ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores that the theory and practice of welfare would gain much if its activities were informed by the sociological imagination. It understands the nature and scope of these apparent changes by contextualizing the study of welfare within a wider sociological analysis of state and society in postwar Britain. The book provides the provision of welfare services, and other post-war state interventions, in recent historical context. It seeks to provide a range of answers to this question by devoting itself to an exposition of various explanations of state intervention in civil society in the period since the Second World War. The book shows that the promotion of an argument that state welfare activities are constrained but not entirely determined by a ruling class or elite sections of it.
