Drawing on interviews with welfare claimants living in Essex, UK, this article examines the material and symbolic effects of the UK government's 2012 Welfare Reform Act, and it highlights the participants' interpretations of and responses to that. In reaction to their sense of material and symbolic exclusion, participants made moral claims for their inclusion through a notion of social citizenship based on collective reciprocity and care. They claimed to have paid-in to the national purse in various material and moral ways until circumstances outside of their control meant they could no longer do so. They thus asserted a moral-economic right to social inclusion and an ensuing right to receive adequate, non-stigmatised, and non-punitive welfare. These moral-economic claims differ from other, more public, counter-narratives to welfare reform and government austerity, and they assert a clear but subtle opposition to the market-bound logic of the reform.

Ignorance and denial of the intentions and outcomes of transgressive activities are central to understanding how individuals and organisations bend, break, create and manipulate moral and legal rules. This chapter describes how these concepts have been used to understand crimes ranging from minor youthful delinquencies to major genocides and widespread environmental devastation. We begin by describing how ‘techniques of neutralisation’ are said to operate to release people from moral binds and enable transgression. We then turn to the concept of ‘pluralistic ignorance’ showing how it facilitates the commission of crimes and illustrating its pivotal role in patterning public reaction to crime and injury. Next, we examine how large and powerful organisations, in particular modern states, also manufacture ignorance and use neutralisation techniques in order to break and manipulate moral and legal rules. We then expand these perspectives to examine how states and corporations operate in conjunction to fog and deny the crimes and harms engendered by environmental destruction so that they can suppress social reaction and continue business as usual.

Using multilevel logistic regression to analyse management data of reablement episodes collected by Essex County Council, a UK local authority, this article identifies constraining and enabling factors for successful reablement. Overall, 59.5% of reablement clients were classed as able to care for themselves when assessed after 13 weeks following the reablement intervention (N = 8,118). Several age-related, disability, referral, and social factors were found to constrain reablement, but some of the largest constraining effects were neighbourhood deprivation as measured through the Index of Multiple Deprivation and, particularly, unfavourable geodemographic profiles as measured through Experian Mosaic consumer classifications. The results suggest that in order to optimise reablement, programmes should consider broader social and environmental influences on reablement rather than only individual and organisational aspects. Reablement might also be better tailored and intensified for client groups with particular underlying disabilities and for those displaying specific geodemographic characteristics.