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 of over 1,500 titles.
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 1 - 10 of 24 items for :
- Type: Book x
- Public Services Management x
- Access: All content x
Compelling and robust, this book provides an analysis of challenges in public service outsourcing and considers how to avoid failure in the future.
Crucially, it proposes a governance mechanism where outsourcing public services nurtures a less extractive corporate form that is oriented towards a productive purpose beyond maximising shareholder value, with implications well beyond public services. Under these proposals, fostering purpose-driven companies that are independently governed and use profit to pursue purpose can improve both public services and wider economic organisation.
Examining how barriers to implementing this idea within the existing EU and UK legal frameworks may be addressed, the book formulates actionable policy proposals.
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
This book examines the idea and practice of co-creation in public services. Informed by practical action, lived experience and research from 10 countries across Europe, including the UK, it shines new light on the theory and reality of co-creation by conceptualising it in terms of human rights, social justice and social innovation.
Focusing on human dimensions, the book presents real life examples in public services as diverse as social care, health, work activation, housing and criminal justice. It also highlights the ways digital technologies can accelerate or hinder co-creation.
The book confronts a paradox at the heart of co-creation: standardisation and inflexibility in planning and resourcing, or ‘concrete-ness’, counters the ‘elasticity’ required to sustain co-creation in complex contexts.
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.
Why do top-down reforms to public services so often over-promise and under-deliver?
Using five concepts from psychology, economics and organisational sociology, Thomas Elston addresses this pressing question of good governance.
Focusing on the practical challenge of how to undertake better public management reforms, he questions the assumption that failure typically occurs because of poor reform implementation. Instead, he shows how reforms are often badly designed from the outset, being fashion-led, more focused more on fixing errors than exploiting opportunities and ignoring implicit costs of change.
This concise, practically-orientated work employs diverse examples to propose ways to improve the design of public sector reform programmes – and the services that citizens receive.
In recent years, failures in health and social care, mental health services, public housing, welfare and policing have dominated headlines and been the subject of much public debate. The means for addressing such concerns have become increasingly legalistic and subject to a particular brand of liberal legalism that stifles the possibility of transformational intervention.
For this reason, this book argues there is urgent need for a radical reassessment of the way the law mediates between citizens and the state. Drawing on public inquiries into high-profile cases, such as Hillsborough and Grenfell, fictional/cinematic treatments such as I, Daniel Blake, and the disability rights movement, this book examines how the regulation of street-level bureaucracy can play an integral part in reimagining postliberal politics and the role of the law.
A public health crisis is gripping the UK. Improvements in life expectancy have stalled, health inequalities have widened, obesity and alcohol misuse are placing an increasing strain on health services and urban air pollution is now widely recognised as a serious health hazard. COVID-19 revealed the weaknesses of the UK's public health system, once thought to be among the best in the world.
Against this background, this book examines the organisational and political barriers to an effective public health system showcased through the UK. It urges that what is needed is a new social contract, in which health policy is truly public.
This book is about tax and social policy and how they interact with each other.
The impact of taxation as an instrument of social policy is central in influencing redistribution and behaviour. This broad-based edited collection fills a significant gap in both literatures, bringing together disparate debates in this emerging area of analysis.
It guides readers through the key interactions of tax and social policies and the central debates and challenges posed by their effect on each other. It examines how analyses might be combined and policy options developed for more effective delivery and impact in both areas.
The last decade has seen a growing focus on producing evidence-based policy and practice in governments around the world – with a specific focus on causal evidence of the impacts of a particular policy on outcomes for citizens. The UK is a key example of this, with the establishment of 14 What Works Centres which collate, create and translate evidence in different policy and practice domains.
In this book, leaders, researchers and practitioners from these institutions share insights to help understand what has worked so far in the Centres, and what could be done better in future. It offers guidance to policy makers and funders looking to establish new centres, and for academics looking to create similar institutions that can have a practical impact on the improvement of the world around us.
Carrie Manning’s illuminating book examines how policies to limit taxation at state and local levels in the U.S. have direct and lasting consequences for equity, accountability, and ultimately for democracy.
Tax structures embed, and reproduce, an implicit social contract between government and citizens, creating path-dependent outcomes that produce unintended consequences that are rarely traced back to state and local revenue models. This book combines historical American political development with the study of state formation. It provides a clear-eyed investigation into the past, present, and future of the social contract between America’s local governments and citizens.
Dive inside this textbook for an accessible guide to the discipline of public services.
Perfect for students, it offers a comprehensive account of core public service topics and explains the fundamental elements of working in the public services. Outlining their role in the welfare state, it explores the policies, providers and legalities shaping the context in which public services operate.
Students will study concepts of organisational change, strategy, management, leadership and funding, and engage with timely discussions around contemporary public issues such as equality, sustainability and climate change. Key features to support student learning include:
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objectives at the beginning of each chapter;
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case studies and examples;
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end of chapter summaries;
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reflective questions;
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further reading recommendations and resources.
