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.
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
Three decades of neoliberal efficiency thinking about caring and care systems have resulted in a greater need for relationality in healthcare and social work than ever before. These support services extend beyond the giving of care and support to include the development of relationships between caregivers and their care recipients in their socio-institutional contexts.
The culmination of over 30 years of research, this book provides an extensive and critical introduction to relational working in care, education and welfare. It explains what relational work is and proposes a new, human-orientated theory beyond the simple needs provision model. Demonstrating the kind of professionalism required for such work, it explores why it is as important to be present with and for people, especially those in precarious conditions, as it is to give care.
This is essential reading for researchers, educators, quality officers, policy makers, students and practitioners interested in understanding the growing scholarship related to both care theory and presence theory.
The past 30 years have seen risk become a major field of study, most recently with the COVID-19 pandemic positioning it at the centre of public awareness, yet there is limited understanding of how risk can and should be used in policy making.
This book provides an accessible guide to the key elements of risk in policy making, including its role in rhetoric to legitimise decisions and choices.
Using risk as a framework, it examines how policy makers in a range of countries responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and explains why some were more successful than others.
Risk has emerged as a key mechanism for controlling the future and learning from past misfortunes.
How did risk influence policy makers’ responses to COVID-19? How will they be judged for their decisions?
Drawing on case studies from the UK, China, Japan, New Zealand and the US, this original text explores policy responses to COVID-19 through the lens of risk. The book considers how different countries framed the pandemic, categorised their populations and communicated risk. It also evaluates the role of the media, conspiracy theories and hindsight in shaping responses to COVID-19.
As we reflect on the ‘first wave’, this book offers a vital resource for anticipating future responses to crises.
As the population ages, this book reveals how divides that are apparent through childhood and working life change and are added to in later life.
Two internationally renowned experts in ageing look beyond longstanding factors like class, gender and ethnicity to explore new social divisions, including contrasting states of physical fitness and mental health. They show how differences in health and frailty are creating fresh inequalities in later life, with significant implications for the future of our ageing societies.
This accessible overview of social divisions is essential reading for those interested in the sociology of ageing and its differences, diversities and inequalities.
Home and care are central aspects of everyday, personal lives, yet they are also shaped by political and economic change. Within a context of austerity, economic restructuring, worsening inequality and resource rationing, the policies and experiences around these key areas are shifting. Taking an interdisciplinary and feminist perspective, this book illustrates how economic and political changes affect everyday lives for many families and households in the UK. Setting out both new empirical material and new conceptual terrain, the authors draw on approaches from human geography, social policy, and feminist and political theory to explore issues of home and care in times of crisis.
