Social Analysis in an enabling society
Life-course perspectives play only a modest role in current social policy-making. However, once life-course concepts are routinely captured in social statistics, and once supporting analytic tools are more fully developed, they have the potential to radically improve practical policy analysis. To provide some sense of the scope of this change, the article examines an older, ‘social accounting’ framework that was developed some three decades ago in order to support the pre-computer, government-centric, welfare-state version of social policy that then existed. It compares this framework with a current ‘Olivia’ framework that is being designed to support the information-age, citizen-centric, enabling-society view of social policy that is now emerging. The big difference is the addition of a broad version of life-course perspectives along the lines associated with the work of Paul Bernard. Bernard opened new and potentially powerful avenues for social scientists to make important practical contributions to a more relevant, future-looking social policy. In making its argument, the article discusses the ways in which any social research can affect policy. It also explores the interactions among social policies themselves, the data and analytic tools that support social policy, and the information technology that is transforming both policy and analysis. It concludes that large changes in both social policies and social analysis are on the near horizon, including a blurring of the lines between policy and analysis.