Abstract
This issue of Social Policy and Labor Studies features three papers that were written based on the presentations at the plenary session of the JASPS 128th Biannual Conference in 2014 entitled "Social Reform Ideology and the Present Age: Questioning the Intellectual Foundations of Social Policies". This Introduction aims to describe the background and the intention of the plenary session, to introduce major points that were presented in the three papers of the Special Issue and those discussed in the plenary session, and to examine the possibilities for "the social" with special focus on the relationships between "the social" and neoliberalism, "the social" and "the political", and "the social" and labor.
