ABSTRACT
Close attention to this variety is important not just in order to understand each individual policy field in its own right, but also must be taken into account if we wish to make sense of the overall patterns change. The economic growth that we will identify in Chapter 2, for example, has reflected the aggregated effect of distinctive ‘vertical’ policies, unfolding under their own internal momentum, in social care and housing. It cannot be reduced to the deliberate cross-cutting policy efforts ‘from above’ by any one class or other interest. Each field has taken a particular developmental pathway, and the nature of the relevant voluntary sector, state sector, and for-profit sector contributions cannot be divorced from this context. The book seeks to begin to show how this is the case by diagnosing how stakeholders’ attitudes and actions towards each sector are conditioned by field-specific policy legacies. It also does so by unpacking, to the extent that data allow, why and how the internal composition of the sector bears the imprint of history.
