First published in 1998. This book attempts to contribute a new framework for social research in the welfare field. As such, it engages with new theories, new approaches and new methods, alongside a constructive critique of both the old and the new. It attempts to illustrate approaches to conceptualization and operationalization within policy-relevant research, to reflect and explore both “new” thinking in social theory and in welfare policy, as well as to maintain a connection with “old” concerns. Our concern is with welfare research—both theory and method— broadly defined as the wider landscape of policy and provision captured, in the past at least, by the notion of the “welfare state”. The “new” thinking with which the book is primarily concerned involves a shift away from seeing people as the passive beneficiaries of “welfare” provided through state interventions and professional expertise and from seeing them as fixed single social categories of “poor”, “old”, “single parent” or as one dimensional, objective socio-economic classifications.