This essay in introduction is to the field of study, rather than to the present, itself distinguished, collection of papers. As such, it opens with a series of 'flashbacks': to the ways in which social policy, and the study of social policy, developed out of the interaction between Western welfare states (in this case Britain) and Asia Pacific. The main body of the article then charts the increasing presence of East Asian modes of welfare within comparative social policy, before going on to distinguish between the different types of approach to East Asian welfare study which have so far been adopted. Two sets of three-part criteria have been adopted for the purposes of classification: focusing first on the dimensions (single case studies of specific countries; East Asia as a region; East Asia in comparison with other parts of the world) and second on the level of issues (matters of policy; of welfare system; of welfare regime) characteristic of each study in question. The article concludes with a restatement of its purpose: not to question the adequacy of hitherto Western (notably, Esping-Andersen) approaches to the study of welfare regimes, but to demonstrate the need for a substantive extension to their scope.

This paper starts from the proposition that approaches to crime and penal policy in contemporary Britain are of a piece with approaches to social policy across a number of fronts. "The New Social Policy" is examined in terms of "the stakeholder idea", its implications for how people are meant to behave, and the distance between this and socioeconomic realities. The paper then explores various sectors of stakeholder social policy in their new order of importance-employment and training, education, health care, social care, housing, social security-before commenting on policies in respect of crime and crime prevention, in the light of the foregoing observations and with particular reference to the "lock-'em-up" tendency. The paper concludes that stakeholdership is no recipe for crime prevention

It Was An Honour To Be Invited To contribute to this special issue, yet I hesitated to take up the invitation. A learned journal is no place for expressions of wifely tribute, had such ever been my style, and I am not a political scientist. In the end, however, it was precisely the lack of specialist qualification which persuaded me. Sam's influence and appeal, as both scholar and teacher, were after all never confined to the realms of political science per se – any more than were his sources of reference and inspiration.

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This article explores the emergence and elaboration of regional and special issues of Social Policy & Administration (SP&A) from the contrasting perspectives of the two editors principally involved in their production as a distinctive feature of the journal.Catherine Jones Finer, who retired from editorial involvement in 2007, writes from memory of her own experience (which featured the introduction of regional then special issues as an ongoing series) drawing on the run of printed copies of SP&A still in her possession. Bent Greve then draws on his own access to a much wider and more up-to-date range of documents to trace trends and developments over time, not merely in the content of the regional and special issues themselves, but in the increasingly international and supra-national social policy environment to which they relate.