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There are a several reasons as to why many of the issues raised by the earlier and subsequent critiques around gender, race, disability, sexuality and age were sidelined or only partly accommodated in mainstream social policy. First, it is important to understand the breadth of these critiques’ new frames of analysis of the post-war welfare state. Feminist critiques were to highlight the relationship between the public sphere of work and politics and the private sphere of family and personal relationships. Within that was an examination of the gendered assumptions attached to care, dependency and patriarchal power, as well as the exclusions attached to non-heteronormative identities, subjectivities and relationships. Care and dependency were also critically re-examined from the viewpoints of disabled people, children and older people, challenging bureaucratic and expert dominance over service-users and attempting to prefigure new democratic and participatory ways of doing welfare. In addition, the links between anti-colonial struggles and anti-racism brought the colonial and postcolonial global context of an international division of labour and geo-political inequalities to the fore. This went well beyond the limitations of the hermetically sealed single-nation view of the welfare state. It uncovered a critical understanding of the role of welfare states in nation-building and especially in the rubric of social imperialism in forms of early collectivism of the twentieth century. This sought to subordinate class and gender interests to those of nation and empire and did so by representing social reforms as the fruits of imperialism, which in their turn required national efficiency and healthy workers, mothers and children. This critique made connections between the increasingly significant political economy of migrant labour and the welfare state, especially the role of migrant labour in reducing social expenditure costs and the use of welfare institutions to police immigration. It found connections between the management of the colonies and the pathologization of the cultures and practices of people, especially mothers and their families, who migrated from those previous colonies. Together these critiques called for a more systematic approach to the study of social policy as the dynamic outcome not only of political and economic forces but of multiple social and cultural forces too.¹

The first set of barriers to their accommodation came from within the study of social policy itself. In a paradoxical twist by the 1990s, at the very point when many of the earlier feminist and anti-racist critiques began to gain greater foothold in the discipline of social policy, not only did the rise of neoliberalism in many countries attempt to dismantle the foundations which made the quest for greater social justice possible, but also the core of the discipline of social policy moved into cross-national comparative study. As it did so, it shed some of these new insights garnered through the previous two decades. The new studies in comparative social policy were influenced particularly by the work of Esping-Andersen’s The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990). This was a major step forward in framing subsequent studies of the variations across different welfare regimes through their impact upon systems of social stratification, employment, and labour markets. It established important theoretical advances in providing a grounded quantitative analysis of welfare regime variations; it centred contestation; and it gave welfare states a significant role in shaping social formations. However, these contestations, histories and social formations focused centrally upon class and ignored gender, race or any other form of significant social division in the origins and development of nation welfare states.

Nevertheless, welfare regime analysis provoked feminist critiques of its marginalization of gender and led to new and inventive analyses of the gendered nature of welfare states. So, for example, Jane Lewis showed how the historical separation of the public and private (domestic) spheres was embedded in a male breadwinner model of welfare in different ways and to different extents in different countries, resulting in different ‘gendered welfare regimes’. This focused on the central issue that welfare regime analysis ignored: how far the unpaid labour of women in the family is recognized and valued (Lewis 1992). Other studies sought new concepts to measure that which was missing in mainstream analysis. For example, ‘the capacity to form an autonomous household’ indicates the extent to which the state frees women from the necessity to enter marriage, or equivalent partnership, in order to secure financial support for them or their children (Orloff 1993; and see Sainsbury 1994 for a redefinition of the gendered logics of welfare). They illustrated how significant contestations around the body and reproductive rights had in many countries wrought important reforms (O’Connor et al. 1999). Shaver’s critique noted the need to make room for the institutional complexity of welfare states – that there are no necessary patterns of coherence, unity or linearity in gender policy logics across and within welfare institutions (Shaver 1990). Together, this work provided much richer explanatory power for post-war welfare and overlapped with new feminist critiques of Marshall’s concept of citizenship which was central to welfare regime analysis (Pateman 1989; Lister [1997] 2003). It provided a sound basis to analyse the shift, starting at that time in many developed welfare states, from a ‘male-breadwinner’ model to a more ‘dual-earner’ or ‘adult-worker’ model in which women and men were expected to be earners (Daly 2011). A greater convergence was emerging from different models to reconcile work and care, while, at the same time, different policy goals, policy instruments and historical conditions were beginning to shape variations across countries (Platenga and Remery 2005; Lister et al. 2007; Lewis et al. 2008; Williams 2010; Williams and Brennan 2012; and see chapters 3 and 6).

