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Information systems have been heralded as indispensible tools for enhancing the performance of human services and producing positive outcomes for people (Poertner and Rapp, 1988). Such systems can play an important role in the processes of formulating social policy, planning, and programming. This role includes the identification of social issues and their formulation, goal clarification, the identification of priorities and alternatives in these processes, and in social monitoring and evaluation (Berman, 1985). In contradistinction to the political aspect of decision‐making, information systems aid in bringing about rationalization of the decision‐making process in the public policy sphere (Welrich, 1985). The effective use of information systems, however, is dependent upon the accessibility of the system to the decision‐maker during the decision‐making process. The place of the decision‐maker in the administrative structure determines the type of information he needs and its mode of application. The value of the information system in decision‐making is contingent upon the relevance of the information in content and in being available at the right time.

Social marketing and government policy are intertwined. Despite this, policy analysis by social marketers is rare. This paper aims to address the dearth of policy analysis in social marketing and introduce and model a methodology grounded in Indigenous knowledge and from an Indigenous standpoint. In Australia, a minuscule number of First Nations people complete doctoral degrees. The most recent, major policy review, the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA) Report, made a series of recommendations, with some drawn from countries that have successfully uplifted Indigenous doctoral candidates’ success. This paper “speaks back” to the ACOLA Report.

This paper subjects the ACOLA Report, implementation plans and evaluations to a detailed Indigenous Critical Discourse Analysis using Nakata’s Indigenous standpoint theory and Bacchi’s Foucauldian discourse analysis to trace why policy borrowing from other countries is challenging if other elements of the political, social and cultural landscape are fundamentally unsupportive of reforms.

This paper makes arguments about the effects produced by the way the “problem” of First Nations doctoral education has been represented in this suite of Australian policy documents and the ways in which changes could be made that would actually address the pressing need for First Nations doctoral success in Australia.

Conducting policy analysis benefits social marketers in many ways, helping to navigate policy complexities and advocate for meaningful policy reforms for a social cause. This paper aims to spark more social marketing policy analysis and introduces a methodology uncommon to social marketing.

Mainland Tanzania has seen two decades of significant social policy reforms and transformations in its social and economic structures, whilst the country continues to grapple with persisting gender inequalities. This article examines Tanzania's social policy developments from a gender perspective. The authors analyse the level, reach and quality of social policy delivery to working-age women across the areas of health policy, social protection and employment policy during 2000–2021.

The article draws on qualitative research deploying the scoping review method. The data consist of diverse secondary materials, including academic publications, government policy documents, relevant statistics and other types of “grey” literature.

Tanzania has made significant advancements in the legal frameworks around welfare provision and has instituted increasingly gender-responsive government policy plans. The health and social protection sectors, in particular, have witnessed the introduction of large-scale measures expanding social policy implementation. However, social policy delivery remains two-tiered, with differences in provisions for women in the formal and informal sectors.

Social policy delivery and implementation have increased and diversified in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) during the new millennium, with a growing integration of gender-specific policy objectives. However, limited social policy scholarship has focused on the gendered effects of broader social policy models in SSA. The article remedies the concomitant knowledge gaps by examining various social policies and their impacts on working-age women in Mainland Tanzania. The authors also engage with the theoretical welfare regime literature and present an analytical framework for gender-sensitive assessment of emerging social policy models in the Global South.

For sociological perspectives on globalization to do justice to its many facets, they must be informed by an understanding of modern societies as simultaneously complex, contingent, and contradictory – as modern capitalist societies. As is becoming ever more apparent, such an understanding of modern societies is the necessary precondition for identifying the defining features of globalization. Yet, for the most part, the history of the social sciences did not produce research agendas, theories, and methods designed to grasp complexity, contingency, and contradiction as core dimensions of modern social life that continually reinforce each other. The social sciences did not evolve as ongoing efforts to grasp the gravity each dimension exerts on concrete forms of political, economic and cultural life, and how the force of each depends on the constant exchange of energy with the other two. To the extent that scrutinizing the impact of globalization on the future – and possible futures – of human civilization is the primary challenge for social scientists to confront today, the current condition presents a unique, and perhaps most unusual opportunity to conceive anew the promise of each and all the social sciences, as elucidating how the complex, contingent, and contradictory nature of modern societies, in the name of advancing social justice, has engendered a regime of managing “social problems.”

Immigration represents one of the most contentious and complicated issues for social democracy in many national contexts. In Scandinavia, the social democratic parties have been particularly tormented, being split internally on central concerns related to immigration policy. Social democratic parties in Scandinavia have had a basically ambiguous relationship to the issue from the initiation of the era of ‘new immigration’. This chapter argues that this can be explained by the specifically strong attachment and ‘ownership’ of these parties to the Scandinavian welfare model, with its particular claims on a strong tax base and an orderly labour market. ‘Social democracy’ is dealt with mainly as an institutional and political entity, close to what goes as ‘The Nordic Model’ in the international literature. The chapter describes and analyses similarities and differences between the three Scandinavian countries, through a historical exposé of the period after the early 1970s; on the one hand, the institutional and normative prerequisites for social democracies in handling migration, and on the other hand, the way in which recent flows of migrants have influenced the very same social democracies. Theoretically, the chapter is drawing on conceptual tools from political economy, citizenship discourse and institutional theory.

