Introduction

As the title of this volume suggests, much of Howard Glennerster's work has been concerned with exploring the most effective means to achieve the goals of social policy. Glennerster has also made a significant contribution to elucidating the intentions of both historical and contemporary policy makers: their stated objectives and the underlying principles for the programmes of reform they have proposed or implemented. This task of uncovering the range of beliefs among policy makers about the purpose of social policy in general, and the welfare state in particular, is important for making social policy work, I shall argue below, because without clarity over guiding principles, the debate between different normative positions is obscured, and the risk of inadvertently developing contradictory policies is increased.

I begin in the next section by considering whether searching for underlying normative principles in social policy makes sense. I argue that even if different conceptions of what is right and good are necessarily traded against each other and against other values and objectives in the messy business of practical politics, it is nevertheless worthwhile to analyse the theories of social justice that contribute to the overall mix of motivations. Social policy has an important role to play in uncovering and exploring these, as Glennerster's work has demonstrated. An example is given in the following section, examining the rhetoric and practice of the current government and finding evidence of a lack of coherence in values and conceptions of social justice. The following section offers a framework for analysing the different conceptions that may be in play. But is it sufficient to lay out the options and to identify which are applied in different areas of policy? The next section argues that the role of social scientists need not be limited to this descriptive task but can and should go further, to tease out the implications in practice of adopting different normative positions, and to differentiate between those which help to resolve policy dilemmas and those which simply throw up new ones. Particular attention is given to one conception, the capability approach, which I argue has a number of advantages over the others considered. The concluding section returns to the question of whether this is all idealistic nonsense, irrelevant to the real worlds of welfare and policy making.