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 1500 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 105 items for :
- Type: Book x
- Social Welfare and Social Insurance x
- Access: All content x
Recent welfare reforms, based on austerity narratives and a gender-neutral rationale, have failed to recognise the ways in which women and men experience the different demands and rewards of paid employment and unpaid care.
This book draws on a wealth of qualitative longitudinal evidence to cast light on women’s lived experiences of welfare and work. Giving voice to social security recipients, this book uncovers the hidden gendered bias of conditional welfare reforms to challenge dominant political discourses, policy design and practice norms.
It combines and develops three interdisciplinary perspectives – feminist analysis, lived experience and street-level bureaucracy – to offer a new understanding of British welfare reform policies and practice.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
In the latest edition of Social Policy Review, experts review the leading social policy scholarship from the past year.
The book addresses current issues and critical debates within the field, with a particular focus on intergenerational research. Contributors also explore key social policy and research developments across a wide range of themes, including the impact of COVID-19 on eldercare and homelessness, research into faith-based organisations, local social services in Italy and social policies for autistic adults in England and Wales.
Published in association with the Social Policy Association, this comprehensive volume will be essential reading for students and academics in social policy, social welfare and related disciplines.
A uniquely hybrid approach to welfare state policy, ecological sustainability and social transformation, this book explores transformative models of welfare change.
Using Ireland as a case study, it addresses the institutional adaptations needed to move towards a sustainable welfare state, and the policy of making such transformation happen.
It takes a theoretical and practical approach to implementing an alternative paradigm for welfare in the context of globalisation, climate change, social cohesion, automation, economic and power inequalities, intersectionality and environmental sustainability, as well as perpetual crisis, including the pandemic.
This book offers insights into the development of social welfare policies by exploring the interconnections between policies and practice throughout history.
It challenges tacitly accepted arguments that favour particular approaches to welfare, such as conditionality and eligibility. It provides examples of enduring social assumptions which influence the way we perform social welfare, such as the equivocal position of women in social welfare and the unintended consequences of reforms such as Universal Credit.
By identifying continuities in welfare policy, practice and thought, it offers the potential for the development of new thinking, policy making and practice.
ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
How can public services and social interventions create and sustain good outcomes for the populations they serve?
Building on research in public health, social epidemiology and the social determinants of health, this book presents complexity theory as an alternative basis for an outcome-oriented public management praxis. It takes a critical approach towards New Public Management and provides new conceptual inroads for reappraising public management in theory and practice. It advances two practical approaches: Human Learning Systems (a model for public service reform) and Learning Partnerships (a model for research and academic engagement in complex settings).
With up-to-date and extensive discussions on public service reform, this book provides practical and action-oriented guidance for a radical change of course in management and governance.
For generations women have experienced disadvantage in the paid labour market, the devaluation of their unpaid caring roles and multiple constraints on their agency.
This book analyses fresh empirical evidence which demonstrates the gendered impacts of the new conditionality regime within Universal Credit. It shows how the regime affects women's unpaid caring roles, their position in the paid labour market and their agency regarding engagement in unpaid care and paid work. Ultimately, it highlights the impacts on low-income women's position in the UK social security system and society.
Drawing on in-depth interviews with mothers, this book offers a compelling narrative and crucial policy recommendations to improve the gendered impact of Universal Credit and make the social citizenship framework in the UK more inclusive of women.
We are often told that mean welfare is what the public wants. Whether or not that's true, this book encourages us all to at least be honest about what that entails.
It explores how diverse welfare users navigate the personal and practical hurdles of Australia’s so-called social security system where benefits are deliberately meagre and come with strings attached. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in a region of Sydney known for ethnic diversity and socio-economic disadvantage, Emma Mitchell brings her own experience belonging to a poor family long reliant on welfare to her research.
This book shows the different cultural resources that people bring to welfare encounters with a sensitivity and subtly that are often missing in both sympathetic and cynical accounts of life on welfare.
Should a citizen’s right to social welfare be contingent on their personal behaviour?
Welfare conditionality, linking citizens’ eligibility to social benefits and services to prescribed compulsory responsibilities or behaviours, has become a key component of welfare reform in many nations.
This book uses qualitative longitudinal data from repeat interviews with people subject to compulsion and sanction in their everyday lives to analyse the effectiveness and ethicality of welfare conditionality in promoting and sustaining behaviour change in the UK.
Given the negative outcomes that welfare conditionality routinely triggers, this book calls for the abandonment of these sanctions and reiterates the importance of genuinely supportive policies that promote social security and wider equality.
The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically exposed weaknesses in UK housing’s relationship to the labour market and welfare system. Inequalities in household type, home occupancy, housing cost and security have contributed to the unequal impact of the disease.
Comprehensively charting fast-moving and inter-linked policy developments, Becky Tunstall assesses the position of housing and home in public policy, health and in peoples’ lives, and documents the most immediate responses to the pandemic in one convenient resource for students, scholars and practitioners.
Rather than being seen simply as social policy implementors, in recent decades there has been increasing recognition of social workers as professionals with unique knowledge and insights to contribute to policy formulation and social justice.
This book offers a path-breaking, evidence-based theoretical framework for understanding why social workers engage in policy, both as professionals and citizens, and the impact of their actions. Drawing on concepts from social work and the political, sociological and policy sciences, the authors set out the implications of this framework for research, education and practice.
