The impacts of welfare conditionality: sanctions support and behaviour change

This book provides an original, empirically informed understanding of the impacts, effectiveness and ethicality of welfare conditionality at it plays out over time within the lives of a diversity of welfare recipients. Utilising the qualitative, longitudinal dataset generated by the five year ESRC funded Welfare Conditionality project (which is unique in both its size and scope), the book offers analysis grounded in the understandings and experiences of welfare service users subject to welfare conditionality to consider three core questions. First, how effective is conditionality in promoting and sustaining movements into paid work and/ or the cessation of problematic behaviour? Second, how is welfare conditionality perceived and experienced over time by welfare recipients and what are its impacts on people’s circumstances, behaviour and opportunities? Third, under what circumstances (if any), and why, might the use of welfare conditionality be justified