In this chapter, we look at the term ‘social policy’ and ask a good many questions about it. In doing so, we shall inevitably have to consider various definitions of associated concepts and categorised labels: social administration, social services, social welfare, social security, welfare states and so forth. We will have to ask ourselves why we should study social policy at all or, for that matter, society’s response as it identifies or fails to identify social needs and problems. Are we concerned with principles and objectives about certain areas of social life and organisation or with social engineering, that is, with methods and techniques of action, management, organisation and the application of games theory?

Whatever the answer we arrive at, we cannot fail to become heavily involved in the issues of moral and political values. Indeed, political propaganda frequently masquerades under social policy labels.

What do we mean by ‘social policy’? Connected with this is the equally important question: whose social policy? For our purposes the word ‘policy’ can be taken to refer to the principles that govern action directed towards given ends. The concept denotes action about means as well as ends and it therefore implies change: changing situations, systems, practices and behaviour. And here we should note that the concept of policy is only meaningful if we (society, a group, or an organisation) believe we can affect change in some form or another. We do not have policies about the weather because, as yet, we are powerless to do anything about the weather. But we do have policies (or we can have policies) about illegitimate children because we think we have some power to affect their lives – for better or worse, depending on whether you are the policy maker or the illegitimate child.

The word ‘policy’ is used here in an action-oriented and problem-oriented sense. The collective ‘we’ is used to refer to the actions of government in expressing the ‘general will’ of the people, whether of Britain, Nigeria or China. The meaning and validity of a concept of the ‘general will’ is, of course, hotly debated.

The greatest semantic difficulty arises, inevitably, with the word ‘social’. Nor is it made any easier by the fact that so many disciplines, professions and groups claim it as a forename and, indeed, flourish it about as something distinctly different.