For perspectives on globalization to do justice to its many facets, they must be informed by an understanding of modern societies as simultaneously complex, contingent, and contradictory – as modern capitalist societies. As is becoming ever more apparent, such an understanding of modern societies is the necessary precondition for identifying the defining features of globalization. Yet, for the most part, the history of the social sciences did not produce research agendas, theories, and methods designed to grasp complexity, contingency, and contradiction as core dimensions of modern social life that continually reinforce each other. The social sciences did not evolve as ongoing efforts to grasp the gravity each dimension exerts on concrete forms of political, economic, and cultural life, and how the force of each depends on the constant exchange of energy with the other two. To the extent that scrutinizing the impact of globalization on the future – find possible futures – of human civilization is the primary challenge for social scientists to confront today, the current condition presents a unique, and perhaps most unusual opportunity to conceive anew the promise of each and all the social sciences, as elucidating how the complex, contingent, and contradictory nature of modern societies, in the name of advancing social justice, has engendered a regime of managing “social problems.”

In this conceptual chapter we examine the impact of the institutional role of public social policy as opposed to the individual role of private social entrepreneurship on the process of social change and value creation.

We review the above fields in order to identify their common and distinctive characteristics. We also examine how each contributes to social value creation and in which way these two sources of social value creation can interact in order to maximize their positive impact.

The value of our work relies on the development analysis reveals that the intersection between social policy and social entrepreneurship constitutes one of the possible responses to the growing uncertainty in the global economy and society. In a conceptual level, the findings of our theoretical inquiry allow us to provide a framework for better understanding the nature and the possible implications of social entrepreneurial/policy activities that allows the appropriate selection of the proper actions to be made for theorists, practitioners, and policy-makers alike.

Our work contributes to existing literature by providing views on understanding how the different forms of organizational actions (public policy vs. social entrepreneurship) act toward social value creation; and by contributing to the understanding of their similarities and differences and the distinctive frameworks within which they unfold.

Given the growing interest in social movements as policy agenda setters, this paper investigates the contexts within which movement groups and actors work with political elites to promote their common goals for policy change. In asking how and why so-called outsiders gain access to elites and to the policymaking process, I address several contemporary theoretical and empirical concerns associated with policy change as a social movement goal. I examine the claim that movements use a multipronged, long-term strategy by working with and targeting policymakers and political institutions on the one hand, while shaping public preferences – hearts and minds – on the other; that these efforts are not mutually exclusive. In addition, I look at how social movement organizations and actors are critical in expanding issue conflict outside narrow policy networks, often encouraged to do so by political elites with similar policy objectives. And, I discuss actors’ mobility in transitioning from institutional activists to movement and organizational leaders, and even to protesters, and vice versa. The interchangeability of roles among actors promoting social change in strategic action fields points to the porous and fluid boundaries between state and nonstate actors and organizations.

Since 2004, the British Government has delivered a national policy on social marketing that has created a new frame of reference in this field. This paper aims to study the genesis, evolution and implementation of the policy process that led to an important development in British public health.

An in-depth multifaceted single case study, mixing qualitative and quantitative data including participatory research, enabled by a cognitive approach based on elements of knowledge, ideas, representations and social beliefs in the elaboration of a public policy.

This approach to understanding the British policy on social marketing process demonstrates a useful explanatory capacity, producing a comprehensive articulation of the main cognitive, normative, and instrumental dimensions of this policy, including its significant mutations influenced by the 2008 Great Recession and subsequent political evolution.

This paper has followed the British social marketing policy’s implementation in England. In Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, this national policy had specific developments that it was not followed in our study In general, subject to complex historical, social and political conditions, this is a field that preserves its dynamism and the ability to question concepts and processes. Ever seeking new directions and solutions, it requires an ongoing research study.

Conclusions speak in favour of a prescriptive framework for a national policy on social marketing that can inform other government entities’ efforts to develop similar policies in other countries. A correct understanding of such a political process can lead to better management of its development and its consequent contribution to improving social marketing policy and interventions.

A proper conception and management of a social marketing policy can contribute to improving the well-being of citizens.

It is the first time that this specific cognitive approach has been applied so systematically to a national social marketing policy through a long-term research, providing a prescriptive framework for other’ efforts to develop similar policies.

The author argues that we must stop and take a look at what our insistence on human labour as the basis of our society is doing to us, and begin to search for possible alternatives. We need the vision and the courage to aim for the highest level of technology attainable for the widest possible use in both industry and services. We need financial arrangements that will encourage people to invent themselves out of work. Our goal, the article argues, must be the reduction of human labour to the greatest extent possible, to free people for more enjoyable, creative, human activities.