The text provides a brief introduction into the basics of the social quality approach. The paradigm is geared to develop thinking on social quality not from the traditional institutional or hyphen-policy orientation. Instead, it proposes to start from looking at the conditional and constitutional aspects of the social, this being genuinely about people's relationships in every day's situations and their own capacity to act within these relationships. It is from here where the challenges for social policy are presented in a generic understanding, thus overcoming strong notions of national or regional bonds of policy definitions.