According to Roland, ‘home ownership has become so culturally embedded in most societies that it seems odd, for most, to question it (p. 52). It is his contention however, that the unchallenged dominance of home ownership has fundamental implications for levels of social inequality, the distribution of risk in society and the future of welfare provision. The Ideology of Home Ownership provides an array of evidence and analytical tools to enable readers to understand and look critically at the dominance of the owner-occupied housing tenure in six ‘homeowner societies’.

Roland begins by conceptualising and theorising political ideology, home ownership and how they relate to forms of governance and welfare systems. His aim is to re-centre the debate and move away from simplistic accounts of the relationship between political parties and tenure approaches, and between tenure and political attitudes (in particular associations of home ownership and conservatism). Instead, he argues that the meanings attached to home ownership effect relationships between the state, market and individual/family in complex, subtle and dynamic (rather than hierarchical and coercive) ways.

He argues that the power of home ownership ideology is ubiquitous and embedded in discourses, with state institutions, market intermediaries and residents all effected by and complicit in its creation and maintenance. Normalising discourses have ‘semantically hijacked’ the meaning of the ‘home’ to be synonymous with owner occupation; constructed owner occupation as natural and necessary for family life and identified home owners as responsible citizens, by extension stigmatising those in rented housing. Roland's analysis cuts through these discourses showing how the apparent naturalness of the tenure reflects political strategies to promote home ownership rather than intrinsic, cultural preferences. In chapters 5–7, Roland documents the different pathways and mechanisms by which this has happened in six countries: he considers Britain, Australia and the United States as three examples of Anglo-Saxon homeowner societies and Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore as three East Asian examples of such societies.

Ronald's consideration of these home ownership regimes treads a careful path between convergence and divergence theories of globalisation, painstakingly documenting the ways in which these countries differ and are similar from the perspective of home ownership ideologies. He argues that, whilst the mechanisms and practices which have shaped Anglo-Saxon and East Asian homeowner societies differ, these two groups of counties can be characterised as forming two distinct regime types.

The Anglo-Saxon home ownership model is one of property-based citizenship, which relates to processes of individualisation and neo-liberal restructuring of welfare practices, according to which citizens are being formed into ‘investor subjects’, increasingly responsible for accruing and maintaining financial assets through home ownership to meet their future needs for social care and an income in older age. In this emerging model of asset-based welfare, Roland argues that the dominance of home ownership and supporting ideologies are facilitating the re-commodification of welfare goods, the individualisation of risk and ultimately the retrenchment of the welfare state.

In East Asian, homeowner societies by contrast, the growth and dominance of home ownership has occurred in a context of minimum citizenship rights and a strong imperative to achieve economic growth. This has had profound implications for the housing market, ensuring a pattern of strong government control over planning and construction in tandem with a highly commodified housing market. Within these regimes, housing consumption patterns and the dominance of home ownership have been fostered to support the provision of welfare through the family to support self-reliance and undercut the need for publicly provided welfare goods and services. In the context of growing instability in the housing market and faltering house-price inflation however, increasing pressure has begun to mount in these regimes for public welfare provision.

In these ways, Roland shows the radically different foundations of home ownership society in Anglo-Saxon and East Asian regimes and the opposite paths they are currently taking in relation to welfare provision. In spite of this divergence however, some similar facets of the two regimes are worth drawing out. Firstly, in all homeowner societies political sponsorship has been integral to establishing the ‘tenure imperialism’ of owner occupation. Secondly, in spite of this, home ownership has been constructed as the normal and natural tenure, and, thirdly, home ownership has become bound up in discourses with resistance to radical political change and social stability.

Roland's book is a triumph, rich with insights, intellectually rigorous and politically challenging. It is ambitious in its attempt to blend theoretical rigour with cross-national empirical comparisons of the discursive and non-quantifiable aspects of housing systems. It is, furthermore, brave in its objective to acknowledge and resist the ‘socially reactionary nature of housing research’ (p. 13). For those with an interest in how housing systems relate to patterns of welfare provision, this book is perhaps most gratifying in its move beyond attempts to overlay housing policy onto existing typologies of welfare regimes (for example Esping-Anderson's Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism). Instead, Roland starts again, developing a framework beginning from the premise that housing systems are of fundamental and increasing importance in structuring relationships between the state, market and individual or family.

In addition to its innovative methodology, ambitious scope and painstaking empirical analysis, The Ideology of Home Ownership is also a personally challenging book, reminding those reading from within homeowner societies that one tenure has come to ‘define the normal, appropriate or ideal way of organizing domestic life’ (p. 241) in ways that ultimately constrain individual interpretations and choices about the best housing options.