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
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 53 items for :
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Since the 2012 LASPO cuts, legal aid provision in England and Wales has faced severe challenges, threatening both client access to justice and traditional practices.
This book offers an in-depth ethnographic study of how these cuts have transformed the professional identity of legal aid lawyers amid shrinking resources. By documenting the first-hand experiences of those on the front line, it reveals how these professionals navigate the precarious landscape while maintaining their commitment to justice.
This is a unique and insightful look into the evolving role of legal aid lawyers in a diminishing industry across both civil and criminal remits.
How can diversity be practiced without reinforcing the very inequalities it aims to dismantle?
In this book, Maddy Janssens and Chris Steyaert address this pressing question by critically examining the assumptions behind current diversity initiatives and turning to critical practice theory and queer theory for novel insights. Through imaginative concepts, inspiring illustrations, and an integrative case study within the dance world, the authors articulate the ‘conditions of possibility’ for a fresh, impactful alternative. This book advocates for a shift from individual efforts to collective practices, proposing a politics of organizational worldmaking oriented at multiplicity – a practicing of diversity that aspires to transformative change into livable and just work lives.
This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the institutions and processes shaping work, labour markets and industrial relations policies in Australia.
It explores traditional industrial relations issues and examines social change and policy failures, in areas such as gender, work and family dynamics, skills and immigration and wage theft. Additionally, it considers how pandemics, climate change, technological advances and new business forms impact policy change. Addressing these universal challenges, the book offers fresh conceptual approaches and rethinks policy problems and solutions.
Essential reading for scholars, students, and practitioners, this book reshapes our understanding of work and industrial relations policy.
This book offers a unique perspective on Sweden’s COVID-19 response in its publicly funded welfare sector, which was initially highly criticised but later recognised as exemplary on the global stage in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Using diaries, stories and interviews from 73 workers across 30 professions, it reveals the everyday experiences of those maintaining welfare services, both on the front lines and behind the scenes. Covering 2020 to 2022, it spans major cities and smaller municipalities across Gothenburg, Uppsala and Stockholm and introduces 'pandemicracy,' a concept exploring pandemic-era governance and organisation of the public sector.
This insightful analysis sparks a wider discussion on adapting to unforeseen challenges in public welfare.
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.
This book provides an account of the evolution of social security and employment policy and governance in Britain between 1973 and 2023. It explains how this remaking of policy and governance shaped, and was shaped by, the transformation of the labour market and power of claimants and workers.
Advancing a class-centred explanation the text situates contemporary working age active labour market policy as the contingent outcome of a long struggle over curtailment of labour autonomy and the challenges arising from policy ‘success’ for securing social cohesion, state legitimacy and better economic conditions for growth.
The gender pay gap is economically irrational and yet stubbornly persistent.
Focusing on the UK finance industry which is known for its gender pay disparity, this book explores the initiatives to fix gendered inequities in the workplace. Rachel Verdin crafts a unique framework, weaving extensive organizational data with women's lived experiences. Interviews uncover gaps in pay transparency, obstacles hindering workplace policies and the factors that are stalling progress for the future.
This is an invaluable resource that offers key insights into gender equality and EDI measures shaped by legal regulations as well as corporate-driven initiatives.
Since the 1960s, a major mental health crisis has emerged among Western working populations. By analysing the development of various occupational cultures and using extensive data sources, this book captures the history of mental vulnerability in working life.
Through a study spanning several decades, the book develops a new understanding of how mental vulnerability has evolved through changes to our working lives and socio-cultural being. It shows how our current knowledge about work, disability and the psyche is influenced by our time and provides intertwining conceptual frameworks and alternatives to current canonised knowledge about mental health in working life.
The relationship between unstable work careers and family transitions into adult life can vary according to the personal circumstances of individuals, as well as the welfare state system of the country.
Drawing from interviews and survey data across the EU and the UK, this in-depth study explores how worker instability is perceived and experienced, and how this ‘perception’ in turn affects individuals’ economic and social situation. Using intersectional analysis and a unique focus on different life stages, the authors identify groups who are more prone to labour market risks and describe their relative disadvantage.
This powerful study will inform policy measures internationally in several social domains related to work, employment and society.
The turnover of labour and its significance for workers and employers has usually been considered at the organizational level as individual exit behaviour, and seldom in relation to the cross-border mobility practices of migrant workers within and without the workplace.
Drawing from labour process theory, the autonomy of migration, social reproduction and industrial relations, this book explores the relationship between labour mobility and international migration under a global and historical perspective.
Uncovering both the individual and collective actions by migrants inside and outside worker organizations, the authors develop a new understanding of migrants’ everyday mobilities as creative and life-sustaining strategies of social reproduction and labour conflict.
