In the literature of the West, concepts and models of social policy are as diverse as contemporary concepts of poverty. Historically, the two have indeed had much in common. They certainly share diversity. There are those at one end of the political spectrum who see social policy as a transitory minimum activity of minimum government for a minimum number of poor people; as a form of social control for minority groups in a ‘natural’ society; as a way of resolving the conflict between the religious ethic of compassion and undiluted individualism. In this view, social policy is not good business. Statistical estimates of the national income per capita look healthier if the infant mortality rate rises. At the other end of the political spectrum, there are writers like Macbeath (1957) who has comprehensively stated that, “Social policies are concerned with the right ordering of the network of relationships between men and women who live together in societies, or with the principles which should govern the activities of individuals and groups so far as they affect the lives and interests of other people”.

Somewhere between these extreme visionary notions lives a conventional, textbook definition of social policy. [For some discussion on the problems of definition, see Wilensky and Lebeaux, 1958; Myrdal, 1960; Titmuss, 1963.] The social services or social welfare, the labels we have for long attached to describe certain areas of public intervention such as income maintenance and public health, are seen as the main ingredients of social policy. They are obvious, direct and measurable acts of government, undertaken for a variety of political reasons, to provide for a range of needs, material and social, and predominantly dependent needs, which the market does not or cannot satisfy for certain designated sections of the population. Typically, these direct services are functionally organised in separate and specialised ministries, departments or divisions of government, central and local. They are seen as the ‘social policy departments’. What they do is thought to be explicitly redistributive; they politically interfere with the pattern of claims set by the market. They assign claims from one set of people who are said to produce or earn the national product to another set of people who may merit compassion and charity but not economic rewards for productive service.