This collection starts from the observation both that the concepts deployed by social policy communities vary across space and time and that the same word rarely has a consensual definition across national cases. The book then proceeds to present this variation, usually over time, in a set of chapters treating countries and a few transnational institutions. The choice of cases remains within the OECD world, ranging over Western and Eastern Europe as well as Japan and South Korea, the United States and New Zealand. The book remains, in other words, within the long-standing tradition of methodological nationalism. The editors wait until the concluding chapter and their proposals for a research agenda to raise the need for analysis of the diffusion of concepts, whether cross-nationally or from the transnational level.

All chapters are of interest to and useful for social policy analysts, being by leading experts with deep knowledge of her or his case. In all chapters, the descriptive and analytic focus is on accounting for the social policy concepts: what they are (usually in their original language); how they have changed; and what they are currently. At times, references are made to the same concept in other countries or regions, but only two of the eleven national-level chapters provide a systematic structured comparison across cases. These are Denmark and Sweden (Edlig, Petersen and Petersen) in one chapter and Hungary and Poland (Aczél, Szelewa and Szikra) in another. Additional chapters are at another scale. One follows the OECD's shifting conceptualisation of social policy goals (Mahon). Another looks at the general and shifting framing of ‘development’ by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (Vetterlein), conceptualisations which range far from the social policy domain that is the focus of the rest of the book. Finally, one chapter presents and critiques pertinent concepts used in some discussions of social policy in the European Union (Barbier).

No matter its focus, each chapter provides a nuanced description of the use of particular concepts in each setting. All chapters examine a case over time. The time frames vary, with some treating concepts’ history since the nineteenth century (most of the national cases) and others being shorter, as appropriate for the international organisations created after 1945. Nonetheless, in all chapters the story of the concepts’ lives is detailed and informative. This book merits attention.

The promise made by the editors is that the ‘volume explores the politics and history of social policy language and concepts’ (pp. 143, 1‒2). The collection lives up well to its promise of providing a history of one or more concepts in each chapter. Thus, Daniel Wincott's chapter on Britain carefully explores and corrects any potted history of Britain as the iconic post-1945 welfare state, by documenting earlier disputes about the very idea, thus extending the history back in time as well as beyond the trente glorieuses. Similarly, the chapters on Denmark and Sweden, on Finland (Kettunen), on Hungary and Poland, on New Zealand (Lunt), on Japan (Shinkawa and Tsuji), among others, track the stories of conceptual adjustment over time and provide new light on these frequently or less frequently analysed cases.

Chapters that deliver on the promise of analysing the politics of social policy language are decidedly fewer. To be sure, Rianne Mahon's analysis of the OECD's conceptual slide toward the concept of active society tells the story as, in part, one of internal controversy among directorates and within the leadership. Ana Guillén and David Luque not only attribute conceptual positions to different actors in Spanish politics but also in part organise the presentation of the narrative by actors. Kees Van Kersbergen and Jaap Woldendorp even more systematically present the positions of the different political families in the development of the Dutch ‘caring state’, while Korean concepts are arrayed over time by Huck-ju Kwon in relationship to political dynasties. Nonetheless, this welcome attention to the politics of social policy language rarely structures the chapters so as to account for which version ‘wins out’. We read about the various versions carried by actors, but rarely about why or even how they came to dominate. Description trumps explanation.

These observations lead to three general issues and comments about the collection: how the corpus for tracing conceptual developments was selected; underlying theories; and the contributions of the book.

Few if any authors explicitly present a strategy for identifying the body of writings that constitute the universe (or the sample) to be analysed. Some are reasonably clear to the reader, because only official documents or key public pronouncements are presented. When individual academics are treated (for example, by Daniel Wincott on Britain), links to the contemporary political debates are clearly made. Nonetheless, even in these cases we are never assured that this historical work is based on systematic archival tracing. More questionable is the strategy adopted by some authors to simply treat as equivalents the conceptual work displayed in internal documents and the conceptual debate among observers, such as academics. For example, Jean-Claude Barbier's objections to the predominance of English terms in European discussions range from the concept of ‘activation’ – a politically useful albeit non-sociological concept (p. 71) used by decision-makers – to social investment. In this second case, only academics are cited, and the reader is provided with no indication of the actual relevance, if any, of this concept to social policy discussions by practitioners. In another research strategy, Daniel Béland follows four contested concepts ‘in France’ and describes the work of the key intellectuals promoting or critiquing them, but without making a systematic link to policy consequences.

