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In designing indicators for use in the EU monitoring process, a great deal can be learnt from the experience of member states in their national policies to combat social exclusion. Ch. 3 reviews, country by country, social indicators from a member state perspective, with the aim of illustrating the range of current practice in the use of social indicators in the field of social inclusion, rather than providing a comprehensive assessment. Member states differ in the degree to which they have embarked on strategies aimed at promoting social inclusion that already include explicit targets and indicators against which to measure the effectiveness of policy, and for this reason, the amount of space allocated to each country varies. In each case, however, the National Action Plan on Social Inclusion (NAPincl) submitted to the European Commission in June 2001 is discussed from the viewpoint of the method by which the plans were produced, their relation with previous policy formation, the use made of the seven indicators proposed by the Commission, and other indicators employed by member states that seem of wider interest, particularly where they relate to fields not covered by the Commission's indicators. The countries included in the review are Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Finland, Sweden, and the UK.

The end result of the investigations carried out over the last 8 chapters is a list of 33 recommendations, which are printed in bold type, scattered throughout the book, and summarized at the end of the book, preceding a list of the proposed social indicators. The recommendations and proposed indicators are intended as a contribution to the debate about EU policy‐making, and in this chapter, the future policy process is considered. Topics discussed include the use of indicators in National Action Plans on Social Inclusion and by the European Commission, policy and national targets, and the development of indicators and mobilizing actors.

This chapter looks at similarities among community-oriented practice, community social work, community work, and community intervention. It examines the ways in which rural social work can contribute to action at the community level aimed at assisting, sustaining, developing, and, sometimes, helping to rebuild communities. Although different writers use different terminology for describing their ideas on community social work, and have developed varied models to describe the processes of planning and development, there is considerable overlap between much of their work. The chapter distinguishes three broad strategies for community intervention: social planning and community planning, community-services development, and community development, which also includes community organisation. Finally, it discusses personal skills, capacities, and characteristics necessary for effective casework.

This is a brief introduction to dynamic programming and the method of using linear quadratic (LQ) approximations to the return function; the method is an approximation because it computes the solution to a quadratic expansion of the utility function about the steady state or the stable growth path of model economies. The main purpose of the chapter is to review the theoretical basis for the LQ approximation and to illustrate its use with a detailed example (social planning). The author demonstrates that, using the LQ approximation approach and the certainty equivalence principle, solving for the value function is a relatively easy task. The different sections of the chapter describe the standard neoclassical growth model, present a social planner problem that can be used to solve the model, give a recursive formulation of the social planner's problem, and describe an LQ approximation to this problem. Exercises are included throughout, and an appendix presents a MATLAB program to illustrate the LQ method.

This chapter describes fast algorithms for computing the value function and optimal decision rule for the type of social planning problem to be described in Chapter 5. The chapter is organized as follows. First, it displays a transformation that removes both discounting and cross-products between states and controls. It then describes invariant subspace methods for solving an optimal linear regulator problem. Next, it describes a closely related method called the doubling algorithm that effectively skips steps in iterating on the Bellman equation. The calculations can be further accelerated by partitioning the state vector to take advantage of patterns of zeros in various matrices that define the problem. This is followed by discussions of fast methods for computing equilibria for periodic economies; the rapid solution of a periodic optimal linear regulator problem; and how the calculations can be adapted to handle Hansen and Sargent's (1995) recursive formulation of Jacobson's and Whittle's risk-sensitive preferences.

Chapter 5 returns the focus to the social sciences. The injection of resources into Ireland’s scientific research infrastructure at the end of the 1950s created two new social science research producers – the Rural Economy Division of An Foras Taluntais and the Economic Research Institute. In the former rural sociology took a recognised place alongside a variety of other agriculture-relevant disciplines. In the latter the distinction between the economic and the social was a blurred and indistinct one. During the first half 1960s the unenclosed field of social research was to be the subject of a series of proposals from actors located within the Catholic social movement to a variety of government departments for the creation of research centres or institutes. This chapter details these proposals and the fate of consistent refusal with which they met. Empirical social research in Ireland was funded and organised in a manner that effectively excluded the participation of any Catholic social movement actor without a university base when the government approved the transformation of the Economic Research Institute into the Economic and Social Research Institute. This approval for a central social research organisation was crucially linked to the project of extending the scope of government programming to encompass social development as well as economic expansion.

