First published in 1992. In this volume the authors discuss that although the idea that the main object of social security is to regulate the lives of poor people rather than to relieve their poverty which fell into disfavour in the post-war heyday of the welfare state; that this idea has more recently returned, as mass unemployment increases the pressure on welfare budgets and the weakness of the British economy calls into question our ability to maintain social spending.
The emphasis of this work is placed on a critique of victim-blaming terms such as "dependency culture" and "underclass", the relevance of recent social security reforms to current social trends and an alternative approach to welfare dependency.