Other critiques – particularly around racism, ethnicity and migration but also around disability, sexuality and gender diversity – were less amenable to the conceptual parameters and quantitative measures of this new cross-national development. Because of this, cross-national comparative studies in these areas were late to the table, mainly emerging some two decades later – immigration regimes (Sainsbury 2012); intimacy (Roseneil et al. 2020); disability (Halvorsen et al. 2017); old age (Walker 2005); transgender (Hines et al. 2018). Lack of quantitative data was a real problem, as many European countries had not by this time instituted the collection of data on ethnicity or sexuality. It was also the case that welfare regime analysis was at first slow to acknowledge those countries that didn’t fit with US or European modern welfare state development, such as the paradoxes of post-communist societies (Deacon and Castle-Kanerova 1992) and the rapid changes in Latin America (Gough et al. 2004; Franzoni 2008) and parts of South-east Asia (Peng and Wong 2008). It was also in relation to some of these studies that the geo-politics and colonialism between North and South began to be recognized as a factor in welfare state development (Midgley and Piachaud 2011), but this had less impact on the rolling forward of welfare regime analysis.

In relation to racism, in the mid-1990s many European countries saw a rise in migration and multiculturalism as well as an emerging political and popular backlash to these, often expressed as claims for new nationalist conditions of eligibility to welfare (‘welfare chauvinism’ – Keskinen et al. 2016). Cross-national analyses of migration and citizenship regimes were being developed by migration and racism scholars (Bovenkerk et al. 1990; Brubaker 1990; Hammar 1990). With some exceptions (Castles and Miller 1993; Faist 1995; Sainsbury 2012), these were largely outside the discipline of social policy and, even so, did not always relate migration to race and racism. Criminal justice, too, in which much critical work around racism had been developed, such as Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978), often stood outside the discipline. Other exceptions at that time also included more intersectional approaches to the gendering, racializing and classing of welfare states (Mink 1990; Ginsburg 1992; Boris 1995; Williams 1995) and the beginning of research on the significance of female migration into care work (Heyzer et al. 1994; Anderson 2000). None of these touched the body of comparative social policy at that time. In fact they were largely ignored. A vacuum opened up in the core of the discipline, one often excused through lack of data, but it was as much that there was no theoretical space for the new-old hierarchies of postcolonial and geo-political realities. The increased pace and differentiation of migration and asylum seeking was beginning to challenge myths of cultural homogeneity and the realities of national boundaries upon which nation-states and their social policies were built. In addition, when the inadequacy of existing immigration policies and social rights was becoming apparent, and when welfare chauvinism was becoming more assertive, few mainstream welfare state/regime analyses were elaborating theoretically or normatively how to counteract racism and racial inequalities or to deconstruct universalism’s failure to recognize difference (but see Phillimore et al. 2021 for a cross-national study that does just this, discussed in chapter 5).

These omissions were carried in different ways into the next waves of mainstream social policy, which focused upon the restructuring of welfare states in the context of the rise of neoliberalism. Three examples offer an understanding of the narrow ways in which gender and race (by now well established in wider scholarship) began to be acknowledged. First, the historical institutionalist approach was a particularly important contribution to understanding how the contingency of history and the architecture of political institutions matter in the way they shape political claims and political change (Hall 1993; Pierson 1996; Pierson and Skocpol 2002). This was more open to referencing different inequalities, but what was missing was any systematic engagement with the multiple social relations of gender, race or any salient relations other than class. Second, this openness but eventual narrowness can also be seen in other work on the restructuring of welfare states which uses the conceptual device of ‘new social risks’ (Bonoli 2007). This refers to the changes that challenged the post-war welfare state: greater female labour-force participation, an ageing society and an increase in single parents, as well as new vulnerable ‘risk groups’ which included migrants and disabled people. While this formulation acknowledged these groups and the challenges they pose, it tended to focus on the relationship they have to the labour market, as human capital, and to strip them of any claims they might make in their own right, as well as the more profound implications of those claims. Third, and similarly, in subsequent research on the impact of post-industrialism on welfare states, Esping-Andersen (1999) employed ‘family’, in addition to state and market, as an analytical concept and recommended moving domestic care work from the household to the state or market as the strategy to enable women to enter paid employment. Such investment would increase fertility, secure a tax base and productivity for the future, and protect and provide opportunities for the low-paid and unemployed (see also Esping-Andersen 2009). While the acknowledgement of social provision to enable women to work was welcome, this utilitarian and heteronormative approach ignores the wider aspects of gender equality such as the unequal gendering of household and care work, not to mention the shaping of these by class, migration and race, disability, age, and sexuality.

