Does social policy need a new textbook? For more than 30 years, I taught social policy at Edinburgh University. I taught at all levels from introductory courses for first-year undergraduates to specialised courses for final year students and MSc students, but I don’t think I ever taught from a textbook. When I started out, the dominant approach was a service-based one with the emphasis placed on what were known as ‘the social services’. This soon gave way to a more thematic and conceptual approach. The service-based approach was first complemented by – and then, to a significant extent, displaced by – courses dealing with the history of social policy, comparative approaches to social policy, the nature of ‘the welfare state’ and the theoretical foundations of social policy, in which the relations between social policy, social need and social justice were the focus of concern.

The assumption underlying Exploring Welfare Debates: Key Concepts and Questions is that social policy involves a set of ideas. The book does not divide the subject matter of social policy into a set of policy areas, e.g. education, employment, health, housing, social security, taxation and so on, and each of these policy areas is referred to throughout the book in the context of discussions of the concepts that underlie and inform the subject as a whole.

The range of topics covered in the book is very wide: the definition of and justifications for welfare; the nature of welfare and well-being; human and social rights; equality and citizenship; universality, selectivity and the mixed economy of welfare; the family; neo-liberalism; globalisation; austerity and the ‘crisis of the welfare state’; risk; social control; participation and empowerment. It is impossible to summarise the author’s discussion of these topics, not least because he does not attempt to minimise their complexity. What he does offer is a through discussion of complex ideas and their implications for policy. In doing so, he is judicious and fair-minded but the extent to which his book throws a fresh and distinctive light on complex relationships is an open question.

In the Introduction, Lee Gregory stresses the importance of reading key texts in the original but argues that students need some guidance before doing so in order that they can better engage with the arguments in them. To my surprise, he does not refer to his own experiences of using the book in this way. Thus, he doesn’t mention which courses he has used the book in, or the stage the students had reached in their studies. My sense is that the discussion is too dense for it to be very useful for first-year students, who are likely to be intimidated by the 370 references included in the bibliography. I think it would have been better to focus on fewer references and to have alerted students to considerations that it would be helpful for them to consider when they come to read the key texts in the original later on.

Instead of using the book before students have read the key texts in the original, perhaps the book could be used with students at the end of the course when they have already read the key texts and are, or ought to be, familiar with the references included in the bibliography.

The question I wish to address in this review is what use I would have made of Lee Gregory’s textbook Exploring Welfare Debates: Key Concepts and Questions. The first thing to note about it is that it is a single-authored book which aims to be comprehensive in its coverage and includes the whole range of topics that undergraduates studying social policy would expect to cover at university.

In reading this book, I asked myself whether I would have used it in my teaching of social policy to undergraduates. I have to say that I think it is unlikely that I would have done so because the material I expected students to read were key texts in the original and this book presents the author’s ‘take’ on the ideas that inform social policy. Students taking my courses would have got my take on the topics that were covered. Their knowledge of these topics would have been shaped, in part, by my approach to them and, in part, by the primary sources they would have been required to read and think about. I might have used Ruth Lister’s single-authored textbook but that is because she has a very distinctive ‘take’ on a range of issues including poverty and deprivation, inequality and social justice and gender. Lee Gregory does not, as far as I have been able to detect, have a comparably distinctive take on social policy and, for this reason, I can’t see how I would have used it in my teaching.

Exploring Welfare Debates: Key Concepts and Questions is comprehensive in its coverage, clear in its exposition and mainstream in its approach. I have little doubt that the author is a very competent teacher and it is clear that he has a good grasp of social policy as it is generally understood. However, whether social policy needs a new textbook – and, if it does, why this is the book that it needs and what ‘gap’ it seeks to fill – are questions that the author does not address.