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Abstract The "passive" welfare state was accused of promoting a dependency culture. "Active" welfare and the "what works?" approach of Britain's New Labour government is allegedly implicated in an age of post‐emotionalism, in which people are largely indifferent to the needs of others and committed primarily to their personal well‐being. This article, first, seeks to extend recent debates about agency and motivation in social policy and relate them to the notion of post‐emotionalism. Second, it draws on a recent empirical study of popular and welfare provider discourses, which suggests that popular opinion can accommodate an appreciation of human interdependency, while welfare providers remain committed to a public service ethos. None the less, Third Way thinking is associated with a narrowing of solidaristic responsibilities. The problem for the future of health, social care and state welfare policies lies not with the imagined consequences of post‐emotionalism, so much as with an ideological context that perpetuates a distorted ethic of responsibility.

In its proposals for achieving a better 'work–life balance' for Britain's working families, the New Labour government is also seeking to balance the interests of business against the needs of families. This article argues that the economic policy 'trilemma' resulting from economic globalisation is mirrored in a parallel family policy trilemma, with particular consequences for the poorest families. Drawing upon this argument and, partly, upon illustrative evidence from a small-scale qualitative study of low-income working families, it is suggested that promoting family friendly employment alongside a policy of welfare-to-work cannot reasonably be achieved without significant additional regulation of low-paying employers.

This paper first describes the influence that environmentalism and ecologism have had upon thinking about citizenship before, second, moving on to discuss conventional models of citizenship and potential models of Green citizenship. The discussion focuses on the competing moral discourses that inform our understanding of citizenship and concludes by arguing in favour of an eco‐socialist citizenship model that would embrace, on the one hand, an ethic of co‐responsibility by which collectively to achieve the just distribution of scarce resources and, on the other, an ethic of care through which to negotiate the basis for human interdependency.

This article reports upon aspects of a small-scale qualitative study of lowincome working families. The study was conducted in the context of recent policy changes in Britain that are intended to promote labour force participation by low-income parents, especially mothers. It is argued that while popular opinion is generally supportive of mothers taking paid employment, some deep-rooted ambivalence remains. Mothers in lowincome families can experience the life-course transition involved as difficult in terms of the practical obstacles, the moral dilemmas and the ideological pressures. Without additional measures to support them in relation to their parental obligations, low-paid women are being pressed, at best, to exchange familial dependency for economic exploitation.

This conceptually oriented paper adopts a critical perspective on the question of social rights and asks whether, in contemporary circumstances, claims to social welfare based on rights can provide a meaningful basis for social resistance to poverty or oppression. Past approaches to the question of rights as a means of resistance are characterised as either opportunistic or anarchistic. Opportunistic approaches give rise to ameliorative compromise, anarchistic approaches to nihilistic or inherently hopeless struggle. Nonetheless, it is argued, it is possible to conceptualise rights to social welfare in ways that do not obscure the basis of social exploitation and that do project human need as the basis for social resistance.

Drawing on the results of a recently completed ESRC research project, this article advances three principal arguments. First, unprecedented social polarization in Britain and other liberal democracies in the last quarter of the 20th century now constitute poverty and wealth as socially constructed forms of exclusion from the realm of 'ordinary' citizenship. Second, that as the welfare state gives way to what has been characterized as the 'risk society', poverty and wealth as symbolic spectres now bear upon the quotidian anxieties and desires of virtually all citizens— whether they be poor, rich or 'comfortable'. Third, that discourses of cit izenship and popular values tend to draw on conflicting sets of traditions and moral repertoires; an insight which helps explain the ambiguity of political debate and social attitudes concerning the welfare state.