A second factor that inhibited the influence of the critiques was in the response to the intellectual shift across the social sciences and humanities to post-structuralist thinking. This was challenging to a discipline rooted in the analysis and measurement of structural inequalities and material poverty. The unfolding analyses of governmentalities, following Foucault, spawned a literature on how the restructuring of the (welfare) state marked a shift in how the behaviour of welfare subjects was to be managed (Rose 1999; O’Brien and Penna 1998). In addition, following Butler (1990), the connections between culture, subjectivity, identity, agency and difference began to be explored. These developments furthered an understanding of the complexity of power, but, for some in and out of social policy, questions of difference and the ‘politics of identity’ were (and still are) characterized as a culturalist shift away from the ‘real’ material struggle around the growing impoverishment and disempowerment of deindustrialized communities (Gitlin 1995). The separation of economic from other forms of injustice is a reflection of an ongoing current in ‘left’ politics of assuming that solidarity based on (working-)class interests constitutes the central force for change (Dean and Maiguashca 2018). In their study of minority ethnic women’s struggles against austerity in France, England and Scotland, Leah Bassel and Akwugu Emejulu (2018) found that the entreaties to solidarity from socialist and social democratic organizations were often implicitly made in economic terms to a white male constituency and thus provided little engagement with issues of racism or sexism. The idea of race as exogenous to class was to come back to bite during the Brexit campaign (see chapter 4). Back in the critical quarters of social policy, far from ignoring economic polarization, this shift offered opportunities to grapple with the way cultural and economic inequalities were complexly intertwined, as, for example, in John Clarke’s examination of what the ‘cultural turn’ means for the study of welfare states (Clarke 2004; see also O’Brien and Penna 1998; and Lister 2004). It was (and is) still the case, however, that many contemporary and influential studies focus exclusively on material inequalities, a tendency reinforced by the clear polarizing of inequalities emerging from the 2000s. Thus, in Thomas Piketty’s analysis of the inequalities of capitalism, powerful and influential as it is, there are no references in the index to gender, ethnic, minority, migrant or disabled inequalities (Piketty 2014).²

Third, and more widely still, by the end of the 1990s and into the new century, neoliberal marketized, managerialized and modernized social policies had taken hold, trade unions were weakened in many countries, and there was a decline in local new social movement activism. Although the profiles of social movements dimmed, they did not go away. Activism around disability, sexual citizenship and rights for migrants, for carers, older people and children and environmental policy, influenced pressure-group activity over this period and was reflected in social policy research. There were important struggles against racism with the first recognition of institutionalized racism in the police force, although these were very hard fought and often on the back foot (Macpherson 1999). There was the declaration of women’s rights at the Beijing Conference in 1995 and the beginning of important moves for gender equality and anti-racist policy in the EU (Hoskyns 1996; Williams 2003). By 2004 in the UK, civil partnerships for same-gender relationships and gender recognition for transgender people became legal, as did same-gender marriage in 2013 (except for Northern Ireland). The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 led to a raft of climate change and energy legislation from, in the UK, 2004 onwards, while environmentalist critiques and some of the arguments for a citizens’/basic income began to identify the limits of assuming a future based on continuing economic growth and productivism (Fitzpatrick and Cahill 2002). Preparation went on for the UN Convention on the Rights for Persons with Disabilities, which was passed eventually in 2006. In some ways, these developments indicate how feminist, anti-racist and other activists were moving higher up the political hierarchy from their bases in the grass roots into EU and international NGO politics as well as horizontally into more transnational coalitions (Watkins 2018).