This leads then to my second comment, about the theoretical grounding of the chapters. The collection is surprisingly light on theory, given the editors’ previous work. It starts from two assertions about goals for the field: (i) we need to get the definitions right, (ii) ‘while grasping the political consequences of social policy language’. There is ample evidence that the first goal is met. The historical narratives and linguistic tracing are immensely informative for the reader regarding the conceptual apparatus of each country or organisation. They get the definitions right.

However, with respect to the second goal, many authors assume there are political consequences rather than demonstrating them. This strategy is legitimate if the goal is simply to act as a historian of concepts, without promising to ‘grasp the consequences’ for policy choices or intervention. The bulk of the chapters remain in this territory, as noted. Then, at least one chapter (Vetterlein) adopts a Foucaultian position on the power of discourse, and therefore does not need to identify processes leading to the policy consequences of Bank and IMF discursive shifts. Stephan Lessenich's chapter on Germany, in contrast, adopts an interesting social theoretical stance about the drive in the German ‘language game’ towards consensus and win-win solutions, an underlying process that he actually shows has led to shifts in rights and provision. Such an explicit theoretical argument is rare in the book, however. Most authors prefer to adopt the position that the differences in words over time must matter.

This position leads directly to my final comments. While constantly fascinated by the richness of the descriptions in this collection, I was regularly thrown back to the question: so what? What difference did this conceptual variety make? A first aspect of this question is directly related to the announced goal of the collection as being to grasp the consequences of conceptual debate and change. Rather than a direct analysis of the links between conceptual forms and policy direction, the standard practice in most of the chapters is to tell two parallel stories, one of policy direction and one of conceptual debate. Key analytical questions about timing are neither addressed nor, therefore, satisfactorily answered. At least three possible situations might be hypothesised. One would be that the conceptual adjustment preceded the policy choice, thereby somehow driving it. A second would be that the conceptual shift followed an already taken decision about social policy modification, and was a rationale for it. And, of course, the third possibility would be an interactive process between the two, in a complicated process of change requiring systematic tracing. Setting two stories – one of policy development and one of conceptual adjustment – side by side does little to distinguish among these three possibilities. Therefore, for example, in the chapter on the United States, Jennifer Klein, Daniel Béland and Klaus Petersen revisit the well-documented terrain of social citizenship and inclusion (or exclusion), ploughed by feminists and other progressives for decades, to retell the policy story in parallel to one of shifting concepts. The question of cause and effect remains unanswered, however.

A second aspect of the so-what question results from the underlying presumption of the collection that conceptual clarity and getting the definitions right is important to social policy analysis. This position is of course wholly defensible if the target is historians of concepts or academic research in general. Of course, we should all seek conceptual clarity as well as being sensitive to conceptual differences in policy language whether across time, space or scale. Nonetheless, it is much more debatable to seek to identify ‘the’ definition of a concept in play when the analytic goal is understanding policy.

The very assumption that a shared definition will exist is contested within the policy literature, an observation to which the book pays little attention. In his chapter on Germany, Stephan Lessenich does document the drive to consensus and identifies the process as a characteristic of the German case. Rianne Mahon points out (correctly I believe) the political uses of under-defined concepts in allowing the OECD to move certain files forward. But Jean-Claude Barbier rails against lack of conceptual clarity, while the editors justify their book with the critical observation that ‘researchers have rightly complained about the vagueness of core concepts used in contemporary social policy debates’ (p. 1), an accusation targeting ‘practitioners’ as well as ‘social policy students’.

This call for clarity among practitioners goes against the current of research, however. The policy literature itself has turned to analyses of what might be termed the political uses of ambiguity. It is a defensible position, as I have claimed several times, to argue that the most useful concepts for making social policy are often quasi-concepts, characterised by their ambiguity, rather than concepts characterised by sociological rigour. Similarly, Bruno Palier has long suggested the political use of ‘ambiguous agreement’ in building coalitions of support for altering social policy. James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen in their own edited book on Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power (Reference Mahoney and Thelen2010) chose to highlight the political role of ambiguity by using it in their subtitle. If the research agenda as laid out by the editors in the final chapter is to be realised (pp. 305 ff.), a better appreciation of the political uses of ambiguity needs to be incorporated into the agenda from the start.