ABSTRACT
Social policies, such as those intended to redesign sex-roles and re-distribute paid and unpaid work between adults, can use four mechanisms of social engineering: ideological reform and moral exhortation; legislation; fiscal policy; and institutional change. Most commonly, some combination of these tools is used. In large pluralist societies, such as the USA and Britain, where competing interests and ideologies have to be accommodated, there can be contradictions between the implicit policies of the four tools of social engineering, so that social change is slow and uneven.