Fourth, at the national level, both culturally and politically, particularly in the emerging ‘Third Way’ politics and New Labour, there was a different shift – away from what were considered ‘out-dated’ conflicts of both the social democratic politics of class and redistribution and the politics of the new social movements, especially feminism and anti-racism: ‘post-feminist’ and ‘post-racial’ became new political catchwords (see chapter 4). John Denham, a former secretary of state in the New Labour government, said in 2010 that it was ‘time to move on from “race”’, and Theresa May, as Conservative home secretary and later prime minister, went further, to say that ‘equality is a dirty word’ (both cited by Craig et al. 2019: 1). For others, it was political correctness that had gone ‘too far’, or cultural diversity that had undermined class solidarity and (mythical) national homogeneity (Alesina and Glaeser 2004; Goodhart 2004). Gail Lewis’s study of local government policies in the 1990s termed this as a ‘blind-eye’ of successive governments to the issue of racism (Lewis 2000), and a study done almost two decades later on the struggles of minority ethnic women identified this as ‘political racelessness’ (Bassel and Emejulu 2018; and see chapter 5).

Fifth, back within the study of social policy, several further dynamics were significant. One was that paid work became the central social policy referent to welfare reforms in much of Europe and the US, providing the financial and moral imperative to get everyone – men, women, disabled, minority ethnic groups – ‘off welfare and into work’. This shifted the axis in what was important in ‘the social’ (Williams 2001). In so far as there is a longstanding predisposition of social policy research, as well as independent policy research organizations, to investigate the agenda framed by governments (Taylor-Gooby and Dale 1981), then from the turn of the century much of this focused upon the priorities of government and EU reforms – a social investment approach which saw opportunities for paid work for women and disabled people and minority ethnic groups as a way to minimize social exclusion and promote multi-ethnic integration. The combined effect was that much useful empirical work was produced, but the focus of inequalities became narrowed into issues of discrimination, social inclusion, community cohesion and integration.

At the same time, another rather different factor in the social sciences more generally was that the academic studies of gender, race, ethnicity, migration, disability, age, sexuality, childhood, youth, age and eco-social policy themselves became disparate, specialist and siloed. And this too was reproduced in social policy studies. The effect of these two dynamics was that single categories of gender, race, etc., came to signify specific descriptors, stand-alone critiques or measures of diversity rather than as challenges to the theoretical underpinnings of what stands for universalism in welfare. Of course, it is also the case that these critiques have themselves needed to stand alone in order to pursue more deeply the specificities of their intellectual journeys, but this separation was influenced by other developments. It was not simply that the fragmentation of social movements was mirrored in the social sciences, or, as some have argued, that feminism’s critique of the state dovetailed with neoliberal policies to wither the state, or that feminism was lured into individualist empowerment strategies (Fraser 2009). It was that critical diversities became siloed because the demands of managerialized universities required more intensive academic specialization (defining and leading a new area of study, setting up a specific journal, etc.) for both research assessment purposes and individual career advancement. On the other hand, this separate but parallel existence has not been a one-way movement. Marginalization happens when barriers exist, intellectual or otherwise. It is this that the demands decolonizing the universities challenge (Bhambra et al. 2018; Andrews 2015).

This marginalizing tendency is no worse in social policy than in other social, economic and political sciences. Indeed, as a disciplinary space it can be more propitious: its very eclecticism gives it greater openness to new ideas. Paradoxically, however, its general commitment to social justice can also render it complacent (Phillips and Williams 2021). Feminist scholarship in particular has a high profile in social policy. Yet, at the same time, its frames of analysis still stand at a conceptual distance from core theories. It should be said that, even here, it is the intersection of gender with class that dominates, with only sporadic forays into critical disability, race and queer theories.

Having explained the continuing marginalization of these critical developments, I want to turn this argument around now to make the case for how they need to be central to social policy. One way of doing this is by providing a strategy to bring together their common analytical and transformative strengths in a manner that can also recognize their specific arguments but avoid the siloing effects mentioned here. I assess first the relevance of an intersectional approach in enabling this.