Talk of social policy always carries an appeal to values: a sense of what matters, or of wrongs that need righting. Even the most dispassionate analysis happens for a reason. And at least part of that motivation will lie in a sense of concern about the state of the world. This doesn’t mean that social policy talk hooks up simply with this or that grand conception of social justice. What we actually mean by ‘injustice’, for example, is often left implicit or hazy. Even so, that we mean something by it, and treat it as a priority, is crucial to how social policy happens, both as a field of practice and as an academic subject.

This handbook is not only about social policy, nor aimed only at social policy people; it is pitched to an audience across the social sciences. Yet every chapter speaks to the ways in which social justice matters in social policy, and the value of exploring how these two relate. The result is a timely, abundant and vital resource – for practitioners, as well as in the academic setting. While it has gaps and limitations, these are themselves instructive, for reasons returned to below.

It comes in four main parts, following an introduction by the editor and a chapter by Phil Parvin on theories of justice, offering a flavour, if not a full panorama, of their different takes and purposes since the discussion was given a reboot by the agenda-setting work of John Rawls (Reference Rawls1971). The chapters in Part I connect social justice to a series of spheres: successively income and work (Andrew Sayer), social welfare (John Hudson), democracy (David Beetham) and poverty and inequality (Stewart Lansley). They should ideally be read together, for a richly illuminating picture of how different strands in recent theory apply to the distribution of resources and rights, particularly under contemporary capitalism. Even between them these chapters don’t cover everything, of course, and we might wonder why a wider range of issues were not included at this formative stage of the book. (A very welcome chapter on civil society, for example, is positioned later among areas of practice, when it might equally be placed at the more general, framing level.)

Part II addresses how social justice issues play out in a series of national contexts: Canada, Australia, France, Germany, the United States and South Africa. It’s here that the ‘global’ aspect of the book’s title is mirrored most directly in its contents. The international spectrum is evidently not complete: no Asian or South American countries feature, and South Africa is in many ways not typical of its continent. The chapters go about their business in different ways, and with different kinds of focus – mostly general treatments of how social justice plays out under different polities and versions of the welfare state, but sometimes much more specific: the Australia chapter addresses the place of indigenous children in the care system. And they sit separately, without any ongoing comparative thread or an overarching setting-out of themes. But each, on its own terms, offers a very valuable window on the country in question.

Part III unpacks social justice in terms of equalities: race, gender, disability, ageing, sexualities, human rights in general and the environment. The chapter on disability, by Tom Shakespeare and Nicholas Watson, offers a particularly resonant example of what happens when writers move with ease and nuance between the domains of theory (in this case, a critical defence of the capabilities approach), policy and practice. But the more empirically-centred chapters, such as Kirstein Rummery’s on gender equality, are equally dexterous: this one giving provocative analysis of care work, political participation and violence against women and girls as examples of how adopting a non-individualistic, non-androcentric paradigm will alter the fleshing-out of what achieving social justice means. This part of the book would stand solidly by itself as an overview of how social justice issues arise, and are navigated, in connection with different groups.

And Part IV, the largest by some way, is entitled Social Justice in Practice. Here the sweep of issues is very broad, from the general and institutional (public policy, law) to specific areas of policy (migration, community development, health, education, transport, housing, employment, religion, children) to other aspects of social relations not yet covered elsewhere (civil society, culture and identity, philanthropy, and visual storytelling, as an example of the relevance of the media). It’s quite a panorama. These are chapters that will be cherry-picked according to the reader’s interests, because that’s what handbooks are for. And it’s here we find most of what makes this one really distinctive. The combination of themes and topics, to my knowledge, has no equivalent in other such books. Alongside this, there is a good deal of distinctiveness within the chapters. Some again work from quite a developed theoretical bedrock (as with Nick Ellison’s public policy chapter, which sets out the balance between key values before relating them to topical policy examples); others move more continuously between issues and concepts (with Jenny Phillimore’s on migration an especially effective example); and others, like Jonathan Bradshaw’s on children, track their chosen focal points primarily through data – in his case, on international comparisons. Gary Craig’s civil society chapter is derived from primary data from a particular study, of the values of workers within relevant organisations in the UK.

All of this diversity is an asset. While the book clearly lacks comprehensiveness in terms of global coverage, it incorporates a truly impressive range of issues, themes and ways of coming at social justice. It moves between the normative and the empirical in ways that are only very rarely found in texts on social justice in political philosophy, or sociology. Alongside this comes some unnecessary repetition. (We keep getting reintroduced to Rawls and Nancy Fraser, just to take two examples, which makes you wonder whether we could somehow have gotten more of that business out of the way at the start, however difficult it is not to keep flagging the big names.) There are also, as we’ve mentioned, places where some treatment of cross-cutting themes – for example, at the start of each Part? – would have really helped organize, disambiguate and reinforce key aspects of concern.

But across it, I found that what might seem limitations from one angle also enhance the way the handbook works. The variety of lines of discussion among the chapters itself conveys the complexity of relations between the descriptive, the explanatory and the normative; or (another point) between the ways frameworks of social justice are defined, interpreted, applied, realized, interrogated and critiqued across different areas of social concern. For a social policy audience, because of the tendency to assume that something is a social justice issue without always elaborating on exactly why or how, this is all – arguably – especially valuable.

So this is just the kind of book we need. That we also need more like it (because it only goes so far) only reinforces that point.