ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the relating social policy analysis and the production of scale, adopting a middle-range level of theorisation, i.e. using a theoretically informed pragmatic orientation as the best option to consider the complexities that social policy analysis entails. Social policies structure redistributive communities as the result of the states' capacity, ability and power to define regulative frames, allocating duties and rights and redistributing resources. In the case of explicit rescaling forms of territorial re-organisation of social policies, it is reforms that shift regulatory power to other levels. The process of change that the different welfare systems are facing is represented by the multiplication of actors involved in designing, managing and implementing social policies. Understanding the processes of subsidiarisation of social policies cannot avoid considering what the main features of European welfare systems are. The involvement of new actors was initially related merely to the implementation of social services and their management.
