Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the 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
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- Type: Book x
- Comparative and Global Social Policy x
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Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Health inequality has reached a crisis point. Your income or hometown can have a devastating impact on how well and how long you live. This injustice, exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, continues as the cost of living rises and other sources of inequity grow. What can be done to make things better?
This book, written by the authors behind the award-winning The Unequal Pandemic, explores successful international case studies of governments reducing health inequalities – from the USA and Brazil to Germany and England – stretching over fifty years from the 1960s to the 2000s.
Essential reading for students and scholars of public health and the social sciences, and for health and social care professionals and policy makers, this book demonstrates that reducing health inequalities is possible and provides a roadmap for today’s governments to follow.
In today’s world, there are interwoven crises affecting us at every level. This book explores the impact of these crises on applied social research. It shows how using a complexity framework in research is key to tackling global challenges effectively.
By featuring illustrative examples from the UK, China, Brazil, South Africa and the US, the authors demonstrate how an action research programme based around the use of existing social research methods embedded in processes of co-production and participation can drive real-time social change.
In doing so, the book highlights the transformative role of action-oriented research in addressing today's complex global challenges.
Philanthropy has become a staple of American society and culture. Associations, endowments, foundations, and limited dividend companies have funded education, culture, healthcare, religion, and social welfare.
Yet American philanthropy is not as exceptional as it appears to European observers. American philanthropy was built upon European and Mediterranean precedents and evolved through the constant influence of philanthropic practices in other parts of the world.
This book explores how philanthropic practices and institutions were introduced into American society and how they were Americanised during the 19th century. It provides a comprehensive history of American philanthropy and positions it within its wider global context.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
This book proposes a conception of social justice according to international human rights law. Social rights include everyday rights such as housing, food, fuel and social security.
Drawing on extensive research with frontline practitioners, the book frames access to social justice as a journey that should end with the realisation of an effective remedy. It highlights discourses that marginalise and disempower rights holders and reclaims the narrative around social rights as legal rights.
This is a unique contribution to our understanding of access to social justice from a social rights perspective complete with key recommendations for policy and practice.
Fiscal welfare (or social tax expenditures) is a policy instrument associated with Liberal welfare states that has been on the rise across many European welfare states.
This book sheds light on the use and effects of fiscal welfare in France and Sweden. Focusing on the introduction of a 50% tax deduction on domiciliary care and household services, it explores the politics behind this scheme, its effects on care provision as well as on labour market dualisation, highlighting how fiscal welfare contributes to structuring both a social division of welfare and a social division of labour.
This ground-breaking book opens a new field of research by exploring fiscal welfare, the political uses of this policy instrument, the patterns of inequalities it gives rise to and its policy feedback effects.
International Organizations (IOs) have been at the forefront of responding to crises in the 21st century, and yet there is little comparative research on how, and how effectively, they have done this.
This book fills this gap by exploring what roles IOs take in response to global crises and to what effect. Bringing together a range of international contributors, the book examines a vast array of international and regional organizations, including the International Organization for Migration, World Health Organization, African Union and European Union. Aiming to answer key questions about IO behaviour, the book investigates these IOs’ responses to pressing issues including the global COVID-19 pandemic, the liberal order and security, and the climate crisis.
The movement of policy is a core feature of contemporary education reform. Many different concepts, including policy transfer, borrowing and lending, travelling, diffusion and mobility, have been deployed to study how and why policy moves across jurisdictions, scales of governance, policy sectors or organisations. However, the underlying theoretical perspectives and the foundational assumptions of different approaches to policy movement remain insufficiently discussed.
To address this gap, this book places front and center questions of theory, ontology, epistemology and method related to policy movement. It explores a wide diversity of approaches to help understand the policy movement phenomena, providing a useful guide on global studies in education, as well as insights into the future of this dynamic area of work.
East Asian societies and welfare systems are rapidly changing, creating an increasing need for research that can help to establish sustainable and legitimate welfare systems.
This original volume considers welfare attitudes in East Asia, including Mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Macao, Singapore and Taiwan, using qualitative and quantitative research methods. Proposing new methods and approaches to analysing cross-national variations in welfare attitudes, it decentralises dominant European based concepts and measurements and takes approaches that are sensitive to cultural and political trajectories and the impact of colonialism and gender.
This book explores the influence of contextual and individual factors, such as family roles and values, on citizens’ welfare attitudes. It also studies social legitimacy and social bonds to understand how to design and implement sustainable welfare policies.
Drawing on international case studies from emerging economies and developing countries including South Africa, India, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Tunisia, Indonesia, China and Russia, this book examines the rise, nature and effectiveness of recent developments in social policy in the Global South.
By analysing these new emerging trends, the book aims to understand how they can contribute to meaningful change and whether they could offer alternative solutions to the social, economic and environmental policy challenges facing low-income countries within a contemporary global context.
It pays particular attention to reforms and innovations relating to the objectives of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including the move away from a welfare state, towards a ‘welfare multitude’, in which new actors, such as civil society organisations, play an increasingly important role in social policy.
In this book, street-level bureaucracy scholars from South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America analyse the conditions that shape frontline work and citizens’ everyday experience of the state.
Institutional factors such as political clientelism, resource scarcity, social inequality, job insecurity, and systemic corruption affect the way street-level bureaucrats enforce rules and implement policies. Inadvertently, they end up implementing inequities in citizens’ access to rights and services – despite efforts to repair organisational deficiencies and broker relations between vulnerable citizens and a distant state. This book illuminates these realities and challenges and provides unique insights into critical themes such as resource scarcities, bureaucratic corruption, control practices, and the complexities of dealing with vulnerable population groups.