This chapter examines the discourse around technology as it circulated among engineers and technology bureaucrats. Through an analysis of the writings and policies of Miyamoto Takenosuke, a high-level technology bureaucrat and spokesperson for the engineers’ movement, it discusses how engineers defined technology as comprehensive social planning. In the 1930s, engineers flocked to the colonies to “construct East Asia” through large-scale infrastructure projects and economic planning studies. In this context, Miyamoto and others developed such notions as “comprehensive technology” (sōgō gijutsu), which coordinated infrastructure projects such as flood control, transportation, land reclamation, and hydropower dam construction to achieve the most effective results and therefore, appeal to the colonized. In sum, this chapter examines how colonial ideology worked through tropes of modernization and technical development, as opposed to backward looking, spiritualist discourses of emperor worship and Japanese racial superiority.

Chapter 6 examines the relationship between the programming state and social research. Initial crisis conditions had enabled increased social spending to be left off the government programmers’ agenda. The changed politics of increasing prosperity, as well as their own expanding ambitions, meant that this could no longer be sustained during the 1960s. Ireland’s social security provision became an object of both political debate and social scientific analysis in this period. The official response to this ferment was a Social Development Programme to which the ESRI was initially seen as a vital provider of inputs. During the 1960s a Save the West movement challenged both programmers and governing politicians. The official response to this challenge involved new structures for rural development with which the social sciences interacted as well as expanded social welfare provision to a class of smallholders whose resilience would later become an object of significant sociological study. As the 1960s proceeded, however, Irish state plans and programmes had to contend with an increasingly difficult external environment with which they ultimately failed to cope.

This chapter reveals opposition to tendencies towards scientistic and/or technocratic paternalism—a complex of ideas and inclinations identified here as ‘managerialism’—to have been central to Berlin’s post-war political concerns. The ‘managerial’ strains in post-war Western (and particularly British) thought, and their antecedents, are traced, as is Berlin’s perception of and reaction to these trends in his writings on politics, the philosophy of history, and the nature of the social sciences. The importance of his reaction against the various facets of ‘managerialism’ for Berlin’s thought is demonstrated; and his political and philosophical responses to these trends are compared to those of other prominent ‘anti-managerial’ and anti-scientistic liberals of the post-war period: Aron, Friedrich Hayek, and Karl Popper.

This chapter discusses the Idea of Development, which appears to emerge variously. It looks at the twelve questions of ‘planned’ social change and reverts to some historical collections of ideas concerning development. The chapter also takes into consideration the Third World ideas of development and looks at development as developmentalism.

Legal positivism generally views law as a genre of artifact. Hart’s de-emphasis on function is seen as a response to Fuller and Dworkin’s mistakes. The inclusive/exclusive debate is understood as being over the role of law’s function. Little practical difference between the two positions is seen except perhaps in treatment of individuals who deny the validity of certain laws generally in force, although the focus on law’s artifactual nature leans toward the exclusive position. Legal validity is seen as an aspect of law’s institutionality. A spectrum of the six jurisprudential positions is given based on their views about legal validity’s dependence on morality. Comparison is made between seeing the law as a genre of institutionalized artifact and as a species of social planning. It is argued that Searlean institutionality better explains the endurance of law than Scott Shapiro’s notion of plans, and that Shapiro’s notion of self-certification is ad hoc.

Chapter expands on the Determinism vs. Indeterminism debate and explores whether a deterministic socio-political theory can consistently advocate a social activism with the aim of thereby bringing about a future state whose eventuation the respective theory regards as determined by historical causation.

This chapter presents a case study on urban intervention teams. Intervention teams spring into action to deal with families if there are suspicions that things are going seriously wrong. It involves house visits along with a series of actions that must eventually lead to improvement in the living circumstances of households and whole neighborhoods. Depending on the nature and aims of a project, the parties involved will include municipal departments, housing associations, welfare organizations, the police, health-care institutions, labor-mediation organizations, debt-relief institutions, community workers, welfare benefit services, schools, and youth-care associations. Despite criticisms, the relevant literature suggests a relatively large degree of confidence that an integral approach will lead to the disappearance of the barriers between organizations, and to a better approach to the problem: so-called decompartmentalization. The underlying train of thought is that the participating parties will be inspired and motivated to collaborate more, which should lead to a more effective approach to security and livability. The chapter attempts to verify this claim by examining the power game currently playing out in the Social Investment Plan (SIP), a project team that tries to regulate livability and insecurity in Amsterdam neighborhoods, in conjunction with housing associations, relief workers, and welfare-benefit institutions.

The conclusion outlines the basic arguments of the book and provides a moral to the story. Every person can imagine a unique life purpose. The theoretical possibilities are seemingly unlimited, but external realities constrain us all. Our salvation appears to be the product of social luck, yet we retain the ability to create meaning in the world, no matter what fate has sent our way. That tension is at the heart of the way people find their purpose in life. It is in our nature to attribute meaning to our every experience in the world. Most remarkably, we create meaning out of abstractions, like love, Truth, beauty, God, and life. To do so is uniquely human.