and discretionary attitude to poor relief.

The paper will aim to examine the contemporary origins and development of the planning system and housing regulation in England and Ireland. One objective is to broadly explicate how the regulation of housing in England began, with reference to Ireland, and its relationship with the planning system. The other is to outline the swing in England from a hotchpotch decentralised system to a centralised, and back again sharply to decentralised approach to planning and the provision for housing, a swing unparalleled in Ireland.

The approach is to consider the main influences on the regulation of planning and housing, with reference to historical, social and legal regulatory developments, and to broadly assess the role of centralised and decentralised systems.

The regulation of housing was an incidental product of the regulation of public health. The use of town and country planning principles could have assisted such regulation, but were unpopular until the development of a centralised system of planning in the 20th century. This has led to problems in Ireland for the delivery of local services. The change in England under the Localism Act to decentralized system is unlikely to achieve an effective use of local resources. It is unlikely that unwieldy new systems of decision‐making and funding arrangements will improve the provision of housing for low incomes and the poor. A balance between the use of both systems is required.

This paper assesses the impact of social, historical, administrative and legal changes that have impacted on the progress of the relationship between planning and housing regulation in England and Ireland over the last two centuries until the present day.

This study aims to explore the role of the Indian merchant class in 19th-century colonial India in addressing the social concerns of disability. Specifically, it addresses why and how business engaged with disability in colonial India.

This study’s methodology entailed historiographical approach and archival investigation of official correspondence and letters of business people in 19th-century colonial India.

Using institutional theory, the study’s findings indicate that guided by philanthropic and ethical motives, Indian businesses, while recognizing the normative and cognitive challenges, accepted the regulative institutional pressures of colonial India and adopted an involved and humane approach. This manifested in the construction of asylums and the setting up of bequeaths and charitable funds for people with disability (PwD). The principal institutional drivers in making of the asylums and the creation of benevolent charities were religion, social practices, caste-based expectations, exposure to Western education and Victorian and Protestantism ideologies, the emergence of colonial notions of health, hygiene and medicine, carefully crafted socio-political and economic policies of the British Raj and the social aspirations of the native merchant class.

In contrast to the 20th-century rights-based movement of the West, which gave birth to the global term of “disability,” a collective representation of different types of disabilities, this paper locates that cloaked in individual forms of sickness, the identity of PwD in 19th-century colonial India appeared under varied fragmented labels such as those of leper, lunatic, blind and infirm. This paper broadens the understanding of how philanthropic business response to disability provided social acceptability and credibility to business people as benevolent members of society. While parallelly, for PwD, it reinforced social marginalization and the need for institutionalization, propagating perceptions of unfortunate and helpless members of society.

This essay is an exercise in imaginative historiography. Its purpose is to modify the boundaries between sociology, social work, and literature that have become impediments to the pursuit of socially responsible scholarship; its goal is to create an analogue in the past for a field that many revisionists wish to create in the present – a field of cultural inquiry in which knowledge is considered both cognitive and emotional, methods are imaginative, and results are meant to improve human relations. In the past I posit as a “working hypothesis” (in Mead’s sense of the term) for this field, I bring together figures, specifically Jane Addams and the nineteenth-century playwright Joanna Baillie, whose contributions to sociology and literature are being separately but not jointly recovered. I examine three key similarities that make Addams and Baillie kindred spirits: they cultivated sympathy as a way of knowing and acting, and made it the basis for social change; they preferred situational problem-solving to theory-building; they used drama for value inquiry and morality construction. Throughout, I also allude to affinities with the thought of Mead, affinities that are important for avoiding gender essentialism in this argument. I illustrate the combined use of problem-solving, sympathy and drama by linking Baillie’s plays on criminality with Addams’s and Mead’s efforts at criminal justice reform and with present-day efforts to move from an ethics of justice to an ethics of care. By bringing Baillie to Hull-House and considering how she might have contributed to the work of Addams, Mead, and their associates, I construct a precedent for transdisciplinary cultural inquiry.

‘Bureaucracy does not only hide its true nature from non‐bureaucrats, it hides it from itself.’ Nicos Mouzelis, ‘Organization and Bureaucracy’

AS A matter of principle Ebenezer Scrooge always held up the payment of outstanding bills until the last possible moment. This principle was based not merely on his love of money, which was albeit very profound, but on the mistaken premise that such action set the seal on his competence and efficiency as a business man, and emphasized his thrift and acumen. Furthermore, Scrooge did not approve of simple humanities such as office heating until the ink froze solid in the inkpots, an event now imminent in his dismal cell of a counting house on the eve of Christmas, and so surely as the poor clerk complained of the wretched conditions the master predicted it would be necessary for him to seek other employment. Whereupon the clerk wound tighter his muffler and tried to derive a little warmth from the solitary candle; in which endeavour, having but only average imagination, he failed miserably.

Reviews the development of the Irish voluntary sector and examines the unique characteristics of the legal framework in which voluntary organizations operate and the funding and staffing arrangements. Focuses on recent changes in the relationship between the state and organizations. Speculates on the future of these organizations by examining issues such as contracting, cohesiveness and general evolutionary trends.

This article offers a personal view of the White Paper, Our Health, Our Care, Our Say, from a service user perspective. The Minister for Care Services, Liam Byrne, has stressed that the philosophy of the White Paper is based on strengthening personal control over support, prevention and the integration of health, social care and other services. This discussion examines the emphasis on health over social care in the presentation of the White Paper. It puts the document in the broader context of social care policy development over the last 20 years, and relates it to the views of service users expressed in consultations leading up to its publication. It considers the White Paper's potential ambiguity, its relation with resource issues and what next steps may be needed to take forward its positive principles.