A few observations as to the current debate, with a real attempt not to bash anyone too hard!

1/ Tim, the following logic is not on - "Social Policy is obviously something, therefore it cannot be nothing, ergo it must be everything". You can argue an inclusive or exclusive definition of social policy, but your logic makes no sense. Social policy is definable, even if that definition, in Gallie's words, may we 'essentially contested', and therefore is something. indeed the principles of its definition are the means by which it stands against dissolution into nothing. That does not mean, however, that it is everything, because those same principles identify its 'other(s)' - that which it is not.

2/ Spicker is right insofar as there is an established field called social policy - or perhaps more properly, social policy and administration. We can read its institutional history within the academy, in its academic journals and professional associations, and in its distinctive literature, it 'greats' - Titmuss, Halsey etc - and its hsitorical links with Government. It grew as an applied element from academic disciplines such as politics, economics and sociology, and many of us would claim Keynes or the Fabians, for example, as part of the social policy tradition as well as economics or politics. What differentiates social policy historically as a discipline is its applied concerns in research, its applied and vocational orientation in teaching, and its linkage with policy-making and policy implementing agencies. We cannot deny this history, even if we embrace the post-structuralist deconstruction of boundaries, rehearse the clear weaknesses of these traditional concerns and the need to refocus on difference and diversity in the last 25 years. Its far more difficult to see where the join stops from the classical expansion of social policy in the 1950's and 1960's, and Marxists, for example, always claimed that social policy as a discipline needed to widen its disciplinary remit to understand its subject, but that history is there, it still has supporters of a contemporary and modified form of this model, and it formed the basis for deconstruction. 

3/ The other principal form of action upon social policy, that has threatened it more than deconstruction, is political. The New Right hegemony that has transformed the understanding of what is both 'social' and 'policy' is quite predictably leading to a crisis of recruitment and staus today, as Blair's private/public partnerships privilige the private, if not as blatently as Thatcher/Major before him. The public suffers now from a continuing pathology of impoverishment, intransigence to change, decay and 'old thinking'. These are challenges social policy has to meet. 

4/ It cannot do it by arguing the traditional position, nor the deconstruction - nothing/everything - position. Social policy as a discipline, a focus and approach to studying the subject of welfare, identifies and privileges certain areas of welfare as its mainstream - health, education, social security and benefits, crime. This is not without the knowledge that elements of these areas have their own disciplines (such as criminology - and often approach their study differently to social policy) or that social policy links to larger disciplinary horizons (sociology, politics etc), or that to have integrity it needs to think about, for example, identity, diversity and difference. And there will happily be those who always those who link central concerns to less central (not peripheral) concerns, producing innovative and creative thinking, because the difference between central and non-central is often dictated by pragmatic curriculum issues, issues of funding and focus in research or orthodoxy that may change. It is the tension between continuity and change that makes a discipline strong, but it does not mean that a core is not identified, if only by the sum of academics, practitioners, departments and so on. On the contrary, to acknowledge that core is to be clearer about changing it if you wish, rather than a post-modern denial or easy condemnation of the existence of a discipline.

5/ What those who follow social policy as a discipline might wish to reflect upon is whether they have responded to the timeless challenges is CW Mills or Gouldner. Do we make private troubles into public issues? Have we been beaten into being servants of the state and the university system (such as RAE) rather than independent? Do we reflect enough on the discipline (its astonishing such a crisis is flagged now when it dates back at least to 1975!)? Have we become inert, shut down our critical faculties about us and our work in the constant need to respond and roll with the punches of a system under attack?

6/ These are questions that ought to be prompting a wider sense of regaining the initiative, restating the importance of social policy, restating the disctinctiveness of social policy degrees and research,

Thats enough for now.......

paul

Paul Reynolds
Senior Lecturer in Politics and Sociology
Centre for Studies in nthe Social Sciences
Edge Hill College
St Helens Road
Ormskirk
Lancs L394QP
Tel: 01695 584370
email: [log in to unmask]