target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_5fe08aef-0634-5a6a-962a-54469f817c09">2018). Moreover, the health and social crisis has further exposed many fictions, myths and lies: that free markets can deliver healthcare for all; that unpaid care work is not work; that we live in a post-racist world; that we are all in the same boat (Williams, 2021). Across every sphere, the impacts of COVID-19 are exacerbated for women and girls, the poorest and the most vulnerable in society and the developing countries (UN, 2020b; WBG, 2020). The world faces a “catastrophic moral failure” because of unequal COVID-19 vaccine policies, the Director-General of the WHO has warned. The price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries.8
We are likely to see significant changes in how society works as a result of COVID-19.9 Already, we find that the crisis is transformatory in many ways. There is major governmental intervention at levels unprecedented in peacetime. Politicians and political parties are (mostly) united behind the raft of emergency packages, budgets and fiscal stimulus. Strong welfare states are once again the best automatic stabilizers in times of crisis, as unemployment soars, and new safety nets and aid packages have been designed and extended to help protect businesses and the self-employed in some contexts. Universal healthcare systems are the most powerful of policy instruments in a health crisis. Each night a grateful public in many countries like France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the UK, paid tribute to the carers and frontline workers dealing with the coronavirus pandemic (‘clap for carers’), a positive affirmation and display of social solidarity, and growing understanding of ‘social value’ created not by market forces but by society as a whole.10
The ‘social’ of social policy
Theorising ‘the social’ has a rich history in the social sciences, although notions and conceptions of the social are not always precisely defined.11 The term ‘social policy’ has also itself received a lot of critical scrutiny over the years yet there is no standard definition. Interest in exploring the ‘comparative’ and ‘global’ dimensions of the social of social policy continues to grow, as does work uncovering the origins of social policy with the framing of the ‘social question’ that demanded ‘social reform’ and ‘social policy’ and ‘social rights’ of citizenship as a growing response to the privations of the 19th century (Kaufmann, 2013).12
In all of this endeavour we find the search for a better understanding of the social, the social sphere and social life (of the state and of civil society), and we learn more about the conceptual challenges associated with drawing clear distinctions between the economic and the political realm, or the ‘public’, private, market and familial spheres; these are familiar distinctions and complex institutions that have long interested moral philosophers and social theorists alike, from Adam Smith ([1759] 2009) and Hegel ([1821] 1967) to Jürgen Habermas ([1962] 1989), Daniel Bell ([1977] 1996), Axel Honneth (1995a) and Carole Pateman (1988) for example.13 What does the ‘social’ mean in social policy debates, shaped by culture and history, and what does or might it increasingly mean in a transnational context in the work of the international organizations, the United Nations (UN) and International Labour Organization (ILO) for example (Emmerij et al, 2001; Bellucci and Weiss, 2020), and from a global social policy perspective (see also recent discussions of the social question(s) in global times by Bogalska-Martin and Matteudi, 2018; Breman et al, 2019; Faist, 2019; Leisering, 2021).
In this volume, then, we hold the idea of the ‘social’ in social policy up to fresh scrutiny. In so doing, we build on earlier works, along with some of our work, that has critically discussed the nature of the ‘social’ in social welfare (Clarke, 1996, 2007; Lewis et al, 2000; and Clarke writing in Chapter 2) and in social policy (Corbett and Walker, 2017; Williams, 2021; and Walker, Chapter 8, and Williams, Chapter 11 in this volume), and with the ‘active’ turn in social policy (Mahon, 2014; Deeming, 2016; Bonoli, 2018). Further insightful works have critically examined the new and emerging conceptions of the ‘social’ influencing the development of social policy, influential ideas about ‘social investment’ (Jenson, 2010a; Laruffa, 2018) and ‘inclusive growth’ (Jenson, 2015a, 2015b); also ideas about ‘social exclusion’ (Béland, 2007; Winlow and Hall, 2013), ‘social inclusion’ (Dujon et al, 2013), and the growing body of work discussing ‘social inequality’, ‘social wellbeing’ and ‘social progress’ (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009, 2018 and Chapter 14 in this volume; Deeming, 2013 and Chapters 13 and 15), ideas about ‘social capital’ (Smith and Kulynych, 2002; Bebbington et al, 2004; McNeill, 2004; Ferragina and Arrigoni, 2017), ‘social solidarity’ (Stjernø, 2005; Barbier, 2013) and ‘social cohesion’ (Jenson, 2010b and Chapter 11 in this volume), along with conceptions of ‘social justice’ and ‘global social justice’ (Vosko, 2002; Craig, 2018 and Chapter 12 in this volume), ‘ecosocial’ perspectives (Fitzpatrick, 2001 and Chapter 6 in this volume; Koch and Fritz, 2014), ‘social innovation’ (Jenson, 2015c; Ayob et al, 2016) and ‘social entrepreneurship’ (Jenson, 2018), to name just some of the recent works critically exploring conceptions of the social of social policy.
Important