Lone mother families are seen as a major policy problem facing governments throughout the OECD. Responses to this problem in New Zealand, as in many other countries, are couched in terms of imposing work and training programmes to encourage exit from dependency on government financial support. This article uses ideas of ‘needs talk’ and discourse coalitions to explore the language of policy framing. Two periods in the development of the women's movement in New Zealand during which opportunities within political institutions have been available to women are examined. It is argued that an unintended consequence of naming needs for many women has been to contribute to the marginalisation of needs of lone mothers and indirectly to encourage policies which seek control and normalisation of this group.

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Industrialization, technological change and overall economic development are often cited as important factors in the development of welfare states. This article examines the importance of cycles in economic activity and cycles in technological innovation to enhancing our understanding of welfare. The history of technological change in health-care services is used to illustrate the argument.

Julian Le Grand has argued that a key component of welfare reform involves changes in the assumptions about human behaviour which are embedded in social policies. Policy assumptions have been transformed from espousing a belief that social service providers act as well-intentioned knights and recipients as passive pawns, to a stance in which all participants are regarded as selfseeking knaves. These ideas are particularly pertinent to policy developments concerning ®nancial obligations for children, and this paper examines these issues in relation to child support policy in New Zealand. It highlights the evident and inevitable failure of this policy to meet its primary stated aim of revenue generation. In New Zealand this failure is compounded by the creation of parallel systems for dealing with children and families, one for ®nancial obligations and the other for care and development, which are founded on diametrically opposed assumptions about human behaviour and capabilities. This confusion is symptomatic of a wider failure in government policy towards families in New Zealand.

The objective of this article is to explore aspects of the nature and process of exchange in welfare systems. The welfare exchange was the focus of much discussion in the early 1970s stemming from the writings of Titmuss, Pinker and Pruger, and this article starts with a review of that debate. In searching for a more adequate theoretical framework it argues that Gouldner's work on reciprocity, beneficence and complementarity provides that framework. A model of exchange on an interpersonal level is put forward in which welfare exchanges are viewed as lying along a continuum reflecting the notions of reciprocity and beneficence, with exchanges at each end of the continuum being represented by the two types of complementarity. Dependency, power and disequilibrium are seen as crucial factors in the exchange process, and the total pattern of exchanges is shown to be strongly influenced by the pattern of resource generation and availability within which all exchanges occur. Different types of social services are located at various points along the exchange continuum, and these are seen as reflecting differing relationships between service donors and individual service recipients. The final section of the article is concerned with discussing the influence of the interaction between ‘servers’ employed by agencies and service recipients.