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Drawing on nearly ten years' experience of developing and managing social firms in Edinburgh, Sheila Durie makes the case for creating real jobs to complement the government's ‘Welfare to Work’ and ‘New Deal’ initiatives.

In the May issue of A life in the day, we flagged up the imminent establishment of a new Service Development Network aiming to encourage the development of better employment, training and work rehabilitation opportunities for users and ex‐users of mental health services. This new national network, WorkNet, is now up and running and in this issue its co‐ordinator, Patience Seebohm, outlines its aims and activities for its first year.

While there have been many innovations in the field of work rehabilitation in recent years, there is still a paucity of research in this area. Nevertheless, interest in this area is steadily growing, and in this issue we include short profiles of two research networks that have emerged in the last couple of years‐the Mental Health Employment Research Network and the Inclusion Research Network. Interest in the newer service models has also gathered pace, and we profile Social Firms UK and its regional networks. These networks are playing a key role in encouraging the development of better quality options for work and meaningful daytime occupation.

Intergenerational confinement is an under-recognized, policy-driven issue which greatly impacts Indigenous and racialized peoples in countries with ongoing colonial legacies. Numerous policy solutions enacted over colonial history have exacerbated instead of mitigated this situation. This chapter advances an improved understanding of the impacts of carceral legacies, moving beyond the dominant focus of parental incarceration in the literature. Focusing on Indigenous peoples, multiple generations in families and communities have been subjected to changing methods of confinement and removal. Using critical policy analysis and interview research, this chapter interrogates these intergenerational impacts of carceral policy-making in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 124 people in the three case countries, this chapter centers perspectives of people who have been intergenerationally confined in carceral institutions. With a goal of transformation, it then explores an alternative orientation to policy-making that seeks to acknowledge, account for, and address the harmful direct and indirect ripple-effects of carceral strategies over generations.

The Social Return on Investment (SROI) framework has been developed for mapping and measuring social impact. It may be used for legitimating organisations and projects. The framework is often criticised for its overemphasis of the SROI ratio, i.e. the relationship between monetised benefits and costs. This study aims to demonstrate how the SROI method legitimates organisations or projects with multiple other discursive ways besides the SROI ratio. It also discusses the status of these other ways of legitimation in relation to the quantifying and monetising core tendency of SROI.

The empirical data consist of an SROI guidebook and 12 SROI reports. Their study applies Theo van Leeuwen’s ideas for analysing the discursive legitimation of social practices. The study takes place broadly in the framework of Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, aided by qualitative content analysis.

In the analysis, the full spectrum of the van Leeuwenian legitimation means used by SROI – authorisation, rationalisation, moral evaluation and mythopoetical narration – is brought out in the data and the status and social context of the legitimation means are assessed and discussed. It is shown that there is existing potential for broader and more visible use of different legitimation means.

Based on the findings of the study, suggestions for the improvement of SROI reporting by a more balanced explicit use of the multitude of legitimation means are presented.

The study is original both in its subject (the spectrum of legitimation in SROI) and its method (qualitative discursive and contentual analysis of SROI as a legitimating discourse).