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Mark Clapson (2012) Working Class Suburbs: Social Change on an English Council Estate, 1930–2010 .Manchester:Manchester University Press. 260pp., £65, hbk.

Empirically, the liberal strategy and social democratic strategy refer only to the UK and Sweden respectively (ibid., pp. 373–6), while the hybrid strategy is explicitly applied only in Barbier’s chapter on France (pp. 164–5). Furthermore, the chapters on Germany, Italy, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland are only peripherally concerned with the social investment state and do not attempt to apply the hybrid strategy. Instead, the authors stress their country’s national distinctiveness as in the German and Italian cases, or the regional distinctiveness of post-communist countries of Eastern Europe in terms of social citizenship. The argument in support of the social investment state is further undermined by the coeditors’ internal critique of the concept. Thus, conditionality may be targeted at the ‘long-term unemployed and minorities excluded from the worlds of labour who are suspected of being too passive or even immoral or “work-shy”’ (Evers and Guillemard, p. 22). Social investment may also be targeted by selecting beneficiaries deemed able to return ‘the most profitable investment with optimal yield’ (ibid., p. 364). This selectivity raises ‘the danger of leaving individuals to themselves when they have to make decisions and plan their lives’ because ‘Not all individuals have the same ability to think strategically about their options’ (ibid., pp. 364–5). This increases the risks of ‘stigmatizing the weakest’ and ‘exacerbating social divisions’ (ibid., p. 365). This also ‘carries the risk of “dualizing” the system of social protection’ by ‘classifying certain categories as second-class citizens’ (ibid., p. 367), thereby weakening the legitimacy of ‘welfare systems’ (p. 385). Finally, the argument for the social investment state is undermined by the fact that the chapters were ‘completed before’ the current ‘international crisis broke out’ in 2008 (p. 3). This has made a ‘gloomy scenario’ in terms of the European social model ‘more probable’ with national governments preoccupied with ‘cutting social spending’ to reduce national debts (p. 384). Furthermore, this strategy ‘may actualize all the potential risks related to the shift in welfare rhetoric towards the “activating social investment agenda”’ (p. 385). Overall, this suggests that, while the concept of a social investment state may be logically coherent, it is comparatively and empirically limited in practise within Europe; and that its distinctiveness may lie more in its rhetorical legitimation of ‘the cost-containment of welfare’ (p. 385) than as a qualitative change in the form of the welfare state.