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 87 items for :
- Type: Book x
- Goal 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure x
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This volume explores where, how and why the cooperative model is having a distinctive, transformational impact in driving socio-economic changes in a post-pandemic 21st century world.
Drawing from a diverse range of examples, the book sheds light on how today’s cooperatives and a co-operative way of organising might serve new societal demands. It examines organisational structures and governance models that develop socio-economic resilience in cooperatives. The book’s contributors reveal how the very pursuit of cooperative values and principles challenges market fundamentalism and promotes participatory democracy.
This is a timely contribution to recent debates around transformative economies and an invaluable resource for scholars and activists interested in alternative ways of organising.
The private rental housing market plays an important and growing role in the advanced economies. Providing accommodation for a wider range of households than before the global financial crisis, rental housing is also a key asset class for private individuals and companies, while the rise of Airbnb lettings has pushed up rents and reduced the number of homes available to residents.
This edited collection by leading experts in the field analyses recent changes in the private rental market, using case studies from the UK, Europe, Australia and the USA, and assesses the initial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This book examines the evolution of digital platform economies through the lens of online gaming.
Offering valuable empirical work on Valve’s ‘Steam’ platform, Thorhauge examines the architecture of this global online videogame marketplace and the way it enables new markets and economic transactions. Drawing on infrastructure, software, platform and game studies, the book interrogates the implications of these transactions, both in terms of their legality, but also in how they create new forms of immaterial labour.
Shedding new light on a previously under-explored branch of the study of digital platforms, this book brings a unique economic sociology perspective into the growing literature on videogame studies.
Escape is an enticing idea in contemporary cities across the world. Austerity, climate breakdown and spatial stigma have led to retreatist behaviours such as gated communities, enclave urbanism and white flight. By contrast, urban community growing projects are often considered by practitioners and commentators as communal havens in a stressful cityscape.
Drawing on ethnographic research in urban growing projects in Glasgow, this book explores the spatial politics and dynamics of community, asking who benefits from such projects and how they relate to the wider city. A timely consideration of localism and community empowerment, the book sheds light on key issues of urban land use, the right to the city and the value of social connection.
We are often expected to trust technologies, and how they are used, even if we have good reason not to. There is no room to mistrust.
Exploring relations between trust and mistrust in the context of data, AI and technology at large, this book defines a process of ‘trustification’ used by governments, corporations, researchers and the media to legitimise exploitation and increase inequalities.
Aimed at social scientists, computer scientists and public policy, the book aptly reveals how trust is operationalised and converted into a metric in order to extract legitimacy from populations and support the furthering of technology to manage society.
Detroit is the first city of its size to become bankrupt and some policy makers have argued that, since then, it has entered a ‘new beginning’. This book critically examines the evidence for and against this claim.
Joe Darden analyses whether Detroit’s patterns of race and class neighborhood inequality have persisted or whether investments have led to improvements in academic achievement, homeownership, employment, and reductions in poverty and violent crime. He measures, quantitatively, the benefits and disadvantages of staying in urban Detroit or moving to the suburbs, and provides evidence to answer whether Detroit, after bankruptcy, is becoming an inclusive city.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence
This book addresses new challenges to the formation of publics in datafied democracies. It proposes a fresh, complex and nuanced approach to understand ‘datapublics’, by considering datafication and public formation in the context of audience, journalism and infrastructure studies.
The tightly woven chapters shed new light on how platforms, algorithms and their data infrastructure are embedded in journalistic values, discourses and practices, opening up new conditions for publics to display agency, mobilise and achieve legitimacy.
This is a seminal contribution to the debates about the future of media, journalism and civic practices.
Much of the debate on the future of work has focused on responses to technological trends in the Global North, with little evidence on how these trends are impacting on work and workers in the Global South.
Drawing on a rich selection of ethnographic studies of precarious work in Africa, this innovative book discusses how globalisation and digitalisation are drivers for structural change and examines their implications for labour. Bringing together global labour studies and inequality studies, it explores the role of digital technology in new business models, and ways in which digitalization can be harnessed for counter mobilisation by the new worker.
The past 30 years have seen the weakening of the central state by processes of devolution, Europeanisation and globalisation, which have led to dramatic clashes between nation states and local authorities. Why do some cities feel the need to sidestep the state in their decision-making? And how can they do so?
Bridging political geography and politics, this book gives a new perspective on the central state’s weakening authority and the parallel rise of cities as political actors. The author considers the tensions between central states and European cities, giving a new perspective to students and researchers in urban studies, geography and political science.
New Zealand’s relatively recent decriminalisation of sex work, and its unusual success in combatting COVID-19, have both attracted international media interest. This accessibly-written book uses the lens of news media coverage to consider the pandemic’s impacts on both sex workers and public perceptions of the industry.
Analysing the stigmatisation of sex work in both short- and long-term contexts, the book addresses the impacts of intersectional oppressions or marginalisations on sex workers, and the ways sex work advocacy relates to other social justice movements. It unpicks how New Zealand’s decriminalisation approach functions under stress, offering valuable information for advocates, activists and scholars.
