Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
You are looking at 101 - 110 of 133 items for :
- Type: Book x
- Poverty and Inequality x
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Wealth and the wealthy have received relatively little attention from social scientists despite a growing wealth gap. Aimed at a broad social science and public readership, this book draws on new data on wealth to answer the following key questions: What is wealth? Who has got it? Where might we draw a ‘wealth line’? Who lies above it? And what might policy do about wealth and the wealthy? Using data sources from the HMRC to the Sunday Times Rich list, this book provides a comprehensive and critical discussion of these issues, and looks at potential policy responses, including ‘asset-based’ welfare and taxation.
Minimum income protection provides the last social safety net for people in need. The book provides a systematic comparative and longitudinal analysis of minimum income protection systems in 17 EU countries based on a newly developed dataset. Country-specific chapters providing institutional overviews are combined with comparative quantitative indicators on issues such as benefit levels, expenditures and beneficiaries. The book will be of major interest to researchers, scholars and experts in income protection, poverty and the welfare state.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. This important book explores the values of equality and diversity as promoted across liberal societies, drawing on various traditions of political and social philosophy, including liberal egalitarianism, existentialism, and elements of post-modernism and post-structuralism. These philosophies are applied to policy and practice debates, especially concerning disability issues, but also relating to gender and multiculturalism. It will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students across a range of social studies disciplines.
This important book makes a vital academic and political statement in the cause of social justice. It begins with an appreciation of the seminal contributions of Peter Townsend (1928-2009), and applies them to contemporary policy debates. It brings together many of the leading contributors to current debates in this field and provides a compelling manifesto for change for students and researchers in the social sciences, policy makers and practitioners, and everybody with an interest in creating a more equal and socially just society.
This landmark study provides the first comprehensive assessment of the nature and associations between the three main forms of social disadvantage in Australia: poverty, deprivation and social exclusion.
Drawing on the author’s extensive research expertise and his links with welfare practitioners, it explains the limitations of existing approaches and presents new findings that build on the insights of disadvantaged Australians and views about the essentials of life, providing the basis for a new deprivation-based poverty measure.
This book establishes asylum seekers as a socially excluded group, investigating the policy of dispersing asylum seekers across the UK and providing an overview of historic and contemporary dispersal systems. It is the first book to seek to understand how asylum seekers experience the dispersal system and the impact this has on their lives. The author argues that deterrent asylum policies increase the sense of liminality experienced by individuals, challenges assumptions that asylum seekers should be socially excluded until receipt of refugee status and illustrates how they create their own sense of ‘belonging’ in the absence of official recognition. Academics, students, policy-makers and practitioners would all benefit from reading this book.
Social cohesion is one of the declared objectives of the European Union and, with some 16% of EU citizens at risk of poverty, the need to fight poverty and social exclusion continues as a major challenge. This book provides an in-depth analysis of the EU Social Inclusion Process, the means by which it hopes to meet this objective, and explores the challenges ahead at local, regional, national and EU levels. It sets out concrete proposals for taking the Process forward.
The book provides a unique analysis of policy formulation and assessment. Setting out the evolution and current state of EU cooperation in social policy, it examines what can be learned about poverty and social exclusion from the EU commonly agreed indicators. Taking the position of outside, but informed, observers, the authors explore the further development of the common indicators, including the implications of Enlargement, and consider the challenges of advancing the Social Inclusion Process - strengthening policy analysis, embedding the Process in domestic policies and making it more effective. Proposing the setting of targets and restructuring of National Action Plans and their implementation, they emphasise the need for widespread “ownership" of the Process at domestic and EU level and for it to demonstrate significant progress in reducing poverty and social exclusion.
The book will be invaluable to academics, students and policy-makers at sub-national, national and EU levels as well as to social partners, and NGOs working towards a more inclusive society.
When New Labour came to power in 1997, its leaders asked for it to be judged after ten years on its success in making Britain ‘a more equal society’. As it approaches the end of an unprecedented third term in office, this book asks whether Britain has indeed moved in that direction.
The highly successful earlier volume “A more equal society?” was described by Polly Toynbee as “the LSE’s mighty judgement on inequality”. Now this second volume by the same team of authors provides an independent assessment of the success or otherwise of New Labour’s policies over a longer period. It provides:
· consideration by a range of expert authors of a broad set of indicators and policy areas affecting poverty, inequality and social exclusion;
· analysis of developments up to the third term on areas including income inequality, education, employment, health inequalities, neighbourhoods, minority ethnic groups, children and older people;
· an assessment of outcomes a decade on, asking whether policies stood up to the challenges, and whether successful strategies have been sustained or have run out of steam; chapters on migration, social attitudes, the devolved administrations, the new Equality and Human Rights Commission, and future pressures.
The book is essential reading for academic and student audiences with an interest in contemporary social policy, as well as for all those seeking an objective account of Labour’s achievements in power.
New Zealand has experienced both sweeping economic and social reform and growing poverty and income inequality in the last twenty years. This book explores the changes to social security provision and coverage in the context of these developments and of widening national and international poverty and inequality.
The book argues that the policy initiatives have altered the nature of social security and in doing so have significantly transformed the nature of social citizenship. The author brings the New Zealand data together in a way that has not been done previously and provides the reader with both a detailed discussion of the work on poverty and living standards in New Zealand and the political and economic context within which social security changes have occurred.
Linking the discussion to international changes in social security and to the international literature on poverty and inequality, the author demonstrates the important implications the New Zealand directions have for the development of social security internationally.
The book will be of considerable interest for all those interested in international reshaping of state support for the poorest and most vulnerable and its development in a neoliberal and Third Way.
Seen through the eyes of parents, mainly mothers, “City survivors” tells the eye-opening story of what it is like to bring up children in troubled city neighbourhoods. The book provides a unique insider view on the impact of neighbourhood conditions on family life and explores the prospects for families from the point of view of equality, integration, schools, work, community, regeneration and public services.
“City Survivors” is based on yearly visits over seven years to two hundred families living in four highly disadvantaged city neighbourhoods, two in East London and two in Northern inner and outer city areas. Twenty four families, six from each area, explain over time from the inside, how neighbourhoods in and of themselves directly affect family survival. These twenty four stories convey powerful messages from parents about the problems they want tackled, and the things that would help them. The main themes explored in the book are neighbourhood, community, family, parenting, incomes and locals, the need for civic intervention.
The book offers original and in-depth, qualitative evidence in a readable and accessible form that will be invaluable to policy-makers, practitioners, university students, academics and general readers interested in the future of families in cities.
