ABSTRACT
In the mid-1970s, however, the word ‘crisis’ began to enter the titles of books on social policy and about welfare states. Much energy since has been devoted to analysing the nature of the crisis, particularly the relationship between economic performance and public expenditure, and issues about the legitimacy of state involvement in particular areas of individual and social life became much more salient. The interdisciplinary and theoretical flowering of the field, however, led to corresponding perplexity on the part of students trying to identify the common features of social policy as an academic pursuit. The academic study of the development of social policy has been particularly prone to Whiggishness, the assumption that the history of the subject shows a long-term general unilinear trend from less adequate to more adequate and superior provision. Intellectually, social policy was caught short by the shift to market-oriented approaches in the early 1980s, and took some time to recover.
